Bookman's wake

called instant rarities. They can be pretty nice collector’s items, though purists have mixed feelings about them.“

“Mixed feelings how?”

“Well, it’s obvious they’ll never take the place of the first edition. Poe’s work becomes incidental to this whole modern process. The books become entities of their own: they’re bought mainly by people who collect that publisher, or by people who just love owning elegant things.”

He gave me a nod, as if waiting for elaboration.

“It’s not an impossible book to find, Clydell, that’s what I’m telling you. I think I could find your client one fairly easily. It might take a month or two, but I could find it, assuming the client’s willing to spend the money.”

“The client’s willing to spend ten grand…which I’d be inclined to split with you fifty-fifty.”

“The client’s crazy. I could find her half a dozen copies for that and still give her half her money back.” “Don’t bullshit me, Janeway. How do you find half a dozen copies of a rare book like that?”

“People call them instant rarities: that doesn’t mean they’re truly rare. My guess is that this Grayson Raven is becoming a fairly scarce piece, but I still think it can be smoked out.”

“You guys talk in riddles. Rare, scarce…what the hell’s the difference?”

“A scarce book is one that a dealer might see across his counter once every five or ten years. A rare book— well, you might spend your life in books and never see it. None of the Grayson books are really rare in that sense. They’re scarce just by the fact that they were all limited to begin with. But they’re all recent books, all done within the last forty years, so it’s probably safe to say that most of them are still out there. We haven’t lost them to fire, flood, war, and pestilence. As a matter of fact, I can tell you exactly how many copies there were—I’ve got a Grayson bibliography in my reference section.”

I got the book and opened it, thumbing until I found what I wanted.

“ ‘The Raven and Other Poems , by Edgar Allen Poe,’” I read: “‘published by Darryl Grayson in North Bend, Washington, October 1949. Four hundred copies printed.’ It was one of Grayson’s first books. The last time I saw one in a catalog…I’m trying to think…it seems like the dealer was asking around five hundred dollars. That’s pretty steep, actually, for a book like that, but I guess this Grayson was a pretty special bookman.”

“And you really think you could get your mitts on half a dozen of these?”

“Well,” I hedged, “I could find her one, I’m sure enough of that.”

“How do you go about it? I mean, you just said you’d only get to see one of these every five or ten years.”

“Across my counter. But I won’t wait for that, I’ll run an ad in the AB . That’s a booksellers’ magazine that goes to bookstores all over the country. Somebody’s bound to have the damn thing: if they do, they’ll drop me a postcard with a quote. I might get one quote or half a dozen: the quotes might range from two hundred up. I take the best deal, figure in a fair profit for myself, your client pays me, she’s got her book.”

“What if I decide to run this ad myself and cut you out of the action? Not that I would, you know, I’m just wondering what’s to prevent it.”

“Not a damn thing, except that AB doesn’t take ads from individuals, just book dealers. So you’re stuck with me. Old buddy ,” I added, a fairly nice jab.

It was lost on him: his head was in another world somewhere and he was plodding toward some distant goal line that he could only half see and I couldn’t imagine.

“My client wants the book, only the one she wants ain’t the one you’re talking about.”

“I’m not following you.”

“This Grayson dude was supposed to’ve done another one in 1969.”

“Another what?”

“Raven.”

“Another edition of the same book? That doesn’t sound right to me.”

I thumbed through the bibliography, searching it out.

“There’s no such book,” I said after a while.

“How do you know that?”

“It would be in the bibliography.”

“Maybe they missed it.”

“They don’t miss things like that. The guy who put this together was probably the top expert in the world on the Grayson Press. He spent years studying it: he collected everything they published. There’s no way Grayson could’ve published a second Raven without this guy knowing about it.”

“My client says he did.”

“Your client’s wrong, Clydell, what else can I tell you? This kind of stuff happens in the book world…somebody transposes a digit taking notes, 1949 becomes 1969, and suddenly people think they’ve got something that never existed in the first place.”

“Maybe,” he said, lighting another smoke.