There were, of course, the bookstores, but it had already been a long winter and we had been in and out of each one of them a number of times already.
By noon, we were getting desperate.
“You want to hike?”
“Are you kidding? It’s fifteen degrees outside.”
“Right. How about taking a drive?”
“You mean getting in the car and wandering around aimlessly until it’s time to take Rebecca home?”
“Yeah. I suppose that’s not a very good idea either.”
Silence.
“Are there any dealers we haven’t been to?”
“I don’t think so. Let’s look in the phone book.”
We went back to the Yellow Pages and perused the now-familiar “Book Dealers—Used & Rare” section. There was a small, one-line listing that we had seen before but always passed over: “Minkoff Geo R Rowe Rd Alford,” with the phone number. He hadn’t even paid for his listing to be in capital letters as had John R. Sanderson and Howard S. Mott.
“What about Minkoff?”
By now, we realized that the smaller the listing in the Yellow Pages, the more expensive the books. And George Minkoff was in Alford, the toniest and most expensive town in the entire county. It wasn’t even a town, really, just a series of extraordinarily expensive second homes, one right after another.
What’s more, one of us had spoken with George Minkoff before. It was during the initial foray into the book world, two and a half years ago, during the search for War and Peace. George Minkoff’s had been the voice on the telephone who had asked impatiently if we wanted Tolstoy in English or in Russian and then curtly suggested a visit to a used-book store. In short, we thought he was going to be old, crusty, and mean.
It was a measure of our desperation on that dull, dreary, cold Sunday afternoon in January that we called George Minkoff anyway and asked for an appointment to come and look at his books at … would one-thirty be convenient? A slightly reserved voice, not friendly but certainly not mean, sounding a bit surprised, replied that one-thirty would be fine.
Alford is a twenty-five-minute ride from Lenox. The drive, like the town, is both beautiful and desolate in the winter. We followed the instructions we had been given and found ourselves pulling up into the driveway of a large, two-story tan farmhouse with brown shutters, which looked to be at least one hundred years old and which had either been scrupulously maintained or scrupulously restored. There was no peeling or discolored paint on the clapboards. The shutters gleamed and hung perfectly square to the windows. No stored objects or piles of firewood cluttered the wide front porch as they did on almost every other front porch in the county. Even in the winter, under a layer of snow, the grounds seemed impeccably maintained. There were two cars in the driveway, both of which were clean, something of an anomaly in Massachusetts in the winter. The driveway had been plowed. The house looked out across the road to an open, snow-covered field backed by a wall of pine trees, the kind of scene that was featured on postcards and subtitled by glowing, chamber-of-commerce phrases like “Winter in the Berkshires.”
We got out of the car. “God, I hope we’re here more than fifteen minutes.”
“Maybe we can go for a cup of coffee afterward.”
We walked up the porch steps, pressed the buzzer next to the front door, and waited. Within a moment or two, the door swung open. A man who appeared to be in his forties, energetic and hospitable, stood in the doorway. He was on crutches, the permanent kind, not the ones you get after a skiing accident.
“Hello,” we said. “We made an appointment.”
“Come in,” he said, maneuvering aside. He took his right hand off the handhold and, balancing expertly, reached out to shake hands. “I’m George Minkoff.”
The front door opened into a large, warm, immaculately clean, post-and-beam country kitchen. In the center of the room sat a large, rough-hewn antique farm table, surrounded by four Windsor chairs. In addition to everything else you would find in a photograph in Architectural Digest, off to one side was the most extraordinary oven either of us had ever seen. It had two levels, at least eight doors, and was laid into a ten-foot-high brick wall. In front of the oven were piles of sealed cardboard boxes with mailing labels, all addressed to “George R. Minkoff.”
“The oven was my ex-wife’s idea,” said George, offering us chairs and sitting down across the table. “She wanted to make bread. We used it once.”
When we were all seated, George asked, “How did you come to me? Are you just up for the weekend?”
“No. We’re local.”
“What do you do?”
“We’re writers.”
“I’m working on a novel myself,” he said. “A fifteen-hundred-page monster about Jamestown.”
“A historical novel?”
“Oh, more than that. It’s historical, social, and psychological. The American experience at the very beginning. It’s very Joycean.”
“How far have you gotten?”
“I’m almost finished. I’d say I have another couple of months’ work.”
“Jamestown? That’s an interesting choice.”
“The entire period was fascinating. You know, John Smith was one of the most important figures in American history and now Disney has made him a cartoon. He was only about twenty-five when Pocahantas saved him and she was only twelve. When he came to America, he had already spent five years fighting the Turks and was a hero in England.”
“Is it historically accurate, your novel? Did you read the primary research?”
“Oh, yes, of course, but that’s not what I’m really about. I’m like a throwback to a different time. You know, art is not supposed to be about expression anymore. It’s supposed to deal with other things, like form. That’s the modern theory, anyway.”
“The modern theory?”
