“It’s like the dealers who sell to Hollywood. Hollywood is the market today. Dealers who sell to movie stars who make fifty million dollars on a movie know that they can come into a bookshop and drop one million dollars on books, that it’s petty change to them.”
“Why are movie stars buying these books?”
“I don’t know. Maybe they think if they have a library with great books in it people will think they are intelligent.”
“So are they the ones driving up the prices? If a movie star buys a thousand-dollar book for five thousand dollars, won’t all the other dealers rush out to their customers and say, hey, this book just sold for five thousand dollars but I can get it for you for three thousand dollars?”
George smiled. “They’d probably say twenty-five hundred.”
“Which has nothing to do with the underlying value of the book. Like a spec stock.”
“Look,” George said, “you were on Wall Street. How many times did you see the price of a stock run up the same way?”
“There’s a difference,” we insisted. “If you buy a spec stock for five thousand dollars and the price doubles, minus commission, you get the full value of the stock when you turn around and sell it. If you buy a book for five thousand dollars and the price doubles and you turn around and sell it, you’ll be lucky to get your original five thousand back.”
“Wait a minute,” George said quickly, “I would never advise someone to buy books to try to make money and I don’t work with people who collect for that reason. I’m not a stockbroker. People who come to me want certain kinds of things in their libraries because they care about them and I tell them what might be available, what it is going to cost them, and then try and get what they want. I know what is important and what is not important, I know what is real and not real, and those are the things I try to pass along to the people I work with.”
“But you don’t do a lot of modern firsts,” we noted.
“I’ve never been sure exactly what I do,” said George.
“Then isn’t it a stacked deck? How can you ever hope to have a decent collection if you’re not enormously rich and are competing against people who don’t care and just buy up everything blind?”
“Oh,” said George. “I think the collector always has the advantage, because if he or she has good taste and gets good advice, he’ll always come out ahead. First, he will have great books. Second, he will get great prices. And third, he or she will have a collection with the sort of books that nobody else can get.”
“That sounds good but it seems a little tough to work in practice.”
“Not if you’re patient and pick your spots. If you’re willing to pass up a book that you want because it’s too expensive or not in good condition, eventually you’ll find it for less money in better condition. What a collector needs most and usually has the least is self-discipline.”
“Do you ever talk to other dealers about these things?”
“I never talk to anybody about these things,” George Minkoff replied.
CHAPTER 17
“Good morning. Welcome to Swann’s auction number 1729, modern literature, fantasy, and detective fiction …”
Swann Galleries, Inc., is located on the sixth floor of an older, slightly down-at-the-heels office building on Twenty-fifth Street, just east of Park Avenue South in New York City. Swann’s was established in 1941 by Arthur Swann to specialize in auctioning rare books. They have since expanded into several related fields such as photographs and autographs, and today, with annual sales of six million dollars, they claim to be “the largest specialist rare book auctioneers in the United States.”
We had read about Swann’s in a number of places and had decided to call and ask about their auctions. After all, Helen and Michael’s auction had been fun and the forty-five-dollar Brontë set was probably the best bargain we had acquired since we had begun collecting. Maybe we could get an even bigger bargain at a real auction in New York where the selection, or so we assumed, would doubtless be more extensive. We chose Swann’s because we knew they specialized in books and it did not seem, from what we had read about them, that they would be as expensive (or as intimidating) as either Sotheby’s or Christie’s.
It turned out that Swann’s held an auction almost every Thursday. In September, we called and asked for a catalogue of their next book auction and the one they sent us was for mid-October. It cost fifteen dollars, which we considered a good sign. We had ordered catalogues from the other houses as well and the one from Sotheby’s had cost twenty-five dollars and the one from Christie’s, forty-five.
“RARE BOOKS,” read the title on the glossy cover of the Swann’s catalogue, superimposed over the sepia-tinted detail of an illustration from lot 49, The History of the River Thames, published by John and Josiah Boydell in 1794. On the inside page it read:
Public Auction Sale 1705
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 19, 1995 AT 10:30 A.M.
RARE BOOKS
FINE PRIVATE PRESS & ILLUSTRATED BOOKS
EDMUND DULAC ARTHUR RACKHAM
L. FRANK BAUM IN DUST JACKETS
ART BOOKS BINDINGS COLOR PLATE BOOKS
LITERATURE EARLY PRINTED BOOKS TRAVEL
NATURAL HISTORY SCIENCE & MEDICINE
The Property of
ALFRED HOWELL
A PRIVATE INDIANA COLLECTOR
THE ESTATE OF DICK MARTIN
AND OTHERS
EXHIBITION
Saturday, October 14—10:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M.
Monday—Wednesday, October 16–18—10:00 A.M. to 6:00 P.M.
CLOSED SUNDAY
Edmund Dulac? We had Edmund Dulac. He was the illustrator for our forty-five-dollar Brontë set. Maybe it was an omen.
