Booked to die

apartment, I read the paper, had my coffee, and was on the streets by nine. I left the opening of the store to Miss Pride. She had her own apartment now, still within walking distance; she was there faithfully by nine-thirty, leaving me free for, as Ruby put it, the hunt. From the beginning I was amazed by the stuff I found. In the old days I had gone into thrift stores and junk shops occasionally and never found anything. From the moment I became a book dealer, good things began to happen. Suddenly there were real books on the shelves of those dust palaces where there’d been only dogs before. I know two things now that I didn’t know then. Then I had been looking with a much narrower eye, seeking out titles in my area of interest only. Now I bought a medical book on eye surgery, a fat doorstop with color plates, circa 1903, that I never would’ve touched in olden times. It cost me $1: I lowballed it to an out-of-town medical specialist for $100. I bought a two-volume set on farming from the early 1800s, very technical, for $10; I think $125 would be very reasonable for it in a store. The second thing I learned is that books are seldom found on a hit-or-miss basis. The hunt is not a random process. I had to be where the books were, and I had to be there all the time. A good book placed in the open for a small price could be expected to last only hours, maybe minutes—then a bookscout would come along and pick it off. I tried to be there first, and I was, a fair number of times. I drifted across town and sucked them up like a vacuum.

I bought extensively and well in my chosen field, first edition lit and detective fiction. I read the trades and saw trends coming. I got on the Sue Grafton bandwagon, though I don’t care much for her stuff, at just the right time. Her first book, A Is for Alibi, has been going crazy in the used book world, appreciating at around a hundred percent a year until now people are asking $300 to $400 for a fine first. Grafton is breezy and readable, entertaining but never challenging. Her father, C. W. Grafton, once wrote one of the cleverest, most gripping novels in the literature. His book, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, is by most accounts a cornerstone, but if I want to sell it I have to do it on her popularity. I put one away for a more enlightened time. I discovered Thomas Harris when people were still selling Black Sunday for $6.50. His Red Dragon put me on the floor, even if he did make a sophomoric break-and-enter mistake with a glass cutter in the early going. You can’t break into a house that way, you might as well use a hammer and knock the glass out, but writers and the movies keep the myth going anyway. Gimme my glass cutter, doc. I’ll just cut a little hole in this here glass case and pluck the Hope diamond out. Uh-huh. Try it sometime. Somehow it didn’t matter. Red Dragon was such a good book that Harris could’ve fed me the untreated discharge from the Metro Denver Sewer Plant and I’d‘ve been standing there like little Ollie Twist with my gruel-bucket in my hand, begging for more. More? You want MORE! Even then he was putting the polish on that big riveting pisser of a book, Silence of the Lambs, simply the best thriller I’ve read in five years. I thought of old Mr. Greenwald all the time I was reading it and I wondered if he’d like it. It proves, I think, the point I was trying to make that day, that wonderful things can come from anywhere, even the best-seller list. Thomas Harris. All he is is a talent of the first rank. I hope the bastard lives forever, but in case he doesn’t, I’ve been squirreling him away. Collectors are starting to find him now: in recent catalogs I see that Black Sunday is inching toward the $100 mark, and I’ve got six perfect copies hidden in a safe place.

Janeway’s Rule of the Discriminating Bookscout was born. Buy what you like, what you read. Trust your judgment. Have faith. The good guys, like Melville, might die and be forgotten with the rest, but they always come back.

I was practicing what Maugham has called the contemplative life. At night I read some of the books I’d found. I read things I had never imagined or heard of, and I listened to good music, mostly jazz, and studied incessantly the catalogs of other dealers. I learned quickly and never forgot a book I had handled. This is how the game is played: you’ve got to be part businessman, part lucky, part clairvoyant. The guy with the best crystal ball makes the most money. The guy in the right place at the right time. The guy with the most energy, the best moves, the right karma.

I had been here before: I knew things that hadn’t yet happened. I was home at last, in the work I’d been born for.

I had been in business three months when I was pulled back suddenly into that old world. It started a few days before Halloween. 1 had two visitors in the store: Jackie Newton and Rita McKinley.

23

I had come to the store late that day after a tough round of fruitless bookscouting. The days were getting shorter: we were off daylight saving time and darkness had fallen by five o’clock, the time we normally close for the night. Usually I tried to get in by four—Colfax is a rough street and I didn’t like leaving Miss Pride to close up alone —but that day I had scouted Boulder and had run later than expected. It was almost five when I pulled up in front of the place and parked. I saw Miss Pride, alone in the front room, adding up the day’s receipts. When I came in she rolled her eyes toward the back rooms, and when I came closer she held up the calculator to show me what she’d done that day. The total was $1,425, my best day ever. I gave a little whistle. “Couple of high rollers,” she said. “They’re still here, in back.”

She showed me the receipts. They had bought John Stephens’ Incidents of Travel in the Yucatan, a very nice 1843 first edition in the original boards, and the expensive Louise Saun-ders- Maxfield Parrish Knave of Hearts, which I had bought from a catalog only last month. The tariff for the two items came to almost $1,200.

“Just an average day if it wasn’t for them,” I said.

“They are definitely strange ducks, Mr. Janeway,” she said, keeping her voice down. “But when they spend this kind of money, who’s going to quarrel?”

“Strange how?” I asked.

“Well, they came in here about three-thirty. The one did all the talking. He asked for you right off. When I told him you weren’t in, he asked when you’d be back. I said probably before five. He asked to see the best books in the house. I showed him the Stephens and the Parrish. He said, I’ll take these, just like that. Paid with hundred-dollar bills.” She cocked the cash drawer open slightly, so I could see the wad of money. “Then he wouldn’t take any change. He gave me twelve hundred-dollar bills and said keep the change. I told him it was against policy, we didn’t accept tips, but he went on as if he hadn’t heard me. I thought he was going to leave but he didn’t. He walked all around the store. Like I said, he’s in the back room now.”

I shrugged. “No accounting for people, Miss Pride. I’ll take his money.”

“I thought you would.”

I sat where she had been sitting and started looking through the other sales. “You can take off now if you want.”