Monday, December 21, 2015
Where the Wild Books Are
Where the Wild Books Are: Needle-in-a-haystack stories are the caffeine of collecting. Who hasn’t heard a tale of someone finding a rare toy at a garage sale, a dust-covered antique in an attic, or a priceless document hidden inside a beat-up picture frame? “That could be me,” we are supposed to think, and right on cue, we do.
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I love articles like that although I'm not the sort of person who looks for rare books (and, as far as I know, I have none). I do love to browse the Friends of the library sales and the shelves at Goodwill (where I recently found a bumper crop of Mary Higgins Clark books for one of my daughters who's an avid fan). At a recent FotL sale, I picked up a copy of Proust's IN THE SHADOW OF YOUNG GIRLS IN FLOWER for a buck. When I got home, I found someone had helpfully written inside, "This novel translation is a First American Edition." Also for a buck, GULLIVER'S TRAVELS with an introduction by Jacques Barzun and illustrations by Warren Chappell. Probably neither worth more than the dollar I paid for each of them...but lovely books just the same.
I love finding books. Any kind of books.
For years, I used to travel around England and Scotland with our (sadly, now late) good friend Bob Adey, who had a collection of over 30,000 books, mostly mystery and detective fiction. Some will know he was probably the expert on locked room mysteries, and wrote books about that sub-genre. But he also collected Victorian three deckers.
Anyway, Bob was always hunting and would find obscure works few others would see, often because most of us had never heard of book or author. But even if he didn't know either something about it would prompt him to pull the book from the shelf and look inside, often to find something special.
I miss the old days. (We started traveling around with Bob in 1978.)
I love finding something left *in* a book. I've run across letters, ticket stubs, and (my favorite) a card detailing the services offered on the 20th Century Limited in 1945 (the train ran daily from Chicago to New York)--you could hire a stenographer/typist, get a massage, and several other things (all legal!). I still have that card somewhere. It was in a Frances & Richard Lockridge book, although I don't remember which one.
There used to be a website, not sure if it is still active, called "Found in Books." The guy who ran it was a used book dealer who would catalog the items he'd found when flipping through his new acquisitions. Really interesting stuff there.
I find stuff in used books now and then, but nothing very interesting. I did find over $200 in cash once. In a book on treasure hunting. That was appropriate and fun. I'd had the book for over a year before I ever opened it.
It's still an active blog, but I had misremembered the name: http://www.forgottenbookmarks.com/?m=1
/ Hey, whaddya know? This Google thing really works! It might catch on some day.
While the book sounds somewhat interesting, I'd much - very much - prefer one about finding rare or hard-to-find American mysteries. There must be a Fine-Fine first edition, first printing of THE BIG SLEEP out there somewhere.....
It's not a mystery but I did just sell the first edition of THE PRINCESS BRIDE for $300. I probably should have asked for me because the book dealer turned around and sold it for $1,000 within a week. I had found it on the shelves of the local ARC store for $1.50 and bought it just because I wanted to read it and see if it was as good as the movie.
The bookstore wasn't very happy that it hadn't been discovered by their book scouts!
My previous big score was $50 for a first edition of THE KENNEL CLUB MURDER by SS VanDine. It came in some boxes of donations to our library.
I love The Princes Bride. That was a great score in more ways than one.
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