We flipped through the pages of the catalogue until we got to lots 75–81, which were limited editions of books illustrated and signed by Dulac. They included Stories from the Arabian Nights, The Tempest, Rubáiyát, Princess Badoura: A Tale from the Arabian Nights (with an exhibition binding by Zaehnsdorf, another old friend). Stories by Hans Christian Anderson, Fairy Tales of All Nations, and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Tanglewood Tales. The estimated prices ranged from $400 to $1,200. Not only that, the Zaehnsdorf binding, “olive levant elegantly gilt-tooled to all-over floral design, with red morocco lettering piece on flat spine,” was stunningly pictured on the inside front cover.
So the good news was that Dulac was a big deal and that we had been inadvertently clever at Michael’s auction.
We leafed through the rest of the catalogue. The Dulacs were not even remotely the most expensive offerings. Most of the lots were estimated in the thousands, some of them in excess of ten thousand, including The Birds of America by John James Audubon, estimated at between $20,000 and $25,000 and something called The Kelmscott Chaucer for $20,000 to $30,000. Not to mention lot 162:
162. GOULD, JOHN. Monograph of the Macropodidae, or Family of Kangaroos [cover-title]. 30 hand-colored lithographed plates after Gould and H. C. Richter. 2 parts in one volume. Folio, 548x365 mm, modern red morocco gilt, red silk doublures and endleaves, front wrapper of second part bound in.
London: the Author, 1841–42 [20,000/25,000]
The ultimate coffee-table book.
There was virtually nothing estimated at less than five hundred dollars.
So, the bad news was that we couldn’t afford Swann’s, either.
It seemed, however, that while we had given up on Swann’s, they had not given up on us. We were now on their mailing list. We got notices of auctions for all sorts of things: Posters, The Civil War, Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Photographs, L. Frank Baum and Related Oziana, Magic, Abraham Lincoln & His Contemporaries, Hebraica & Judaica, and then, finally, Public Auction Sale 1729, Modern Literature, Fantasy & Detective Fiction. First Editions, Signed & Inscribed Copies.
We ordered the catalogue. Another fifteen-dollar investment.
And this time, it worked out. The books listed in the catalogue were just the kind of thing w
e were interested in. And at prices we were interested in as well. Many books carried estimated sale prices of under a hundred dollars. But the prices were interesting on another level. Catch-22, for example, which we had seen at a book fair for $500, was estimated to sell for between $150 and $250. The Thin Man, which we had seen in Sheffield for $2,500, was estimated to go for between $600 and $900. The 42nd Parallel, part of Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy, which Brian had told us could go for up to $750, and which we had seen as part of the set at Pepper and Stern’s for $1,250, was estimated here between $80 and $120. There was Raymond Chandler, a slew of Tarzan books, and Jack London, all at estimated prices wildly lower than we had seen at other dealers and book fairs. Even Gone with the Wind, for which a good clean copy of the first edition in a first-issue dust jacket can command up to $10,000 dollars, was here estimated at between $2,500 and $3,500.
Our first thought was: How can this be? Maybe the books are in terrible condition. Our second thought was: Let’s go.
There was one other thing in the Swann’s catalogue that had caught our attention. On the inside front cover, it noted that the current president of Swann’s was a man named George Lowry. We had checked our business card file and confirmed that Judith Lowry from the first-edition room at Argosy spelled her name the same way. We wondered if they were related.
We had actually tried Argosy one last time on an earlier visit to New York. We had gotten there early, just after they opened, well before lunch, on a weekday. It was raining.
We walked immediately to the desk at the back of the room, where Judith Lowry was seated.
“Good morning.”
“Good morning,” she said, looking up at us as if we had come to sell something instead of to buy something.
“Would it be possible to see the first editions this morning?”
“I’m afraid not. I have an appointment downtown to buy books. I’m leaving right away.”
Veterans of Argosy that we were, we did not bother to ask if anyone else could show us the books.
“This is our third try. Is there some formal procedure that one has to go through in order to see the first editions?”
“You can try making an appointment,” she said coldly.
We nodded. Then, just as an experiment, instead of leaving right away, we wandered to the back and went downstairs. We idled in the basement for about fifteen minutes. When we came back up the stairs, there was Judith Lowry, still at her desk, on the telephone, leaning back in her chair, chatting and laughing. Just from the snatches of conversation that we caught as we walked past her desk, it was clear that it was a personal call.
The preview for the auction was held for the five business days preceding the auction, closed on Sunday. We got into New York late Wednesday afternoon, dropped Emily at her grandparents (the beloved Nana and Papa, always a big plus), then raced downtown. We got to Swann’s about an hour before they closed.
Swann’s was essentially one big room. The books weren’t laid out on tables like at the American Legion Hall; here they were on built-in bookshelves against a wall, except for ten or fifteen of the most expensive items that were in a glass case. The glass case was not locked, allowing anyone who so desired to remove and leaf through what turned out to be a pristine copy of Gone with the Wind, an excellent copy of The Thin Man, Raymond Chandler’s Lady in the Lake, and a first edition, first issue of The Sun Also Rises, which had an estimated sale price of between $2,000 and $3,000.
