17
Under the Hammer
Back in 1953 the town of Sarezzano, in the Piedmont, agreed to sell its famous Purple Bible to an American book dealer. The sum agreed upon was not disclosed, but it would have been enough to build a new church, which is what the good people of Sarezzano wanted. They also wanted cash, but by the time the dealer had accumulated the banknotes, which filled several suitcases, the press had gotten wind of the deal. Corriere della Sera headlined a piece objecting to the sale: american buys national treasure for fabulous sum.
A papal courier arrived in Sarezzano the next day and confiscated the Bible.
“What was so special about the Bible?” I asked the abbot, who had told me the story during one of our evening chats.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I guess the fact that it was purple.”
I’d been suggesting gently that he might want to sell off some of the duplicates in the monastery’s own library, which, as far as I could tell, nobody ever used.
“I’d sell them all,’’ he said. “I’d sell the whole library if I thought I could get away with it. I used to be a Gutenberg man, homo Gutenbergensis. Books were my life. But what did I ever learn that I didn’t already know in my heart? Niente, Signorina, niente.”
“What would you do with the money if you could sell the duplicates?”
“I’d buy a new stove,” he said, “for the kitchen. I’d hire a good cook. Those nuns from Galuzzo don’t know enough to put salt in the pasta water. I would like to eat a dish of tripe the way my mother used to make it, with homemade brodo and plenty of Parmesan cheese.”
“You could fix it yourself,” I suggested as we walked across the courtyard, but the possibility was so remote from his experience that it didn’t register. I was glad to see, nonetheless, that the old man was still attached to this world by however slender a thread. I was fond of tripe myself.
That night I dreamed of purple Bibles and papal couriers, and on my way home one evening a week later, when I saw a black-suited figure in a clerical collar ringing the bell outside my door, I thought to myself, “This is it,” and almost walked away. But it wasn’t a papal courier; it was Father Ingram, the rector of the American Church. He’d received a letter from my father, who wasn’t sure I was still at this address since he hadn’t heard from me after he’d moved to Texas and he wanted to make sure I’d gotten my sister Molly’s wedding announcement—and would I please call or write. Molly wanted me to be in the wedding; everyone was starting to worry.
I thanked Father Ingram and sent him on his way, but not before agreeing to give a talk at the church on the restoration work at the Certosa.
I knew about the wedding, of course. The announcement was on my worktable, along with a dozen letters from Meg and Molly and Papa. I told myself I’d been too busy to answer them, and I had been. In addition to supervising the work at the Certosa, I’d been asked by Signor Giorgio—since I knew both English and Italian and something about paper chemistry—to help with the arrangements for a meeting on paper sizings. I told myself that I’d write as soon as things were settled—as soon as I’d disposed of the Aretino, that is. Before a papal courier showed up at my door!
In the meantime . . . I was looking through a one-way mirror. I could see all the people I loved, I could watch their lives unfolding: Papa looking down at the Rio Grande from a hill on his new avocado orchard in Mission, Texas; Meg and Dan, who were expecting their third child, remodeling an old Victorian house on the lake, just north of Milwaukee; Molly selling real estate and eating in German restaurants in Ann Arbor with her Indian fiancé. I could see them, but they couldn’t see me.
I put the letters in three piles at the end of the table, which I’d moved to the front of the apartment so that I could look out at the piazza. My own life was unfolding, too. There was business to be taken care of: a businesslike inquiry from Sandro’s wife, asking when I intended to vacate the apartment, which she wanted to sell, and letters from Christie’s in Rome and Sotheby’s new Florence office. My adventure was coming to an end, and I was as anxious as the rest of my family to see how it would turn out.
“I spent the night in Basel,” I explained to Mr. Reynolds, the head of Sotheby’s office on the second floor of the Palazzo Capponi. He was an Englishman, about my age, with stiff curly hair, brushed back from his face like the picture of Keats that Mama used to keep on her desk. “I was poking around in an old bookstore not too far from the station, looking for something I could afford. It’s my field, you know, seventeenth-century prayer books. I didn’t even realize that there were two books bound together till I got back to Florence. Do you think it might be valuable?” (I wanted an unprejudiced opinion.)
“You never know,” he said. “You didn’t make yourself very clear in your letter. Actually you sounded very mysterious.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, “I didn’t want to give too much away. Look, you see, this book of engravings, with the poems, was bound in with the prayerbook. I’ve rebound it myself.”
When he opened to the marker I’d placed at the title page of the Sonetti lussuriosi, he knew at once what it was.
“The divine Aretino,” he said, turning to the first of the engravings and then to the second. “I’ll be damned.”
I could see his face coloring as he glanced back and forth from engraving to text.
Stick your finger up my ass, old man,
Thrust cazzo in a little at a time,
Lift up my leg, maneuver well,
Now pound with all inhibitions gone.
I believe this is a tastier feast
Than eating garlic bread before a fire.
If you don’t like the potta, try the back way:
A real man has to be a buggerer.
