A Passion for Books

by Harold Rabinowitz

  The fallacy of thinking that age is of major importance in judging a book should be corrected by every book lover. Age? Why, there are many books of the fifteenth century which command small prices in the auction rooms today, while certain volumes brought out a decade ago are not only valuable but grow more so with each passing year. A first edition of A. A. Milne’s When We Were Very Young, printed two years ago, is already more precious than some old tome, such as a sermon of the 1490s by the famous teacher Johannes Gerson, the contents of which are and always will be lacking in human or any other kind of interest.

  The inception of any great movement, whether material or spiritual, is bound to be interesting, according to its relative importance. The Gutenberg Bible, leaving aside the question of its artistic merit and the enormous value of its contents, as the first printed book is of the greatest possible significance. But it so happens that this wonderful Bible is also one of the finest known examples of typography. No book ever printed is more beautiful than this pioneer work of Gutenberg, the first printer, although it was issued almost five hundred years ago. It has always seemed an interesting point to me that printing is the only art which sprang into being full-blown. Later years brought about a more uniform appearance of type, but aside from this we have only exceeded the early printers in speed of execution. Enormous value is added to some of these earliest books because they are the last word in the printer’s art.

  The first books printed on subjects of universal interest are the rarest “firsts” of all for the collector. These include early romances of chivalry, of which few copies are found today. They are generally in very poor condition, as their popular appeal was tremendous, and they were literally read to pieces. They were really the popular novels of the period. The ones which come through the stress of years successfully are extremely rare. For instance, there are the Caxtons.

  William Caxton was the first printer in England and the first to print books in the English language. When he brought out the second edition of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in 1484, with its fascinating woodcut illustrations, it was literally devoured by contemporary readers. This and other publications of Caxton were very popular— he evidently had a good eye for best-sellers—and now a perfect Caxton is difficult to find.

  One of the finest Caxtons in existence is Le Morte d’Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory, published in 1485. This perfect copy, this jewel among Caxtons, sold at the dispersal of the library of the earl of Jersey in 1885 for £1,950, approximately $9,500. Now this is an excellent example of a book increasing in value for its pristine, perfect state as well as for its alluring contents. Twenty-six years later it brought $42,800 at the Hoe sale. It is now one of the treasures adorning the Pierpont Morgan Library.

  The first editions of books which have that quality so glibly called today sex appeal, such as Boccaccio’s Decameron, and his Amore di Florio e di Bianchafiore—a wicked old romance of the fifteenth century, truly the first snappy story—are firsts of which there are but few left for our edification. They are extremely precious to the collector, no matter what their condition. The first book on murder; the first book on medicine or magic; the first Indian captivity; the first music book, the first newspaper, the first published account of lace making, or the comparatively modern subject, shorthand—the first book on any subject marking the advance of civilization is always valuable.

  One of the rarest and most interesting books is the first sporting book, The Book of Hunting and Hawking, printed at St. Albans, in 1486, by an unknown man, called, for convenience of classification, the Schoolmaster Printer. Women were sports writers even in those days, for this record was written by a woman, Dame Juliana Barnes, sometimes known as Berners. A copy was sold in the Hoe sale in 1911, for $12,000, to Mr. Henry E. Huntington, who formed one of the few great collections of the world. Nearly all of the few existing copies of this work are now in this country. Another one, the Pembroke copy, which I now own, sold for £1,800 in 1914. As it is the last one that can ever come on the market, heaven only knows what it is worth today. Like some other famous firsts, it has several novel merits, being one of the first books to contain English poetry and the first English book to be illustrated with pictures printed in color. This and Walton’s The Compleat Angler are the two greatest sporting books of all time. Yet because there are more copies of the latter in existence, a fine copy of the first edition in the original binding is worth not more than $8,500 today.

  Another tremendously rare book is the much read Pilgrim’s Progress. No work, with the exception of the Bible, has enjoyed greater popularity all through the years than this powerful, imaginative, and moral tale. I have almost every edition of it, in every language. A best-seller for years after the author’s death, and a very good seller today, too, the early editions were really read to bits. So it is hardly surprising that only six perfect copies of the first edition exist. A few months ago a copy sold at Sotheby’s in London for £6,800. The most beautiful one in existence is that famed copy I purchased eighteen months ago from Sir George Holford. I believe if one of the half-dozen perfect first editions were offered in public sale today, it would easily bring from $40,000 to $45,000.

