During my sixteen years as The Official Booksearcher at Congress Avenue Books, I kept a log recording almost every book I found and sold. I noted the author and title, described the technical details (publisher and year, pagination, printing, size, and so on) and wholesale and retail prices, as well as condition notes (x-libs, cover and dj condition, inked sentiment, etc.).
A random question someone asked me recently had me pulling out the log to look for information on a book I half-remembered handling once . . . but then I got distracted as I flipped through, because I started remembering bits about the customers all these books went to. There was the clutch of Wodehouse titles, including some expensive late-early-period stuff (Jeeves, 1923; I sold it for $95 then and Bookfinder says it now fetches close to $200) that I sold to an ophthalmologist with a Wodehouse jones. Unfortunately, when he was killed some years later in a plane crash, I didn’t get the chance to handle the collection’s dispersal.
There was the woman who wanted every Eric Sloane Title That Ever Was, and already had about half of them. I managed to supply her with several more, but never did manage to find the one that she most wanted in all the world, which was . . . . damn, I’ve forgotten. It might have been A Museum of Early American Tools. There was the tiny black woman who turned out to be a major at Bergstrom AFB, and who bought all kinds of black-consciousness titles: lots of Richard Wright, some Ralph Ellison, miscellaneous other stuff, and (so help me Jesus) a TRUE FIRST EDITION of The Narrative of Sojourner Truth for SIXTY BUCKS! The cheapest one I can see on Bookfinder these days is priced at $750; I hope that, wherever she is, the owner’s taking care of it.
For years I searched for recondite Brontë-studies titles, for a woman who was going to write a master’s thesis contending that the Brontës formed a gestalt among the four of them, and when Bramwell died it broke the gestalt and carried Emily and Anne off in short order as well. Another customer used to come in every six months or so to have me search him another copy of Elijah Muhammad’s Message to the Blackman in America; I suppose he kept giving them away. Fortunately, those are common as dirt on the market.
And some of these, I can’t for the life of me remember the customer, but I wonder how in the world these books could ever have been so cheap. A true first of Lonesome Dove for $25? I sold two of them in 1986 and ’87. Viktor Bracht’s Texas in 1848, an absolute classic of early Texas travel writing and the impetus for a lot of German immigration to Texas, that sells for $200 and up today? I bought three copies for less than seven bucks apiece in ’86, from a dealer who had stock full of treasures and no more idea than a bird what to ask for them—but that’s another story. Edward Gorey’s toy theatre with all the sets from Dracula—I sold one in as-new condition for $15 in ’87. Try even touching one for much less than $150 today.
But listening to old bookies ramble about the ones you caught and the ones that got away gets old, unless you’re John Dunning
: : time out for Happy Dance : :
JOHN DUNNING IS PUBLISHING ANOTHER CLIFF JANEWAY MYSTERY NEXT SPRING!!!
so maybe I ought to leave some more war stories1 for another day.
1 You know the difference between a fairy tale and a war story? A fairy tale begins, “Once upon a time . . .” and a war story begins “No shit, this really happened . . . .”
David Letterman commands the best jet ski. Fnord.