“It’s very well drawn, don’t you think?” I said. “The look on the woman’s face . . . Her eyes are wide open as if she’s seeing something for the first time.” (I was speaking aloud words that I’d said only to myself before.) “But she’s not idealized. It’s a woman, not an angel.”
He pursed his lips as if he were going to whistle a tune but couldn’t quite remember how it started. “Oh my Lord,” he said, giving each word equal emphasis. “This is pretty astonishing. You say you found this in Basel?”
“Yes. I went to renew my permesso di soggiorno.”
“You’ve been living in Italy, then?”
“Yes. I’ve been working at the Certosa.”
“One of the volunteers?”
“Not exactly. I’ve been filling in for Professor Panuccio, who’s gone back to Rome.”
“Oh really? Then you must be the American who was . . . who had a liaison with the art restorer—Postiglione—before he left town.”
“A ‘liaison.’” I liked the word. “I never thought of it that way,” I said. “But how on earth did you know about that?”
“Florence is a small town. Everyone knows who you are.”
“You’re joking.”
“Not a bit of it. You’re giving a talk at the American Church—‘Triage’—something like that. ‘A Book Conservator’s Point of View.’ There are signs all over town. At all the English-language places. There’s one in the window. Don’t tell me you didn’t see it. They should have put your picture on it so people could recognize you.” He nodded toward the window. “Plus you’ve brought in this marvelous book. Do you have any idea what you’ve got here?”
“It looks like a book of dirty pictures to me.”
“I meant do you know who Aretino is? The ‘divine Aretino,’ ‘scourge of princes’ and all that?”
“I have some idea,” I said. “Giulio Romano did the drawings, Marcantonio Raimondi did the engravings, Aretino wrote the poems, Clement VII had a fit. But I’m not sure why he was called divine.” (I kept my own guess to myself.)
“You know all about it, don’t you? And you’v
e had it all apart then. That was very naughty, you know. Might knock a thousand pounds off the price.”
“Don’t say that, Mr. Reynolds. Don’t tell me what I should or shouldn’t have done.” If I was annoyed, as I’d been annoyed with Martelli, it was because I was afraid he was right. “I used my best judgment as a conservator. I intervened to preserve the integrity of the book. The embroidered binding was completely ruined. The text block was starting to mold. The tapes were rotten. I used the old boards, that’s all I could do. These are the original boards; the seventeenth-century boards. But if you don’t like the binding I’ll take it to Christie’s in Rome.”
“You might as well shoot me now,” he said, placing his hand over his heart, as if he were about to say the pledge of allegiance. “Those chaps at Christie’s are villains and sons of darkness. I didn’t mean to question your expertise.”
“But you did question it.”
“Is it enough that I’m sorry?”
“I suppose I overreacted,” I said. “It’s a sensitive issue with me. I’m always going to wonder if I did the right thing.”
“You did the right thing—it’s beautiful—but I’m going to have to ask you a couple of questions. Will you promise not to overreact, like an Italian?”
“You’re the one who’s overreacting,” I said.
“Don’t be offended.”
“Do you plan to offend me?”
“Not if I can help it,” he said, “but you never know. Let’s begin with the provenance. Do you have a receipt?”
“Yes, in fact. Yes, I have it right here.” I produced the receipt from Buchhandlung Karl Schulze, Basel.
“That’s good,” he said. “A lot of people don’t bother with receipts.”
“There won’t be any problem, will there? I mean about taking it out of the country?”
“Should there be?”
“Oh, you know. A national treasure, the Purple Bible of Sarezzano, that sort of thing.”
“Quite. Now if it were a painting . . . that’s more complicated. That’s my raison d’être, my bread and butter. But a book . . . that you bought in Switzerland . . . No trouble at all. We won’t even apply for an export license. We won’t say anything. The only question would be—may I speak frankly?”
“Of course.”
“You won’t go to Christie’s?”
“I won’t go to Christie’s.”
“Swear.”
“I swear.”
“The only question is . . . Tell me something about this bookstore in Basel, Buchhandlung Karl Schulze. The book you describe suffered water damage. The binding was disintegrating, the text block starting to mold . . .” His shoulders went up, palms turned out—an Italian question mark. “There was a leak in the roof? A broken pipe? The Rhine overflowed its banks? The book was in such bad shape that immediate intervention was necessary, but Herr Schulze kept it on the shelf?”
“Who’s going to ask these questions?”
“The real question is, Who’s going to answer them?”
“Will I have to?”
He tapped his pencil on the desk.
“Probably not. Not unless someone else tries to establish legal title to the book.”
I thought of the bishop. And Volmaro Martelli. Powerful enemies or impotent old men? Individually, I thought, they could do nothing. Martelli had no claim, and the bishop had been fobbed off with a copy of some nineteenth-century pornography.
“Of course not,” I said.
On my way out of the office I looked at the poster in the window. It was on cheap paper, but nicely printed.
triage:
a book conservator’s perspective
A lecture by Margot Harrington,
director of the restoration work
at the Monastery of the Certosa.
20 April 1967
8:00 p.m.