  About five years ago the illness of an English barber’s wife brought to light a first edition of Pilgrim’s Progress which was in good condition, except that it lacked two pages. In the little town of Derby lived this barber, daily plying the trade of his ancestors. Between the lathering and the gossiping he found little time and inclination to read, but sometimes when business was not so brisk as usual he listlessly ran through a small stack of books which he inherited along with the shop. Old-fashioned in text, some with odd pictures, and leaves missing, he thought them rather funny and occasionally showed them to customers who shared his amusement. One day someone suggested the books were interesting because they were old and— following the popular fallacy of which I have spoken—must be valuable. He had heard of a man who once paid two pounds for a book!

  But the barber shrugged his shoulders and said he had plenty to do without chasing about trying to sell old, worn-out books. Then came a day when his wife took to her bed and the doctor was hurriedly sent for. While waiting for him the barber tried to think of some way he might amuse his wife. As he went into the shop his eyes fell first upon the books on a low shelf. When the doctor arrived he found his patient’s bed loaded down with books, and she was reading a copy of The Pilgrim’s Progress. The doctor was a lover of books in a small way; he felt there was something unusual about this copy. He insisted it should be sent to Sotheby’s in London for valuation. Even then the barber believed he was wasting both time and money.

  Finally Sotheby’s received a package accompanied by a letter, painstakingly written in an illiterate hand, with small i’s throughout and guiltless of punctuation. He was sending this copy, he wrote, because a friend was foolish enough to think it might be worth something. Of course it wasn’t. He had inherited it from his people, and his people were poor. They couldn’t have had anything valuable to leave him. If, as he believed, it was worthless, would they please throw it away, and not bother to return it, or waste money answering him? I don’t know what his direct emotional reaction was when they replied saying his old book was worth at least £900—more than $4,000—and that they would place it in their next sale. Perhaps he was stunned for a time. Anyway, weeks passed before they received a rather incoherent reply. I happened to be in London when it was sold, and I paid £2,500—about $12,000—for the copy. I later learned that the barber was swamped for months with letters from old friends he had never heard of before, each with a valuable book to sell him.

  As collectors grow older, they find it is better to buy occasionally and at a high price than to run about collecting tuppenny treasures. There is seldom any dispute about the worth of a rare book. Many collectors, however, feel collecting has a value other than monetary; it keeps men young, and as the years pass it proves to be a new type of life insurance.

  The late Mr. W
. A. White of New York, until his death a few months ago, was as vigorous at eighty-three as he had been thirty years before. He combined a quality of youth with his extraordinary knowledge of books and literature. His wonderful library would take away the load of years from a Methuseleh. Even to read over the partial list of his treasures, which was recently published, would have a distinctly rejuvenating effect. Mr. Henry E. Huntington was another successful man who practically gave up his business interests to devote himself to the invigorating pastime of book collecting. He collected so rapidly that no young man could follow in his steps! Even my uncle Moses grew younger and younger as he sat year after year surrounded by books.

  Rare books are a safe investment; the stock can never go down. A market exists in every city of the world. New buyers constantly crop up. The most ordinary, sane, and prosaic type of businessman will suddenly appear at your door, a searching look in his eye, a suppressed tone of excitement in his voice. Like the Ancient Mariner, he takes hold of you to tell his story—for he has suddenly discovered book collecting. And if it happens to be at the end of a very long day, you feel like the Wedding Guest, figuratively beating your breast while you listen. He returns again and again, enthralled by this new interest which takes him away from his business. If he is wealthy, he already may be surfeited with luxuries of one sort or another; but here is something akin to the friendship of a charming and secretive woman. He takes no risk of becoming satiated; there is no possibility of being bored; always some new experience or unexpected discovery may be lurking just around the corner of a bookshelf.

