Answer: Yes! Any Other Questions?

The Bibliomaniac’s Prayer

Keep me, I pray, in wisdom’s way
That I may truths eternal seek;
I need protecting care to-day,–
My purse is light, my flesh is weak.
So banish from my erring heart
All baleful appetites and hints
Of Satan’s fascinating art,
Of first editions, and of prints.
Direct me in some godly walk
Which leads away from bookish strife,
That I with pious deed and talk
May extra-illustrate my life.

But if, O Lord, it pleaseth Thee
To keep me in temptation’s way,
I humbly ask that I may be
Most notably beset to-day;
Let my temptation be a book,
Which I shall purchase, hold, and keep,
Whereon when other men shall look,
They’ll wail to know I got it cheap.
Oh, let it such a volume be
As in rare copperplates abounds,
Large paper, clean, and fair to see,
Uncut, unique, unknown to Lowndes.

 – Eugene Field

Try to explain Book Collecting to anyone who has never been bitten by the bug. They’ll look at you as if you have three heads. If you get as far as trying to explain the arcane and crazy rules of book collecting to this same individual, if he cares for you at all, he’ll probably wind up begging you to seek professional help. What he doesn’t understand is that professional help is powerless against a virulent strain of biblioholism.

Book Collectors are not normal people. Normal people go through their day thinking about what they’re going to have for dinner, what health care plan is the right one for the country, or how the secretary in the next office would look in a string bikini. Book Collectors go through their day thinking about points, editions, foxing and bindings. To them, these issues have breathtaking passion and urgency. To a normal person they’re boring as hell. I’m reminded of a comment I once read from a master chess player when asked what he would change about the game of chess if he could? He responded, “I’d slow it down. It’s so fast. I have to get up at 5 in the morning to run ten miles to have the stamina to play at this speed.” Now, to normal people, there’s nothing slower or more boring than watching two men lean over a chess board and make an occasional move for three or four hours. Normal people would be wrong. The breathless struggle against time and spatial relationships will leave you spent and in need of recuperation. A young Bobby Fischer, after having sex for the first time in his life remarked, “That was great—but not as good as chess.” People thought—what a nut. Bobby was a nut—but not for saying that.

Book Collectors, like chess players, are different people when they enter their respective worlds. Their friends, the normal people, will not recognize them from what they do and say when in the throes of biblioholism. Let me give you an example of what I’m talking about. Here is an observation I’ve gleaned from my 40 years in Book Collectors World: “Book Collecting, like wine, like women, have the power to make men happy. And don’t ask the man to rate those three in order.” As for me, I’ve already answered that question in CS2 when I was forced to choose between a gorgeous woman and a book signed by Picasso—see Lost the Girl; Got The Book.

Now, I can hear the ladies in the audience really losing patience with me. They’re thinking, “Listen to that sexist. First he refers to normal people thinking about the secretary in the next office wearing a string bikini. Then he refers to women having the power to make Book Collectors happy. What about women Book Collectors, Bozo?” Answer: The answer is quite simple: I am not a sexist. In both cases I am referring to the male population. Why? Because men collect books. Women do not!!

After 40 years of collecting and selling books, I can count on my two hands the number of serious female collectors I’ve encountered. Fully 30 to 40% of my male customers were collectors in the traditional sense of the word. I do not know why this is. But I do know that it is. I have some theories—some Freudian, some not—that I will explore with you in future entries in this series on book collecting. But for now let me just say this: Your Aunt Tilly buying up all the Nancy Drews from her childhood is not Book Collecting. It’s nostalgia. It could be Book Collecting if it is pursued by the rules of Book Collecting, but usually it is not. Women think that books are to read.  Just where the hell did they get that crazy idea? You never, ever read a book you are collecting. It’s blasphemy! If you must read the book, buy a cheap knockoff and read that.  But do not read the copy you are collecting. Got that straight? Am I being obnoxious enough to dissuade you from taking this course in Book Collecting I am offering in the pages of CS2 over the next two years? If the answer is yes, leave now and consider that I have done you a service. You’ve been saved from the possible ruination of your life.

Ground Rules for CS2 Book Collecting Course

OK. Those of you who are still with me have been forewarned about the power  of the disease known as biblioholism. You have entered at your own risk. Let’s use this first month just to come to some basic understandings about the Book Collecting World and how it views and relates to what you consider the real world. Those in the Book Collecting World would not concede that you are in the real world. They believe they are.

First and foremost you must understand that Book Collecting World is not a democracy. Unlike your real world, where even tea-baggers and conspiracy theorists can spout their opinions and are given the right to vote, Book Collectors would prefer you shut up for the first ten years until you know what you’re talking about. The rules and understandings of this world are not subject to debate by those who have just entered the house. They have been developed over hundreds of years since the invention of the printing press. Book Collecting World wants you to absorb the bibliographic wisdom of your predecessors before you have the audacity to question it.