All-Purpose Room
St. James Church
13 Via B. Rucellai 9
“It’s funny,” I said to Mr. Reynolds, “I’ve never been anybody before.”
“Well,” he said, “you’re somebody now.”
His name was Tony, though he wasn’t Italian, and we soon became good friends despite some initial difficulties. There were several reasons, for example, why the Aretino could not be included in Sotheby’s spring sale of early printed books: the catalog deadline had passed; Mr. Harmondsworth, the head of the book department, was unwilling to give an estimate without seeing the book; it was not part of an important collection; and finally, the date—1525—was not quite early enough to be “early.” But I’d been doing my homework in Sotheby’s reference library, and I wanted the book in this sale for the same reason that a trainer would rather run a horse in the Kentucky Derby than in the county sweeps. This was where the money was. And I’d discovered early on that there was a magic word at Sotheby’s. That word was Christie’s. Like Ali Baba’s “open sesame,” it never failed to open a crack in the solid rock face of an apparently impassable mountain. Tony cabled London, London cabled back, and so on.
“Why don’t you just call them?” I asked.
“We do it this way,” he said, “because this is the way it’s done.”
Tony helped me with the catalog description, photographed the book himself—he didn’t want anyone on the staff to get wind of it—with a banged-up Hasselblad he sometimes used to photograph jewelry, and—most importantly—he took my part in the difference of opinion over the estimate, even though he thought I was wrong. Mr. Harmondsworth suggested an estimate of eight thousand pounds, a little over twenty-two thousand dollars. It was the first time I’d been able to put a price on the book since Martelli’s offer of five thousand dollars.
Tony was exuberant, but I was disappointed. I’d been skimming through old copies of the Book Collector in Sotheby’s reference library and looking at auction catalogs, comparing catalog estimates and prices paid. The Houghton Library at Harvard had recently acquired an editio princeps of Saint Augustine’s De Civitate Dei for about that amount; Hans Kraus—the man who’d tried to buy the Purple Bible of Sarezzano—paid eight thousand pounds for a long poem on the Christian year by someone called Ludovico Lazzarelli, and ten thousand for an imperfect copy of something called the Grete Herbal, printed in 1526, only a year after the Aretino. These were big-ticket items, but there was another class of books—a different class entirely—and it was this class that excited my imagination. Kraus, for example, had paid sixty-five thousand pounds at last year’s sale for the Saint Alban’s Apocalypse, and Doctor Rosenbach had paid almost as much for the Bay Psalm Book back in 1947. This was the story that nourished my fantasies and convinced me to hold out for an estimate of twenty thousand pounds, a little under sixty thousand dollars.
Doctor Rosenbach had assembled a group of wealthy backers who wanted to present the book to the Beinecke Library at Yale. He was authorized to bid up to ninety thousand dollars. But so was another dealer, Mr. Randall, representing J. K. Lilly, whose collection eventually went to the University of Indiana. Randall dropped out at ninety-one thousand. Rosenbach thought he had the book for ninety-two thousand; but on the spur of the moment Sonny Whitney of the Vanderbilt Whitneys, a Yale man himself, jumped in and took the bidding up to a hundred fifty thousand before letting Rosenbach have it for a hundred fifty-one thousand. Rosenbach presented the book to Yale, calling it “the greatest, goddamndest, most important book in the world,” but Yale refused to make up the sixty-one-thousand-dollar difference and then the original consortium fell apart. Rosenbach’s brother threatened to sue Yale . . .
“Now tell me the truth, Tony,” I said. “Wouldn’t you pay more for a copy of the Sonetti lussuriosi than for the Bay Psalm Book?”
“The Bay Psalm Book was the first book printed in America.”
“Right, but which would you rather look a
t? Besides, there are eleven Bay Psalm Books floating around. There’s only one Aretino. I want an estimate of twenty thousand pounds and a reserve of fifteen thousand.”
“You can’t do that, Margot. They’re not going to put the catalog estimate at twenty thousand pounds.”
“Look, if people see the estimate at eight thousand, that tells them what to expect. If you put it at twenty thousand, they’ll expect something different. You told me that yourself: ‘You can’t price things too high for the American market.’ Right?”
“Yes, but I was talking about paintings. They’ll never agree to that estimate.”
“Paintings shmaintings. Who won’t agree?”
“Mr. Harmondsworth.”
“Tony, you’ve seen the book. You know how powerful it is. It reaches right down inside you. Somebody’s going to want this book. A lot of people are going to want it. Christie’s will. Believe me.”
I think that was the last time I had to use my magic word—Christie’s—but it worked as well as it had the first time.
“Call them up,” I said. “I’ll pay for the call.”
He picked up the phone and spoke to the operator and then, while she was placing the call, to me: “You’ve got to remember that if the bidding doesn’t reach the reserve, you have to pay a five percent penalty. Are you prepared to pay five percent of fifteen thousand?” He worked out the figure in his head: “Seven hundred fifty pounds.”
“How much is that in dollars?”
“Just over two thousand dollars.”
“And in lire?”
The Sixteen Pleasures Page 27