  Potch

  BY LEO ROSTEN

  Among the score of books Leo Rosten wrote, he is probably best known for The Joys of Yiddish and The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N. Rosten considered the story of Potch—which first appearedin Look magazine in the 1950s and later in his 1970 collection, People I Have Loved, Known or Admired—to be one of his own favoritepieces. Nearly everyone has had an experience like the one Rosten writes about, an experience that sets one on a course through the world of words, ideas, and books. One of the editors of this book, in fact, marks his own entry into that world with his first reading of this piece.

  We called him Potch, and he was as unprepossessing as his nickname: a sallow, humorless gnome of a boy who plunged me, at ten, into the greatest moral crisis of my life.

  Potch, who was given to sucking air and muttering odd maledictions, was not popular. He was never part of our “gang.” He had no athletic skills, no dreams of glory on gridiron or diamond, and seemed actually to dislike the noble, shining hours we spent on soft-ball, basketball, handball, “pinners.” No one wanted Potch when we chose up sides for Run, Sheep, Run or Prisoner’s Base or Shoosh, which was what, in Chicago, we called punchball, played right out in the streets, with a manhole cover as home plate—and without a bat: you hit the ball with your fist.

  Potch was a loner, skinny, moody, without luster. He was so non-popular that he did not even compete in our daily tournament of loyalty, each boy screaming out his own All-Time All-Star Baseball Team at the top of his lungs. Nor did Potch, upon seeing a man with a beard, spit into his left palm and jam his right fist into it, pronouncing the proper abracadabra that, we all knew, exorcised (or, at least, slowed up) the faceless demons who lurk around any familiar with a beard.

  We never invited Potch to undergo the mysterious rites, performed in a cellar, of initiation into our secret club, whose sole function was to perform mysterious rites of initiation in a cellar. And whenever our volcanoes of adoration erupted, and we extolled the relative splendors of the Rover Boys or Tom Swift, the intrepid Nick Carter or the peerless Frank Merriwell, Potch merely made muffled, gargling sounds and drifted away. He never read anything, so far as we knew; and we (well, two of us anyway) were absolutely fanatical, insatiable addicts of print.

  The only noteworthy thing about Potch was that he always seemed to have spending money, and more of it than any of the rest of us. I once saw him take a whole two-dollar bill out of his pocket. To me, whose allowance was five cents a week, this bordered on the supernatural.

  We used to talk about Potch in front of the corner delicatessen, marveling over his readiness to buy a ten-cent bologna sandwich or a root beer, a Hershey bar or piece of halvah whenever he felt like it. And we came to the only conclusion possible to explain so staggering “a stash of mazuma” (that’s the way men of the world talked on my block): Potch had not inherited a fortune, since his mother was still a laundress and his father had long since been buried by a fraternal order; clearly, Potch worked at some secret, lucrative part-time job and was well along the road to becoming a millionaire.

  But what sort of a job could a callow schoolboy hold? We swiftly deduced that a job never mentioned, never even hinted at, was probably shady, possibly unlawful, perhaps even sinful. We tried not to show our envy. We failed. Potch came to enjoy an unvoiced prestige among us.

  Once, Potch bought chocolate phosphates for five of us, and “Stomach” Ginsberg, who on a penny bet would eat matches, gravel, pencils, paper, etc., laughed, “Hey, Potch, watchado—robba bank or sumpin?”

  Potch paused, blinked, and tossed noncommittal “Khoo!s” and “Flggh!s” around his throat.

  “Well, Jesse James, didja?”

  At that moment, Potch must have realized the aura he had acquired in the minds of his peers; a glow spread beneath his pastiness, like watercolors fanning out from a blot, and he grinned and brought out, “Pfrr . . . khnug . . . woonchoo liketa know!”

  It was the first time I had seen him approximate a smile, and I saw that he was missing a tooth on each side of his mouth. He looked like a dog—not a good dog, a mutt. But there was all that money. . . .

  Once, Potch and I were alone, spinning our tops one flaming afternoon in July, moving like sleepwalkers, hearing our sweat splat on the burning sidewalk, and I said, “Hey, Potch, no fooling—where do you get all your dough?”

  He produced various facial twitches, made several rabbity squeaks, then gargled: “Hanh . . . Presents! Presents fmy birt’day!”

  “Oh,” I said. “When was your birthday?”