“Look. You have to have a historical perspective in order to understand what is happening in the arts today. You have to go back centuries. For example, one of the great gifts of the Moorish culture was the knowledge that what we see is reflected light. Once you have that, you have three dimensions, and once you have three dimensions, you have the Renaissance because before that everything was art as the life of Christ. Look at music. Nineteenth-century music is very different from any other music. Before that, it was all about theology. Like Bach. Bach was the fugue. When Bach died, Haydn was twenty-three years old. Bach was a total reactionary, but a great artist. Great art also happens at the end of an age, not just the beginning.
“From Haydn you have Mozart,” George continued, “and an exploration of human sentiment. It was an exploration of how people felt, total expression, to the point where certain classic forms were forgotten or ignored. Mozart was writing for a middle class, a highly educated nonnoble class. And the middle class was always interested in how they felt. By the nineteenth century there were no patrons anymore. You had to have a mass audience. You had to differentiate yourself.
“Of course, they overdid it,” he said. “The expression, I mean. It got overwrought and sentimental. So the twentieth century rebelled. In the twentieth century, art is about no expression. Today they write for academics,” he finished, “or for a presumed mass mind, which is terrible.” He put his hands on the table. “Well, shall we see the books?”
He got up and led us from the kitchen. “Who do you like to read?” he asked.
“Well, Dickens, of course, … Trollope … no specific period really … Dos Passos …”
“Wonderful writer, Dos Passos,” George agreed. “U.S.A. is one of the great books of the twentieth century.”
“Yes. And no one reads him anymore. Not in school anyway. Hemingway, but not Dos Passos. It seems unfair.”
“Don’t underestimate Hemingway,” said George. “His style is deceptively simple, very poetic, like T. S. Eliot, but no one writes like Hemingway. It looks like it would be easy to write like Hemingway, but it isn’t. You can do it for one or two lines maybe, then it
becomes too difficult.
“The mind moves on images,” he went on, “and not logic. Hemingway was like a great director. He knew exactly what images to use to make you feel that you were part of the scene … in ‘The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ you were there, facing a charging rhinoceros, you could feel what it was like to face a charging rhinoceros … it was brilliant. That’s why people liked Hemingway. He was so different.”
“Maybe. But that still doesn’t explain why he survived with this titanic reputation and Dos Passos didn’t.”
“You have to understand,” George replied. “Spokesmen have been chosen for their generations … Steinbeck for the depression, Hemingway for the great expatriate era, Faulkner for the South after The Birth of a Nation … and that’s who everybody reads … and who everybody wants to buy.”
“So, in other words, those writers who were chosen will remain popular while others who were just as good will disappear.”
“Usually yes, but not always. Literary reputation is based on cultural factors independent of the text. The greatest cultural influence on modern literature was World War I because all the people who came back from the trenches weren’t about to write nice little novels about manners and society. They’d seen moronic generals from the old school send smart people to their deaths in obviously stupid military campaigns. They wrote about it and, as a result, literature and the way people looked at literature began to change.
“The depression is another example. Scott Fitzgerald’s reputation was very low before World War II. He was almost forgotten. The country was poor, people were reading Steinbeck.
“Fitzgerald came back but others didn’t. Galsworthy was the perfect example of an author who was permanently killed off by the depression. Booth Tarkington is another one. They were representatives of a simpler, more ordered time.”
We had passed through a large dining room into the living room. The furnishings were comfortable and tasteful. There were many objets d’art, including some very fine small paintings. A grandfather clock stood in the corner. On a small side table were arranged all sorts of antique spoons. There was not a speck of dust on any of the spoons or on the table. George led us to a large, cherry-wood cabinet.
“I had this specially made,” he said.
The top of the cabinet was glass etched with a rabbit and a frog. On the bottom were two doors. On them was carved:
JANE
GUSTAV
HERMAN
EMILY
JOSEPH
BEATRIX
BILBO
LEWIS
FRANZ
LEMUEL
FREDERICK
WILLIAM
AUSTEN
MAHLER
MELVILLE
BRONTË
CONRAD
POTTER
BAGGINS
CARROLL
KAFKA
GULLIVER
CHURCH
YEATS
The sides of the cabinet were shaped as pencils. Carved on the two pencils were “2B or” and “Not 2B.”
We looked in the cabinet. William Blake was there, as was Emily Dickinson, and T. S. Eliot.
“This is where I keep most of my poetry,” George said. “The books are scattered all over the house. I’m more of a consultant, anyway. Mostly, I help people build libraries or find something that they’re interested in.”
“What sort of people?”
He smiled. “People.”
From the living room, we went into a large parlor. A table with pictures of his two sons was at one end of the room and a large freestanding glass-fronted antique-looking bookcase was at the other. The books inside were beautiful, but there weren’t many of them and what he had was all over the place. Conrad Aiken, James Fenimore Cooper, Charles Bukowski, Anne Sexton, Theodore Roosevelt. He had the second book ever written on the subject of hypnotism by Franz Anton Mesmer (where the word mesmerize obviously came from), translated into French from the German. They were all interesting books, which ordinarily we would have liked to have around the house, but we didn’t have thousands of dollars to throw around. Until we saw one particular volume on the bottom shelf.
