Bookman's wake

anything if it’s fine enough . Gregor had the finest copy of Smoky I had ever seen. Signed Will James material is becoming scarce, and James had not only signed it but had drawn an original sketch on the half title. Gregor was asking $600, $480 after my dealer’s discount. I took it, figuring I could push it to $800 or more on the sketch and the world’s-best-copy assertion. I figured James was a hotter property in the real West, Colorado, than here in Seattle, and when the day came for me to go in the ground, I could rest just fine if they threw this book in the hole with me. Speaking of dying, Gregor had a dandy copy of If I Die in a Combat Zone , Tim O’Brien’s 1973 novel of the Vietnam War. He had marked it $450, but I was making his day and he bumped my discount to 25 percent for both items. I took it: the O’Brien is so damn scarce that I thought it was overdue for another price jump, and I left the store poorer but happier. Eleanor directed me downtown. We stopped at the Seattle Book Center, a lovely store on Second Avenue with half a dozen rooms on two floors. I bought a Zane Grey Thundering Herd in an immaculate 1919 dust jacket for $160.1 was flying high now. There were books everywhere we looked, and even if the Seattle boys weren’t giving them away, I saw decent margin in almost everything I touched. “This is one of those days, isn’t it?” Eleanor said. “I’ll bet if you went back there and flushed the toilet, books would come pouring out.” We went to a mystery specialist called Spade and Archer. It was in a bank building downtown, in a fifth-floor office that old Sam Spade himself might have occupied in the thirties. The owner was a young blond woman whose credo seemed to be “keep ‘em moving.” She had two of the three Edgar Box mysteries at a hundred apiece, cost to me, and I took them, figuring they’d be good $200 items in the catalog I was planning. As mysteries they’re just fair. But Gore Vidal had written them, hiding behind the Edgar Box moniker when he was starting out in the early fifties, and there’s always somebody for a curiosity like that.

In another store I fingered a sharp copy of White Fang , amazed that the asking price was just $75. Eleanor warned me off with a look. In the car she said, “It was a second state, that’s why it was so cheap.” I felt like amateur night in Harlem, but I asked her anyway, what was the point of it, and this kid, this child, gave me another lesson in fly-by-your pants bookscouting.

“There was a mistake on the title page. Macmillan just sliced it out and glued a new one on the cancel stub… You look perplexed, Mr. Jane way, like a man who’s never heard the terminology. You don’t know what a cancel stub is?…How long have you been in the business?”

“Long enough to know a lot about a few things and damn little about most of it.”

“Well, this kind of thing happened a lot in the old days. The publisher would make a mistake in a line or word, but by the time they noticed it, ten thousand copies had been printed and maybe five thousand had been distributed. If it was an important author, like Jack London, they didn’t want to release any more with the mistake, but they didn’t want to redo all those books either. So Macmillan printed a new title page, in the case of White Fang , then they sliced out the old ones on all those flawed copies and just glued the new one right onto the stub.”

“They just tipped it in.”

“Sure. Labor was cheap then, and even those factory grunts could do a decent job of it. The average book collector won’t even see it, but a bookman can’t miss it unless it’s done with real finesse. Just look down in the gutter and there it is, like a man who had an arm cut off and sewn back on again. Doran did the same thing with one of Winston Churchill’s early books, My African Journey . They bought the remainder from the British publisher and just slashed out the title page and put in their own on the cancel stub. That’s why the first American edition comes in a British casing, with Hodder and Stoughton on the spine and a tipped-in Doran title page. It was one of Doran’s first books, and he was lowballing to save money.”

“Oh,” I said lamely.

We stopped for lunch. I wanted to talk about her case but she wouldn’t get into it: it would only screw up an otherwise pleasant day, she said. We drifted back toward the Kingdome. Her car was gone: her father had picked it up for her and had it towed to a gas station a few blocks away. We drove past and saw it there in the lot. We were in the neighborhood anyway, so we stopped in the big Goodwill store on Dearborn. I don’t do thrift stores much anymore— usually they are run by idiots who think they are book dealers, without a lick of experience or a grain of knowledge to back them up. In Denver the Goodwills have become laughingstocks among dealers and scouts. They have their silly little antique rooms where they put everything that looks old—every ratty, worn-out never-was that ever came out of the publishing industry. They mark their prices in ink, destroying any value the thing might have, and when you try to tell them that, they stare at you with dull eyes and say they’ve got to do it that way. The store in Seattle didn’t ink its books to death, but it didn’t matter—they had the same mentality when it came to pricing. The shelves were clogged with common, crummy books, some still available on Walden remainder tables for two dollars, marked six and seven in this so-called thrift store. Naturally, they missed the one good book. Eleanor found it as she browsed one side while I worked the other. She peeked around the corner with that sad-little-girl-oh-so- lost look on her face. “Scuse me, sir, could you loan me a dollar?…My family’s destitute, my daddy broke his leg, my little brother’s got muscular dystrophy, and my mamma’s about to sell her virtue on First Avenue.” I made a convulsive grab at my wallet. “Damn, you are good!” I said with forced admiration. “You’re breaking my damn heart.” She grinned with all her teeth and held up a fine first of Robert Traver’s wonderful Anatomy of a Murder . It was a nice scarce little piece, worth at least $100 I guessed: a good sleeper because the Book of the Month edition is exactly the same size and shape and so prolific that even real bookpeople won’t bother to pick it up and look. Goodwill wanted $4 for it. She paid with my dollar and her nickels and dimes, then haggled with me in the parking lot: “Gregor would give me at least forty for this, and I’m waiting breathlessly to see if you’re inclined to do the honorable thing.” I gave her forty-five, but made a point of getting my dollar back, and we both enjoyed my good-natured grumbling for the next half hour.

After wading through the dreck, it was good to be back in a real bookstore again. In a place downtown, she spent most of her money on a miniature book, a suede-leather copy of Shakespeare no larger than the tip of her thumb. “I’m really a sucker for these things,” she said. “I’ll buy them if there’s the least bit of margin.” I knew almost nothing about the miniature-book trade, only that, like every other specialty, it has its high spots that are coveted and cherished. Eleanor filled me in as we drove. “This was published by David Bryce in Glasgow around the turn of the century. Bryce did lots of miniatures, some of them quite special. I once had a Bryce’s dictionary, which they called the smallest dictionary in the world. It was only about an inch square and it had about four hundred pages, with a little metal slipcase and a foldout magnifying glass. You could carry it on a key ring.”

I held the Shakespeare between my thumb and forefinger. “You think there’s any margin in this?”

“I don’t care, I didn’t buy it to get rich. Maybe I could double up wholesale, but I think I’ll keep it for a while as a memento of this day. It’ll be my good-luck piece. I think I’ll need one, don’t you?”

Bookscouting gives you the same kind of thrills as gambling. You flirt with the Lady in much the same way. You get hot and the books won’t stop coming: you get cold and you might as well be playing pinochle with your mother-in- law. I was hot, and when Luck is running, she flaunts all the odds of circumstance and coincidence. I found two early-fifties Hopalong Cassidy books by a guy Eleanor had never heard of, some cowboy named Tex Burns. I savored the pleasure of telling her that Tex Burns was like Edgar Box, a moniker…in another lifetime he had been a young