Used and Rare
Page 21
The Charles Addams went for eighty dollars, which was right in the middle of the estimate of 60/90.
The bidding went very fast. Often, there was no counter to the order bid, even when it was below the low figure of the estimated value. In fact, of the first twenty items, with the exception of two lots, nothing exceeded the high estimate and most went for less than the low figure on the estimated value. Only a 1911 first edition of Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm excited any interest, going for $325 after some spirited bidding, against a high estimate of $150. A lot of three James Baldwin first editions, on the other hand, went for sixty dollars when the low figure on the estimate was a hundred.
This was very encouraging, because The Asphalt Jungle was next and we were hoping for a bargain. We picked up our paddle.
“Wow, this is fun.”
“Item twenty-one,” said the auctioneer. “The Asphalt Jungle by W. R. Burnett. A fine copy of the first edition with the black dust jacket.”
Immediately, the man to his right said, “We begin with an order bid of one hundred thirty dollars.”
We put down our paddle. Bidding increments between $100 and $150 were ten dollars and if we bid $140 and added on the 15 percent buyer’s premium and sales tax, it meant paying $175 for the book. That seemed too much, especially so early in the proceedings. We didn’t want to be in the position of passing up a later bargain because we had spent too much too soon. Still, by the time the next lot, Back to the Stone Age by Edgar Rice Burroughs, had been called, we were already regretting our inaction. We knew, now that we had passed it up, if we ever wanted The Asphalt Jungle, we were, in all likelihood, going to have to pay upward of $350 to a dealer in order to get it.
There were seventeen Burroughs books, the majority of them some form of Tarzan, most in the $600 to $800 range. After Pepper and Stern, we had expected these to easily exceed the high estimate but here, too, the bids were low. Most of the books went to the same two or three bidders. We realized that each of these dealers obviously had a customer who collected Burroughs and they could count on a quick turn-around and easy profit, all the quicker and easier because of the low prices.
As the bidding moved on, we were again surprised at the number of items that were taken by order bids that went uncontested. Raymond Chandler got some contested bidding although, except for The Lady in the Lake, which went for $1,100 against a $900 high estimate, none of the winning bids was that high. Winston Churchill did poorly, as did Joseph Conrad.
Then it was time for Dos Passos. There were eight. The first, Airways, Inc., had an estimated value of $100 to $150.
“We begin with an order bid of one hundred fifty dollars,” said the younger man.
Bad sign.
The bid stood and The 42nd Parallel was next. This time, we weren’t going to bargain hunt. Even if the bidding opened in the middle of the $80 to $120 range, we were going to bid. We picked up our paddle.
“We begin with an order bid of one hundred fifty dollars,” said the younger man.
“One seventy-five,” immediately countered the auctioneer, indicating someone in the audience, not us. (Bidding was by $25 increments between $150 and $500.)
We put down our paddle.
“In the room,” he said, “at one seventy-five. Will anyone go to two hundred. No?” He paused, then clapped the little wooden cup he was using instead of a gavel. “Sold, for one hundred seventy-five dollars, to number …” He read off someone’s number in a row behind us.
Sigh.
Dos Passos did very well, each of the eight exceeding the high estimate, some by as much as 100 percent. It gave us some small consolation that Dos Passos seemed to be finally getting his due. It would have been a lot nicer, however, if he had gotten it at the next auction.
We sat glumly as the bidding proceeded through Conan Doyle, Drieser, and T. S. Eliot. Then we came to lot 109, “Group of 5 First Editions” by Loren Estleman, “all warmly inscribed and signed by Estleman.” Lot 110 was “Group of 9 Inscribed and Signed Volumes,” also by Estleman and lot 111 was another “Group of 9 Volumes,” “First Editions. All Warmly Inscribed and Signed by Estleman.” Some examples of the titles were Angel Eyes, Whiskey River, Bloody Season, and The Glass Highway.
