Bookman's wake

A long moment passed. “So go get Rigby,” he said at the end of it. “Pick her up and cash your chips. At least we know that’s real.”

“Jesus. I can’t believe I’m about to do this.”

“Easiest money you ever made.”

“You better understand one thing, Slater, and I’m tempted to put it in writing so there won’t be any pissing and moaning later on. I’m gonna take your money and run. You remember I said that. I’m happier than I’ve been in years. I wouldn’t go back to DPD for the chiefs job and ten times the dough, and listen, don’t take this personally, but I’d rather be a sex slave for Saddam Hussein than come to work for you. Can I make it any clearer than that?”

“Janeway, we’re gonna love each other. This could be the start of something great.”

3

For an hour after Slater left I browsed through the Grayson bibliography, trying to get the lay of the land. I had owned the book for about a year and had never had a reason to look at it. This is not unusual in the book business—probably 90 percent of the books you buy for your reference section are like that. Years pass and you never need it: then one day a big-money book comes your way and you really need it. There’s a point involved and you can’t guess, you’ve got to be sure, and the only way to be really sure is to have a bibliography on the book in question. In that shining moment the bibliography pays for itself five times over. Bibliographies are not for casual browsing or for bathroom reading. They are filled with all the technical jargon, symbols, and shorthand of the trade. The good ones are written by people with demons on their backs. Accuracy and detail are the twin gods, and the bibliographer is the slave. A bibliography will tell you if a book is supposed to contain maps or illustrations, and on what pages these may be found. It will describe the binding, will often contain photographs of the book and its title page, will even on occasion— when this is a telling point—give a page count in each gathering as the book was sewn together. If a printer makes an infinitesimal mistake—say the type is battered on a d on page 212, say the stem is fractured ever so slightly, like a hairline crack in a skier’s fibula—it becomes the bibliographer’s duty to point this out. It matters little unless the printer stopped the run and fixed it: then you have what is called in the trade a point. The bibliographer researches relentlessly: he gets into the printer’s records if possible, trying to determine how many of these flawed copies were published and shipped before the flaw was discovered. Those copies then become true firsts, hotly sought (in the case of hot books) by collectors everywhere.

Bibliographies are among the most expensive books in the business. A struggling book dealer on East Colfax Avenue in Denver, Colorado, can’t possibly buy them all when the asking price is often in three figures, so you pick and choose. I remembered when the Grayson book was published: it was announced with a half-page spread in the AB , an ad that promised everything you ever wanted to know about the Grayson Press. I had torn out the ad and stuck it in the book when it arrived. The title was The Grayson Press, 1947- 1969: A Comprehensive Bibliography , by Allan Huggins. The blurb on Huggins identified him as the world’s top Grayson scholar and a collector of Grayson material for more than twenty years. The book looked substantial, one for the ages. It was thick, almost eight hundred pages, and it contained descriptions of every known book, paper, pamphlet, or poem ever issued by the Graysons. It had come in a signed limited edition at $195 and a trade edition at $85. To me it was a working book. I took the trade edition, and now, as was so often the case, I was damn glad I had it.

It was divided into four main sections. First there was a narrative biography of Darryl and Richard Grayson. This, combined with a history of their Grayson Press, took sixty pages. The second section was by far the biggest. It attempted the impossible, the author conceded, to catalog and annotate every scrap of Grayson ephemera, all the broadsides that the brothers had printed over a twenty-two-year career. This consumed more than four hundred pages of incredibly dense copy. The third section was called “Grayson Miscellany”: this contained the oddball stuff —personal scraps, Christmas cards (the Gray-sons had for years printed their own cards, charming pieces that, today, are eagerly sought), special announcements, trivia. Even the commercial jobs they had taken on—posters, menus for restaurants, brochures for the Oregon Fish and Wildlife Department —all the unexciting ventures done purely for cash flow, are now avidly collected by Grayson people. There would never be a complete accounting: a fire had destroyed the printshop and all its records in 1969, and it’s probably safe to say that previously unknown Grayson fragments will be turning up for a hundred years.

It was the final section, “Grayson Press Books.” that was the highlight of the bibliography. Grayson had made his reputation as a publisher of fine books, producing twenty-three titles in his twenty-two years. The books were what made collecting the scraps worthwhile and fun: without the books, the Grayson Press might have been just another obscure printshop. But Darryl Grayson was a genius, early in life choosing the limited edition as his most effective means of self-expression. When Grayson began, a limited edition usually meant something. It meant that the writer had done a work to be proud of, or that a printing wizard like Darryl Grayson had produced something aesthetically exquisite. Scribners gave Ernest Hemingway a limited of A Farewell to Arms , 510 copies, signed by Hemingway in 1929 and issued in a slipcase. But in those days publishers were prudent, and it was Hemingway’s only limited. Covici-Friede published The Red Pony in a small, signed edition in 1937, with the tiny Steinbeck signature on the back page. Perhaps the nearest thing to what Grayson would be doing two decades later was published by a noted printer and book designer, Bruce Rogers, in 1932: a limited edition of Homer’s Odyssey , the translation by T. E. Lawrence. People can never get enough of a good thing, and around that time the Limited Editions Club was getting into high gear, producing some classy books and a few that would become masterpieces. The Henri Matisse Ulysses , published in the midthirties, would sell for eight or ten grand today, signed by Matisse and Joyce. Slater would find that interesting, but I didn’t tell him. It would be too painful to watch him scratch his head and say, Joyce who?…What did she do ?

Like almost everything else that was once fine and elegant, the limited edition has fallen on hard times. Too often now it’s a tool, like a burglar’s jimmy, used by commercial writers who are already zillionaires to pry another $200 out of the wallets of their faithful. There are usually five hundred or so numbered copies and a tiny lettered series that costs half again to twice as much. The books are slapped together as if on an assembly line, with synthetic leather the key ingredient. As often as not, the author signs loose sheets, which are later bound into the book: you can sometimes catch these literary icons sitting in airports between flights, filling the dead time signing their sheets. Two hundred, four hundred, six hundred…the rich get richer and God knows what the poor get. The whole process has a dank and ugly smell that would’ve horrified the likes of Bruce Rogers, Frederic Goudy, and Darryl Grayson. According to Huggins, Grayson was the last of the old-time print men, the printer who was also an artist, designer, and personal baby-sitter for everything that came off his press. Look for him no more, for his art has finally been snuffed by the goddamned computer. Grayson was the last giant: each of his books was a unique effort, a burst of creativity and tender loving care that real book people have always found so precious. The Thomas Hart Benton Christmas Carol had been Grayson’s turning point: he had worked for a year on a new typeface that combined the most intriguing Gothic and modern touches and had engaged Benton to illustrate it. The book was sensational: old Charles Dickens was covered with new glory, said a New York Times critic (quoted in Huggins), the day the first copy was inspected by the master and found fit to ship. The Times piece was a moot point: the book was sold-out, even at $700, before the article appeared, and it mainly served to make the growing Grayson mystique known to a wider audience. People