“Is the Martin Chuzzlewit a first?” we asked, opening the case and removing a beautiful golden brown book with gilt edging.
First edition, George told us, but not first issue. The first issue has 100£ for £100 in the illustration on the title page. “It’s bound by Morrell, though,” he said, “and is in first-class condition.”
It was in first-class condition. It was also $650.
“We’ll take it.”
“Larry, are you crazy? George, do you mind if we talk for a moment?”
“Not at all.”
We walked to the other side of the room. “Larry, we can’t afford to buy a six-hundred-fifty-dollar book.”
“Sure we can. We just won’t go out to eat for a while.”
“About six months.”
“All right.”
“You’re serious.”
“Yet.”
“You want to spend six hundred fifty dollars on Martin Chuzzlewit.”
“Yep.”
“Why?”
“Because if we don’t, we’ll always wish we had. Look, we’ve been doing this long enough to know that are certain things we shouldn’t pass up. Dickens is one of them. It’s a lot of money, sure, but we’ll have something we’ll treasure for the rest of our lives. How does that compare to a few dinners?”
“Maybe you’re right.”
“You do want it, don’t you?”
“Of course I want it.”
“Then let’s get it.”
“All right.”
“And afterward we can go out to dinner to celebrate.”
“You were right about the Dickens,” said George, when we were back in the kitchen. “Dickens has enduring value. He may go up and down a little, but in the long haul that will be a valuable book.
“Today, the autographs that are collected, the books that are collected … these are the authors that the collectors read in high school. They’ve always remembered them, they have a fondness for them … of course, the people who were read in, say, the forties and fifties are different than those who are read in high school today. Then we read Steinbeck and Hemingway and Faulkner. I don’t know what they read today.”
We did. It comes from having a succession of high school baby-sitters dragging their bookbags into your living room.
“They read Margaret Atwood,” we said.
George stared at us. “That’s appalling,” he said.
We talked awhile longer around the kitchen table before saying good-bye. It wasn’t until we were back in the car and looked at the clock on the dashboard that we realized that we had spent the entire afternoon with George Minkoff and were already fifteen minutes late to go and relieve Rebecca.
CHAPTER 16
The Thirty-sixth Annual New York Antiquarian Book Fair was held from April 19 to April 21, 1996, in the Seventh Regiment Armory, which occupied the entire block on the east side of Park Avenue between Sixty-seventh and Sixty-eighth Streets, a three-story stone fortress stuck in among the luxury high-rises. There was a preview on April 18 but, after Boston, we thought it prudent to wait for the real thing.
We had heard that the New York fair was different and the differences began at the door. The admission fee was ten dollars, not the usual five or six. Instead of an ordinary check room, there were young, attractive men and women wearing tuxedo shirts and black bow ties stationed at a small table outside the checkroom who called you “sir” or “ma’am” and noted with finality that they would be pleased to check your backpack for you.
Just before the entrance to the main hall was a large, glossy announcement mounted on an easel that said that Allen Ahearn would be conducting a seminar at one o’clock on Modern First Editions.
Just past the easel was an information table manned by prosperous-looking women with white hair who looke
d as if they lived in the apartment houses up the street. The table was heaped with free literature describing the fair, free copies of “the special New York Book Fair issue” of AB Bookman’s Weekly (“for the specialist book world”), and announcements of future fairs, including those to be held in London and Amsterdam. The food area was in the rear, where little tables had been set up to allow participants to snack on $7.95 sandwiches of smoked turkey breast and arugula on whole grain bread and a small dish of fruit salad made with fresh blueberries, cut strawberries, and cantaloupe for five dollars. The only thing that was not different about the New York fair was the basic layout—booth upon booth in one long row after another—although even here, with 136 dealers to be accommodated, the scale was magnified.
Still, as we stood at the threshold of the main hall, it was hard to shake the feeling that, as with many things about New York, the differences were more of form (or grandiosity) than substance.
Wrong again.
First of all, it was a question of who was there. Pepper and Stern had a booth, of course, and so did Buddenbrooks and Howard S. Mott. The high-end New York dealers like Ursus, from above the Carlisle, and Bauman, from the lobby of the Waldorf-Astoria, were all there, too. (Although not J. N. Bartfield. Bartfield had taken a full-page ad in the brochure but Mr. Murray apparently did not make personal appearances.) But that was only the beginning. Of the 136 dealers, over twenty were from Britain and others were from France, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Spain. Among them were Quaritch and Maggs Brothers of London, legendary dealers we had only read of in places like The Amenities of Book-Collecting, or heard about from Clarence. On the domestic side, there were a great many California dealers, as well as others from as far away as Minnesota, Oregon, and Hawaii.
But more than the who was the what. These dealers brought with them strange and wonderful old maps and vellum books and pictures of ships. There were dealers who specialized in everything from Napoleonic history to alchemy to arts and crafts to dance rarities to Egyptology to Dr. Seuss to medieval illuminated manuscripts. They had fore-edge paintings, gastronomy, and golf; horticulture, incunabula (books printed before 1501), and landscape architecture.
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