When the bidding began on the first lot (estimated to sell at between $200 and $300), the younger man on the right said, “We open with an order bid of one hundred ten dollars.”
There was no sign of any stirring in the room. “Sold to order at one-ten,” said the older man.
Lot 110, also valued at between $200 and $300, also went to order at $110. Lot 111 opened with an order bid of $120.
We heard a voice behind us, one of the dealers. “You really ought to buy that,” he told his neighbor. “He’s going to be famous one day.”
“Who is he?” asked the neighbor.
“How should I know? I never heard of him,” answered the dealer.
The auction went on. Faulkner did very well. Fitzgerald was a surprise. A first edition of The Beautiful and the Damned, with a dust jacket, estimated at $880 to $1,200, opened—and closed—with an order bid of $2,600. That number caused a murmur in the crowd. You could almost hear all the dealers frantically making notes to remind themselves to mark up all their Fitzgeralds as soon as they got back to the shop.
The Thin Man went for $2,000, more than doubling its high estimate. That meant that the copy we had seen in Sheffield. was now a bargain. We sat up straighter as we got closer to James Hilton and Good-bye, Mr. Chips. But first, we had to go through Hemingway.
They had quite a few Hemingways but things didn’t get going until lot 184.
“The Sun Also Rises,” announced the auctioneer. “A fine copy of the first edition.”
“We begin with an order bid of fifteen hundred dollars,” said the younger man.
Bidding increments between $500 and $2,000 were $100 and immediately the auctioneer said, “One thousand six hundred,” then “seven … eight … one thousand nine hundred,” then, “on the phone, two thousand.” Over $2,000, the bidding increments jumped to $200.
“In the room, twenty-two hundred,” said the auctioneer. “On the telephone in the back, twenty-four.” We realized that every telephone in the room was in use, not just the two telephones at the table in the front.
“In the room, twenty-six … on the telephone at the front, twenty-eight … three thousand, in the back.” The bidding was now at the high end of the range. The bidder in the room shook his head, leaving the two telephone bidders to fight it out.
“Thirty-two hundred, at the front … thirty-four … thirty-six …” The bidding kept on through four thousand, then five. The dealers in the room were looking at each other, shrugging and gesturing.
“Fifty-two hundred … fifty-four.” There was a little more time between the bids now. “Fifty-six, at the back … fifty-eight …” then, after a few seconds, “six thousand dollars.” The bidding increments jumped to $500 now.
“I have six-thousand dollars in the back …” The auctioneer looked at the woman on the telephone at the front table. “Do I hear sixty-five hundred?” There was a pause, then the woman said something to the bidder on the other end of the line.
Finally, she shook her head.
Clap! went the little wooden cup. “Sold for six thousand dollars to number …” The auctioneer gave the paddle number of the telephone bidder. The dealers were shaking their heads with a mixture of disbelief and greed.
“Congratulations,” said the auctioneer. Then, in a lower voice, he added, “I think.”
Tranquility returned to the room as two copies of The Torrents of Spring were sold to order bidders in the middle of their estimated values.
Then Hemingway was done and it was time for James Hilton.
We picked up our paddle.
“Lot one-sixty-seven,” said the auctioneer, “a first edition of Good-bye, Mr. Chips.”
The younger man spoke, “We have an order bid for …” We held our breath. “Si
xty dollars.”
“Seventy,” said the auctioneer, nodding to someone in the second row.
We held up our paddle.
“Eighty,” he said, looking our way.
We waited but there was no “ninety.”
Clap. “Sold to …” we held up our paddle again. “One-eighty-three for eighty dollars.”
Yesss!
