Bookman's wake

I shook my head no.

“It was one of his trademarks, one of his eccentricities. That’s what makes the man so endlessly interesting. Try to get a grip on him by looking at his work— you’ll end up in a rubber room talking to men in white coats. I can spend days with his books, and I’m talking about different copies of the same title, and I’ll find some little variation in every one of them. Every time I look! I’m supposed to be the Grayson expert, I’m supposed to know everything there is to know about these things, and I can still sit down with five copies of his Christmas Carol and find new things in every one of them. Sometimes they’re subtle little things in the inks or the spacing of words. Can you imagine such a thing in this day of mass production? —Grayson made every copy in some way unique. It was a trademark, like Alfred Hitchcock appearing somewhere in all his films. Only what Grayson did was far more difficult than anything Hitchcock ever dreamed of. Try to imagine it—the chore of produc-ing an exquisite book in a run of five hundred copies, and making many copies different from the others without messing anything up. It would drive a normal man nuts. He must’ve worked around the clock when he had a book coming out. The binding alone would’ve taken anyone else six months to a year, full-time. Grayson did it in a gush.”

“He had Rigby to help him.”

“But not until 1963.”

“Before that there was Richard.”

“Who was a pretty fair binder, as it turned out. I’m sure these people helped out, but I don’t think anything ever went out of that shop that Grayson himself didn’t do. This is partly where the mystique comes from. Grayson did things that to other printers look superhuman, and once he decided what he was going to do, he did it with a speed that defies belief. He’d fiddle and change things in the process: then, for reasons no one understands, he’d toss in a real variant. It’s as if he suddenly got a notion in the middle of the night, and he’d change the paper or the binding, for that one book only. If the book passed muster when he’d finished it, he’d go ahead and ship it. People on his subscription list were always thrilled when they discovered they had a variant— though it was sometimes years later that they found out.”

“Some of them probably never found out.”

“That’s an excellent assumption. You can bet there are still many Grayson books sitting on the shelves of people who have no idea what they’ve got.”

“The original owner dies, leaves them to his children…”

“Who don’t understand or care.”

“Is there any way of tracing these books?”

“Don’t think that hasn’t occurred to me…and to one or two other people. You’d think it would be simple— Grayson must’ve kept a master list of his subscribers, but it’s never been found. Some of the books have come to light on their own. They’ll pop up in the damnedest places…last year I got a card from a woman in Mexico City. Her husband had been a subscriber. He had just died and she had all the books, still in their shipping boxes.”

“What did you do?”

“I flew down and bought them. On the first available plane. That’s one of the perks that comes with being an expert. Everything gets funneled your way.”

“I wonder if Aandahl gets any of that.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised. When you’ve published a book on something, people do tend to think you know what you’re talking about, whether you do or not. And they’ll call you when they think they’ve got something you’d buy for a price. Trish has a certain advantage in that her book will be read by many thousands more people; mine is so narrow and specialized. But I really doubt if she’d know the differences between the Benton standard issue and the Broder variant”—he grinned widely—“without consulting my book first.”

I didn’t say it, but it seemed to me that Huggins had been reading Aandahl at least as much as Aandahl had been reading Huggins. He caught my drift at once.

“I’ve read that goddamn book cover to cover ten times. That doesn’t count endless browsings. Sometimes I dip into it when I’m at loose ends. I’ve got two copies back there, one for the shelf and the other for the workroom. The working copy’s so marked up you can barely read it anymore. I argue with her in the margins, I rail at the liberties she takes. The book is bashed and battered where I threw it against the wall when I first read it. So, yes, I do know it well. I can quote passages from it the way some people quote Shakespeare. And if we’re going to be totally honest, I’ve got to tell you this: the goddamn thing can move me to tears in places. It has a brilliance that I…I don’t know how to describe it. At its best it rings so true that you just know …you find yourself pulling for Trish to be right. But her book is fatally flawed because there are many other places where you know she’s stretching it. I can tell the minute she starts that horseshit, sometimes right in the middle of a sentence. And in the end the whole book’s meaningless: it’s a fascinating piece of pop culture. Trish can talk to a million people, and even if they all slept with Grayson, they still won’t be able to tell her what she really wants to know.”

“Which is what?”

“For starters, what drove the man, what made him do things, why he did them the way no one before or since has come close to doing, and where did the genius come from. I can’t remember who said this, but it’s got the stamp of truth all over it. James Joyce could spend a lifetime trying to teach his son to write, but the son could never write a page of Ulysses .”

“Grayson sounds like a pure romantic.”

“Trish seems to think they both were—that’s one of the many flaws in her book. Take the term romance strictly in its sexual context and you’ll see right away how silly her thinking is. Darryl Grayson couldn’t have been more his brother’s opposite in his relations with the opposite sex, even if encounters with women invariably ended up in the same place. In bed, I’m saying—they both had enormous sexual appetites. But women to Richard were just objects. Richard sometimes said that he had slept with more than twelve hundred women, Mr. Hodges, can you even begin to imagine such a thing? Trish Aandahl must’ve been in hog heaven when she uncovered that juicy little tidbit. But the point is this—Richard hated women; Darryl loved them. That’s the difference. Darryl Grayson never met a woman he couldn’t just love to death. And it didn’t matter what they looked like: he loved the homely ones the same as the beauties. I’ve known a few of Grayson’s ladies and they all say the same thing. He had a way of making them feel cherished, even when they knew he’d be with someone else tomorrow.”