  “Khroo . . . Skng . . . Las’ March. . . . But you gotta remember I got fordy—fifdy uncles ’n’ aunts! An’ some of ’em live way far t’hellangone an’ back, so it takes time, you have to figure, for alla my presents t’get here.”

  I did not know what to think, so I donned the liberating wings of fantasy. I thought of my book heroes, especially the great Jimmy Dale, a socialite by day, a Robin Hood at night, who outwitted the finest police brains of the time. Jimmy Dale was a one-man Corrector of Injustice, self-appointed Punisher of Greed and Chicanery, a noble, saintly Redresser of life’s inequities, the law’s blindness, the helplessness of innocents. Jimmy Dale wore an opera cape and mask as he made his midnight rounds, concealing his ropes and “burgalizing” equipment beneath the voluminous carapace. Ah, Jimmy Dale: his wit, his agility, his intrepid courage and blazing virtue—what more could you ask in an idol?

  But Potch? Holy macaroni! Jimmy Dale was as handsome as Apollo, and Potch was a dish of oatmeal. Jimmy Dale was as courageous as Ajax, and Potch was “ascared” of mice. Jimmy Dale was as nonchalant as the Scarlet Pimpernel; Potch was only pimpled. Jimmy Dale wore tuxedos and was a paragon of sophistication; Potch, to put it in a nutshell, was a shmendrick and a klutz.

  Still, I comforted myself with the uplifting thought that Potch was just beginning his career; if Fate only gave him a fair shake of the dice, a long and glorious career of crime might stretch beyond the springtime of his delinquency. In my mind, I even converted Potch’s deficiencies into boons. Since he was so small and skinny, he could become a human fly. I could see him scaling walls, shinnying up pillars or down rainpipes, crawling across balconies, pulling himself up parapets, leaping with cat-footed sureness from rooftop to rooftop on moonless nights, forcing open skylights, windows, transoms, ventilators, jimmying open doors, prying back iron bars, outwitting locks, chains, b
olts, burglar alarms—all without leaving so much as the scratch of a fingernail to betray him—to reach at last the baronial bedroom of Throckmorton Spondulix, where Potch would glide to the safe secreted behind a Raphael Madonna, the safe in which the fabled Star of Samarkand reposed, and, with a knowing smile, breathing softly, without a vestige of his youthful Phtrr!s and Shlgg!s, would proceed to apply his genius to the tumblers, seducing them into revealing their magic numbers by the superhuman sensitivity of his fingers on the dial. . . . And then Potch—Potch?! The whole luminescent edifice collapsed. It was crazy. It was ludicrous. It was impossible. You might as well cast cross-eyed Ben Turpin in the role of Don Juan, or ZaSu Pitts as Juliet.

  One afternoon, as I was stretched out on my bed reading The Red-HeadedOutfield, I heard a soft tap-tap-tapping at my window. I rolled over. Potch was crouched on the porch like the Hunchback of Notre Dame, his face screwed up.

  “Hey, boychik,” he whispered hoarsely, be quiet no one should hear. “. . . Krrr . . . Flmm . . . I wanna ask a favor.”

  “C’min,” I said.

  “Tru da window?” he protested.

  “Sure.” I raised it.

  “Na, na!” He shot nervous glances around. “How’s about you c’mon out?” He signaled to me vigorously and snaked his way down the back stairs.

  I climbed out of the window and followed him and sat down on the bottom step. He was standing over me now, looking down, unaccustomed to being taller, sniffling, then began to dance around in crazy circles, straining his neck and jerking his arms about in a new repertoire of tics. “So I had a birt’day yestiday!” he cried. “So my uncle and aunts and, boy, maybe one hunnerd tousand other relations from all over hellangone give me presents, see? So many presents you can’t even count ’em up. So they’re piled up in boxes an’ I can’t hardly squeeze in the goddam bedroom me and my brother use, it’s so crowded. Yeh. Phrr. Nyaa . . . So I remember you got a bedroom. Alone. Right?” He kicked imaginary time bombs off the sidewalk. “So I figure—how about me bringin’ over some boxes, and leave ’em in your closet, for maybe one, two weeks? Whaddaya say you hold somma dem boxes, huh?”