While a few of the books were, in fact, in poor condition, all of the imperfections seemed to us to have been accurately set down in the catalogue. The dust jacket of The Maltese Falcon, for example, was torn, but the catalogue read, “lacking the lower portion of the front panel, but with the falcon clearly visible” (which it was). A first American edition of Dracula, of which the Pepper and Stern catalogue had listed “a fine copy” for $4,000, was not in good shape, but the catalogue noted a “chip just beneath the title, tips and spine extremities rubbed,” and the price was estimated at $350 to $500.
There was one item of great interest to us, because it was estimated at a much higher price than we thought it should be. East of Eden, which we had purchased at David and Esther’s for $90, was estimated in the catalogue at between $350 to $500. In earlier, more naive times, we would have congratulated ourselves on a coup but now we just made a mental note to check and see if the first edition had more than one issue and we had the later one and didn’t know it.
We spent some time at the preview checking things out and came up with a list of books on which we might actually bid. These were: The Asphalt Jungle by W. R. Burnett (100/150), Good-bye, Mr. Chips by James Hilton (100/150), The Shuttered Room by H. P. Lovecraft and others, an Arkham House first edition (100/150), Parnassus on Wheels by Christopher Morley inscribed and with Morley’s bookplate on the inside cover (100/150) and the Dos Passos (80/120).
When we were done, we left Swann’s, went to a terrific offbeat movie that wouldn’t have come to the Berkshires until 1999, had dinner in a nice Italian restaurant, and then went back to Nana and Papa’s apartment to sleep on the pull-out couch.
We were back at Swann’s by ten the next morning. There were already about twenty people there, milling about, taking a last-minute look at the books. We saw instantly that they were all dealers. The vast majority were middle-aged men wearing glasses, although there was a sprinkling of younger men as well as a few middle-aged women wearing glasses. Although one man was wearing a dark conservative business suit and reading the New York Times, the rest were dressed in a manner we had come to view as standard dealer attire. The men wore jeans or ill-fitting khaki pants, plaid shirts, bushy beards, and there were lots of long ponytails on balding heads. The women wore loose-fitting, rumpled pants suits in drab colors, except for one woman in her sixties with bleached-blond hair who wore a red, blue, yellow, and fuschia running suit under a teal quilted jacket.
We were immediately cheered by this. While we considered it obvious why no one but a dealer would venture to the American Legion Hall in Sheffield to attend Michael and Helen’s auction, we had assumed that in the middle of New York City at a place with Swann’s reputation, there would be lots of private collectors. The fact that there were not explained the estimated prices.
There was a reception area to our left with a long counter and three people behind it. Thanks to Helen, we knew that, if we wanted to bid, we would have to fill something out, so we went and stood in front of the counter and, sure enough, a bearded man handed us a long, thin rectangular two-part card with a big 183 on the top and bottom sections. We filled in our mailing address and billing information on the top section and he tore that off and handed us the bottom, with our number, 183. “We bid by paddle,” he said, nodding toward the card in our hands.
Five rows of folding chairs had been set up since the preview. We took our “paddle,” strolled confidently over to the last row, and grabbed two seats, then watched with satisfaction as the chairs in front of us began to fill up.
A podium had been set up at the front, along with a table on which sat two telephones. After a while, a young woman went up to the podium and announced that the auction would be starting in five minutes and that the exhibition was now closed. From this point forward, she added, no one was allowed to touch the books.
No sooner had she made this announcement than the elevator door opened and a wave of new arrivals came into the room. And no sooner did these new people enter than the Swann’s employees dutifully set up three additional rows of folding chairs behind ours, putting us squarely in the center of the audience.
At this point, two men who had been standing near the books by the front ambled over to the podium. One was a tall, thin, balding, well-groomed man in his fifties wearing a gray suit, a red striped shirt, and a red-and-black tie. The other was much younger, late twenties or early thirties, with close-cropped black hair, wearing a brown suit and tie. They took their places side by side at the podium. We assumed from l
ooking in the catalogue that the older man was George Lowry and that the younger man was one of the two other licensed auctioneers, one of whom was George’s son, Nicholas.
The older man addressed the audience. He was obviously to be the auctioneer. Although his demeanor was perfectly serious and professional, he seemed somehow to have a smile on his face. There was something about the ease with which he moved and the obvious enjoyment of his position that made us smile as well. In addition, we got the feeling that there was never anything that had happened or could happen at an auction house that George Lowry hadn’t seen.
“We’ll take a rest after item two-oh-five,” he said. “That’s exactly halfway. We hope you’ll get up, stretch, talk to your neighbor, maybe sell a few books.” So everyone there was a dealer. “Then we’ll change auctioneers and do the second half. For those of you who haven’t been with us before, we bid by paddle. If we are giving a bid that has been left with us, we will say ‘by order’ and we will also note if a bid is being made by telephone. We retain the right to reopen the bidding if we have missed someone, but under no circumstances will we reopen bidding once the next item has been called. Bear with me if I don’t see you, that’s why he’s here … ,” gesturing with his thumb to the younger man on the left, who grinned. “He can see. We will begin with lot number one, Charles Addams, My Crowd.”
“We begin with an order bid of fifty dollars,” said the younger man, looking down at something in front of him on the podium.
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