We stayed at the auction as long as we could (even grandparental baby-sitters have their limits), until the presentation copy of Parnassus on Wheels that had been estimated at $100 to $150 had sold for $225. (We didn’t bid on the Lovecraft either, even though it went at the middle of its $100 to $150 range.) We stayed long enough to see a red-haired woman who had arrived after intermission engage in what can only be described as a war with a telephone bidder for the twenty-three Jack London lots, almost all of which, as a result, went for more than their estimates. (The red-haired woman, who left immediately after the last London lot was done, ended up with only about six or seven books, each of which she had to fight to get, leaving her in an obviously poor humor.) Both copies of Gone with the Wind, as could be expected, exceeded their estimates by half.
On the way out, we stopped at the desk to pay for Good-bye, Mr. Chips. The same bearded man handled the checkout.
“By the way, that was George Lowry at the podium for the first half, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, and Nicky is doing the second half.”
“Is, by some chance, George related to the Judith Lowry from Argosy?”
“That’s his wife,” said the bearded man.
Back in Massachusetts, we eagerly awaited the arrival of both our book and the “prices realized, including buyer’s premium” sheet that auction houses send to those who have purchased a catalogue. The sheet arrived first.
We checked lot 167 and there it was, “92.” That was ours. Next we checked item 348, East of Eden, expecting a low number but, no, there was a “402.” That meant the hammer price had been $350. We had checked with a number of dealers and there did not seem to be more than one state of the first edition of East of Eden, so, maybe, just this once, we had done well by ourselves after all.
Then we perused the sheet to see if there was anything else of interest and a number immediately caught our eye. Lot 325 had sold for $11,500, which meant that someone had bid $10,000 for it. It was, by $3,000, the highest bid in the entire auction. What could have gone for $10,000? We hadn’t remembered anything else valued so highly. We looked up lot 325.
325. RUNYON, DAMON, Guys and Dolls. 8vo, cloth; dust jacket, couple of tiny closed tears. Fine copy. New York, 1931
First edition, inscribed: “To my very dear friend and companion-in-arms, Doc Morris (one of the best,) from the author, Damon Runyon with sincere regards, September, 1931.”
The price was estimated at $400 to $600.
Someone had paid $10,000 for a $500 book? It must be a misprint, we decided. Swann’s had added a zero. It must have been $1,150 or a $1,000 hammer price. Still high but at least in the realm of sanity.
Unable to resist temptation, we called Swann’s and asked. “No,” said the man who answered the telephone, “it wasn’t a misprint. The price that appears on the sheet was correct.”
“Was it an order bid?” we stammered. By a lunatic? we wanted to add.
“No,” said the man. “There were two bidders.”
Two lunatics? We remembered the Hemingway. “Telephone bidders?”
“No. Both of them were in the room.”
“Dealers?”
“Yes. I can tell you that the winning bidder was bidding for someone else.”
We hung up. It had to be collectors, two people, each with a seven-figure net worth and a Damon Runyon fetish.
Two weeks later, we were in Boston. Peter Stern, who seemed to know more about modern firsts than anyone else we had met, was the perfect person with whom to discuss the auction, particularly the stunning price of ten thousand dollars for a Damon Runyon book.
“Oh, I was the underbidder,” said Peter casually.
Lucky that we hadn’t had a chance to offer our lunatic theory.
CHAPTER 18
“I heard a story the other dye you moight enjoy,” said David.
“Friend of moine was down in Atlanta at an auction. They had a lot of old law books for sale, all very noicely bound in leather, but pretty much useless being completely out of dyte. Most lawyers do things by computer these dyes loike everyone else, I guess.
“Anywye, any toime a lot of these law books came up for bids, a man in the back snatched them up. He was the only one bidding, and he got them all. He wasn’t pyeing much, not over fifty cents a book, but still even that seemed too much for worthless books and my friend couldn’t figure out what he wanted them for. So, after the auction was over he went over to the guy who was sitting there surrounded by all these big, heavy leatherbound books and asked him, ‘Why are you buying those worthless old law books?’
“The man looked up at him. ‘Worthless? They’re not worthless. Watch this,’ and he opened his briefcase and pulled out a stack of lybels. He took one of the books off the floor and slapped the lybel on it. ‘THE COMPLETE WORKS OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,’ it said.
