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Literary Review
Books about books
PRADEEP SEBASTIAN
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Books have stories associated with them that have nothing to do with the stories inside them. Following their trail, Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone have written lively, stylish narratives.
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THE lure of a First Edition is perhaps best known not even to a book lover or even a book collector but to someone who loves a particular book so passionately that she has to have the book when it was born, so to speak. Later editions are just copies. "First Edition Fever" is what Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone call it and they should know: the Goldstones went from first balking at paying $60 for a First Edition of Goodbye Mr.Chips to wantonly paying $700 for a First Ed of Bleak House. Used and Rare: Travels in the Book World was Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone's first book about book hunting in second-hand bookshops. Slightly Chipped: Footnotes in Booklore was the sequel. Their latest, Warmly Inscribed: The New England Forger and Other Book Tales is perhaps the weakest in the trilogy but none the less indispensable to the book lover. Together, they make a charming, delightful, and welcome addition to the brand new and quickly growing genre of "Books About Books". A marvellous genre devoted to booklore.
"The idea that books had stories associated with them that had nothing to do with the stories inside them was new to us," note the Goldstones in Used and Rare. "Now for the first time we began to appreciate that there was a history and a world of ideas embodied by the books themselves." What is fascinating about their books, what sets them apart from other books about books is that they are not academic essays but a lively, enchanting, knowledgeable and stylish narrative of their visits to several lovely used, rare and antiquarian bookstores across America. The Goldstones discovered that they were primarily interested in — what in the book trade is called — Modern Firsts. Modern Firsts fall between rare and antiquarian books — such as a First Ed of Gulliver's Travels — and Hyper moderns, which would be a Sue Grafton or P.D. James First Ed. (While they would go happily without Hyper moderns, the couple would have dearly loved to possess rare editions if only they could afford it: a First Ed of Gulliver's Travels is $40, 000). A Modern First would be a modern classic — something by Kafka, Joyce, Hemingway, Faulkner, Greene, Chandler, Fitzgerald, Marquez and so on.
In the their first ever visit to a used bookstore they discover that the more beautiful the edition, the more suspect it is. They stare longingly at a row of classics bound in leather. The owner of the shop comes over to them and says: "Oh, the leather bounds". And the Goldstones wince, because "he said `leather bounds' the way Harold Bloom might say Judith Krantz." But what was wrong with them? — they were finely bound, had gilt edging and there were even ribbons to keep your place with. "They are worthless," insists the bookseller. The only edition that really matters, they learn, is the First Edition. And it is not long before the First Edition fever grips them. "We didn't want condition," they write, "we wanted character. Thus began a period of profligate acquisition. We literally hunted every used book store and had purchased enough books to fill three new floor-to-ceiling bookcases. There wasn't a weekend that went by that we weren't re-arranging our bookcases to accommodate new purchases. But for all the enjoyment of acquiring the works of writers we wanted, it was the books by writers that we didn't know we wanted that was the most fun."
My favourite part in their books is the lore on rare books, how to identify a First Ed and what classic Modern Firsts are priced at. To identify a true First Ed, for example, you'll have to know what a rare book catalogue means when it says a book is "rubbed", "foxed" and "chaffed". Then you need to know how to differentiate between a "first state" and a "second state". And you can do that only when you've become familiar with the various "Points of Issue" in a book. The most legendary bit of lore on rare books concerns the discovery of a book called Tamerlane by a Bostonian that was found in the dustbin of a Used bookstore for $15. When it turned out to be actually Edgar Allan Poe's first book, it was auctioned at Sotheby's for a quarter of a million dollars.
To their utter astonishment, the Goldstones discover that the most expensive First Ed is not something by Shakespeare or Dickens or Austen but Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs, priced at $50,000. Ayn Rand's own copy of The Fountainhead is $15,000. Catch 22 is $500. Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep is $8,500. The very rare Call for the Dead, John Le Carre's very first novel is $20,000. A Wodehouse ranges from $150 to 250. Dracula is $ 9,500. H.P. Lovecraft First Eds are so rare that even a reprint will go for as much as $10,000. The Prime of Jean Brodie is $50. Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff and Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night for as little as $15. Psycho is $2,600 and is collected more for its vintage cover art. And Michael Ondaatje's 1974 Wall Calendar which is "extensively annotated by him in his hand as to his family activities on an often daily basis" is also for sale at $ 250! The Goldstones never find out the price of The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird and The Catcher in the Rye because they never even sight a good edition of these books, let alone a First Ed. By a delicious coincidence, my own copy of Warmly Inscribed turns out to be a Firs Ed. A First Edition about First Editions!
Unlike Used and Rare and Slightly Chipped, Warmly Inscribed moves away from bookshops to the history behind certain books, writers and libraries. It's a bit disappointing not to have the Goldstones foraging in bookshops in their new book. I dearly wish they would get back to it in their next. The most interesting chapter from Warmly Inscribed is on rare book selling on the Internet: how even the best independent antiquarian sites like Bibliocity.com and Bibliofind.com are being taken over by Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble. While the Goldstones are only too aware of the benefits of buying and selling on the Net, they lament it. What, after all, can take the place of browsing in a bookshop, meeting knowledgeable booksellers and actually seeing and holding a book?
The writer, a Bangalore-based freelance writer, is a bibliomaniac and a bibliomane.
E-mail: pradeepsebastian@hotmail.com
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