Second, you have probably come to the suspicion that the people who run Book Collecting World are snobs. You’d be right. And we’re proud of it!  Why? Because we know and you don’t. Know what? Tons of things. You probably think that terrorism is the biggest threat to your world. Members of Book World know that both public and high school librarians are the biggest threat to life as we know it. These evildoers are bent on destroying every book they touch. Look what they do. They take a perfectly good book, remove the dust jacket, put it in a Brodart (clear protective cover named after the company that makes them) and then tape the Brodart to the book so that it may never be removed without forever defacing the book. Before placing the Brodart back on the book they either deface the dust jacket by writing in indelible white ink on the spine the library’s reference number, or on the spine of the book itself. Some, more evil than others, will do it in both places. Think they’re done? You don’t know these people. Then they will glue a pouch on the rear endpaper to hold the library card in that they can stamp when someone removes the book. For good measure they will then take a name and address stamp and stamp all edges of the book and in case you missed those – the title page as well.  A fait accompli – the book has been destroyed!

For the reasons cited above “ex-library” is an uncollectible condition in Book Collectors World. So much so that the term “ex-library” not only describes the physical manifestation of what the book is, but also the condition as well. By that I mean it is wrong to say that a book is “an ex-library book in fine condition”. That’s an oxymoron. By virtue of it being an ex-library book, the book is in ex-library condition. In the pantheon of book collecting it would rate at the bottom of the totem pole: new, fine, very good, good, ex-library.  We’ll discuss what all of these ratings mean in future articles in this series. Suffice it to say that you’ve learned one thing about book collecting today: “ex-library is bad”. Are there exceptions to this rule? Yes. But the exceptions make the rule. We will discuss those exceptions in a future installment.

Members of Book Collectors World mourn the loss of all those Hemingway, Steinbeck and Joyce first editions that librarians have destroyed. Unlike Professor Harold Hill in The Music Man, we can no longer fantasize about “Madame Librarian”.  It would be like asking a progressive to fantasize about Ann Coulter.  Just not gonna happen.

Next month we will begin our course  with a discussion of the Holy Grail of Book Collectors World: The First Edition. We will discuss why the first edition and the thinking behind it. We will start you on the never ending bibliographic journey of how to determine first editions.  We will answer the oft asked, ” Why not the 10th edition?  Every book has a first edition, and so few have a 10th edition.  Wouldn’t that make them more collectible?”  See, your teacher was lying to you when she said that there was no such thing as a stupid question.

See you next month!

Dear Old London

When I was broke in London in the fall of ’89,
I chanced to spy in Oxford Street this tantalizing sign,
“A Splendid Horace cheap for Cash!” Of course I had to look
Upon the vaunted bargain, and it was a noble book!
A finer one I ‘ve never seen, nor can I hope to see,
The first edition, richly bound, and clean as clean can be;
And, just to think, for three-pounds-ten I might have had that Pine,
When I was broke in London in the fall of ’89!

Down at Noseda’s, in the Strand, I found, one fateful day,
A portrait that I pined for as only maniac may,
A print of Madame Vestris (she flourished years ago,
Was Bartolozzi’s daughter, and a thoroughbred, you know).
A clean and handsome print it was, and cheap at thirty bob,
That ‘s what I told the salesman, as I choked a rising sob;
But I hung around Noseda’s as it were a holy shrine,
When I was broke in London in the fall of ’89.

At Davey’s, in Great Russell Street, were autographs galore,
And Mr. Davey used to let me con that precious store.
Sometimes I read what warriors wrote, sometimes a king’s command,
But oftener still a poet’s verse, writ in a meagre hand.
Lamb, Byron, Addison, and Burns, Pope, Johnson, Swift, and Scott,
It needed but a paltry sum to comprehend the lot;
Yet, though Friend Davey marked ‘em down, what could I but decline?
For I was broke in London in the fall of ’89.

Of antique swords and spears I saw a vast and dazzling heap
That Curio Fenton offered me at prices passing cheap;
And, oh, the quaint old bureaus, and the warming-pans of brass,
And the lovely hideous freaks I found in pewter and in glass!
And, oh, the sideboards, candlesticks, the cracked old china plates,
The clocks and spoons from Amsterdam that antedate all dates!
Of such superb monstrosities I found an endless mine
When I was broke in London in the fall of ’89.

O ye that hanker after boons that others idle by, –
The battered things that please the soul, though they may vex the eye, –
The silver plate and crockery all sanctified with grime,
The oaken stuff that has defied the tooth of envious Time,
The musty tomes, the speckled prints, the mildewed bills of play,
And other costly relics of malodorous decay, –
Ye only can appreciate what agony was mine
When I was broke in London in the fall of ’89.

When, in the course of natural things, I go to my reward,
Let no imposing epitaph my martyrdoms record;
Neither in Hebrew, Latin, Greek, nor any classic tongue,
Let my ten thousand triumphs over human griefs be sung;
But in plain Anglo-Saxon that he may know who seeks
What agonizing pangs I ‘ve had while on the hunt for freaks
Let there be writ upon the slab that marks my grave this line:
“Deceased was broke in London in the fall of ’89.”

 – Eugene Field