“The man grinned. ‘I sell ’em by the yahd to interior desoigners in Atlanta … the ones redoing all those old plantytion houses with the loibraries,’ he said.”
It had been a while since we had been back to Berkshire Book Company. The shop was busier than during our previous visits and, other than the story, we didn’t really get a chance to talk to David very much. We were just as happy, though, because we had a chance to browse. Bartfield’s had been a kind of fun and Swann’s had been a kind of fun but here was a different kind of fun because here we knew that anything we saw that we wanted we could have.
And there was a feeling of freshness walking around the shop that we’d missed. They’d gotten a lot of new stock, even added a room. We realized that, with all the modern firsts, we really had been seeing the same books over and over and now we had the chance to explore again. These weren’t the books in their moments, maybe, but that didn’t mean they weren’t worth reading. Many, many excellent books fall by the wayside, either don’t get the attention they deserve at the time they come out or time works on them and, like MacArthur’s old soldier, they just kind of fade away. The only place you can find books like that anymore is a used-book shop like Berkshire Book Company.
We were experienced now, so we knew that there were a lot of books we were not going to find here. We were not going to find The Great Gatsby, we were not going to find The Hamlet, and we were not going to find Dracula. But at Berkshire Book Company, unlike at places where you would find The Great Gatsby, The Hamlet, or Dracula, you might be surprised.
“Larry, weren’t you looking for U.S.A.?”
“Uh-huh.”
“It’s here.”
“Where?”
“In the Ds.”
“It’s not the Modern Library edition, is it?”
“Yes, but it’s the early one. From 1939.”
Unlike later Modern Library editions, which are basically hardcover paperbacks, the 1939 Modern Library Giant edition of the U.S.A. trilogy was well bound, sturdy, and altogether nicely done. Not a set of first editions, maybe, but then again, it didn’t cost $1,250 either. It cost $10.
“Hey, this is great.”
“I thought you wanted firsts.”
“No. Just nice hardcovers. I didn’t think you could get these in nice hardcover without buying firsts.”
And that, after all, was the point. It had been all too easy to catch what Kevin at Bartfield’s had called “First Edition Fever.” To think that a book had no value unless it was a pristine first edition of a book that everybody else wanted. In fact, one of the things that made our library feel special to us was the variety. We loved our $700 Bleak House and our $650 Martin Chuzzlewit, but we also loved our $10 Josephine Tey, our $20 Andersonville, our $10 Another Country,
our $10 War and Peace, and we were going to love our $10 U.S.A.
The more we thought about it, the more we came back to our original view. You don’t really need first editions at all. They are just affectations, excuses for dealers to run up the price on you, charge you a lot of money for something that doesn’t read any better than any other edition.
Still, there was that fabulous Ashenden at Pepper and Stern with that amazing dust jacket …
ALSO BY THE GOLDSTONES
Lawrence Goldstone
Rights
Nancy Goldstone
Trading Up: Surviving Success as a Woman Trader on Wall Street
Bad Business: A Novel
Mommy and the Murder
Mommy and the Money
A THOMAS DUNNE BOOK.
An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.
USED AND RARE: TRAVELS IN THE BOOK WORLD.
Copyright © 1997 by Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
Design by Bryanna Millis
eISBN 9780312207496
First eBook Edition : March 2011
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Goldstone, Lawrence.
Used and rare: travels in the book world / Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone.
p. cm.
“A Thomas Dunne book.”
ISBN 0-312-18768-8 ISBN 978-0-312-18768-2
1. Book collecting—New England. 2. Book collecting—Middle Atlantic States. 3. Goldstone, Lawrence.
4. Goldstone, Nancy Bazelon. I. Goldstone, Nancy Bazelon. II. Title.
Z987.5.U6G65 1997
002’092—dc21
96-30081