In another store I fingered a sharp copy of White Fang , amazed that the asking price was just $75. Eleanor warned me off with a look. In the car she said, “It was a second state, that’s why it was so cheap.” I felt like amateur night in Harlem, but I asked her anyway, what was the point of it, and this kid, this child, gave me another lesson in fly-by-your pants bookscouting.
“There was a mistake on the title page. Macmillan just sliced it out and glued a new one on the cancel stub…You look perplexed, Mr. Jane way, like a man who’s never heard the terminology. You don’t know what a cancel stub is?…How long have you been in the business?”
“Long enough to know a lot about a few things and damn little about most of it.”
“Well, this kind of thing happened a lot in the old days. The publisher would make a mistake in a line or word, but by the time they noticed it, ten thousand copies had been printed and maybe five thousand had been distributed. If it was an important author, like Jack London, they didn’t want to release any more with the mistake, but they didn’t want to redo all those books either. So Macmillan printed a new title page, in the case of White Fang , then they sliced out the old ones on all those flawed copies and just glued the new one right onto the stub.”
“They just tipped it in.”
“Sure. Labor was cheap then, and even those factory grunts could do a decent job of it. The average book collector won’t even see it, but a bookman can’t miss it unless it’s done with real finesse. Just look down in the gutter and there it is, like a man who had an arm cut off and sewn back on again. Doran did the same thing with one of Winston Churchill’s early books, My African Journey . They bought the remainder from the British publisher and just slashed out the title page and put in their own on the cancel stub. That’s why the first American edition comes in a British casing, with Hodder and Stoughton on the spine and a tipped-in Doran title page. It was one of Doran’s first books, and he was lowballing to save money.”
“Oh,” I said lamely.
We stopped for lunch. I wanted to talk about her case but she wouldn’t get into it: it would only screw up an otherwise pleasant day, she said. We drifted back toward the Kingdome. Her car was gone: her father had picked it up for her and had it towed to a gas station a few blocks away. We drove past and saw it there in the lot. We were in the neighborhood anyway, so we stopped in the big Goodwill store on Dearborn. I don’t do thrift stores much anymore— usually they are run by idiots who think they are book dealers, without a lick of experience or a grain of knowledge to back them up. In Denver the Goodwills have become laughingstocks among dealers and scouts. They have their silly little antique rooms where they put everything that looks old—every ratty, worn-out never-was that ever came out of the publishing industry. They mark their prices in ink, destroying any value the thing might have, and when you try to tell them that, they stare at you with dull eyes and say they’ve got to do it that way. The store in Seattle didn’t ink its books to death, but it didn’t matter—they had the same mentality when it came to pricing. The shelves were clogged with common, crummy books, some still available on Walden remainder tables for two dollars, marked six and seven in this so-called thrift store. Naturally, they missed the one good book. Eleanor found it as she browsed one side while I worked the other. She peeked around the corner with that sad-little-girl-oh-so-lost look on her face. “Scuse me, sir, could you loan me a dollar?…My family’s destitute, my daddy broke his leg, my little brother’s got muscular dystrophy, and my mamma’s about to sell her virtue on First Avenue.” I made a convulsive grab at my wallet. “Damn, you are good!” I said with forced admiration. “You’re breaking my damn heart.” She grinned with all her teeth and held up a fine first of Robert Traver’s wonderful Anatomy of a Murder . It was a nice scarce little piece, worth at least $100 I guessed: a good sleeper because the Book of the Month edition is exactly the same size and shape and so prolific that even real bookpeople won’t bother to pick it up and look. Goodwill wanted $4 for it. She paid with my dollar and her nickels and dimes, then haggled with me in the parking lot: “Gregor would give me at least forty for this, and I’m waiting breathlessly to see if you’re inclined to do the honorable thing.” I gave her forty-five, but made a point of getting my dollar back, and we both enjoyed my good-natured grumbling for the next half hour.
After wading through the dreck, it was good to be back in a real bookstore again. In a place downtown, she spent most of her money on a miniature book, a suede-leather copy of Shakespeare no larger than the tip of her thumb. “I’m really a sucker for these things,” she said. “I’ll buy them if there’s the least bit of margin.” I knew almost nothing about the miniature-book trade, only that, like every other specialty, it has its high spots that are coveted and cherished. Eleanor filled me in as we drove. “This was published by David Bryce in Glasgow around the turn of the century. Bryce did lots of miniatures, some of them quite special. I once had a Bryce’s dictionary, which they called the smallest dictionary in the world. It was only about an inch square and it had about four hundred pages, with a little metal slipcase and a foldout magnifying glass. You could carry it on a key ring.”
I held the Shakespeare between my thumb and forefinger. “You think there’s any margin in this?”
“I don’t care, I didn’t buy it to get rich. Maybe I could double up wholesale, but I think I’ll keep it for a while as a memento of this day. It’ll be my good-luck piece. I think I’ll need one, don’t you?”
Bookscouting gives you the same kind of thrills as gambling. You flirt with the Lady in much the same way. You get hot and the books won’t stop coming: you get cold and you might as well be playing pinochle with your mother-in-law. I was hot, and when Luck is running, she flaunts all the odds of circumstance and coincidence. I found two early-fifties Hopalong Cassidy books by a guy Eleanor had never heard of, some cowboy named Tex Burns. I savored the pleasure of telling her that Tex Burns was like Edgar Box, a moniker…in another lifetime he had been a young man named Louis L’Amour. Amazing to find two such in a single day, but I take Luck where I find her. These cost me $4 each and were worth around $250.1 razzed Eleanor for not knowing. We headed north and I said, for at least the fifth time, “I thought everybody knew about Tex Burns.” She crossed her eyes and looked down her nose at me, a perfect picture of rank stupidity.
It was the damnedest day, full of sorrow and joy and undercut with that sweet slice of tension. I’ll blink and she’ll be gone, I thought at least a dozen times: I’ll turn my head for a second and when I look up, she’ll be two blocks away, running like hell. But I had set my course and the day was waning, and still there had been nothing between us but the most cheerful camaraderie. Out of the blue, in midafter-noon, she said, “I guess it’s a good thing you turned into an asshole when you did: I may’ve been on the verge of falling in love with you and then where would we be?” Coming from nowhere like that, it put me on the floor. It also brought to a critical point a problem I had failed to consider—I had to pee in the worst possible way. I told her to stay put, disappeared into the rest room, and found her still there, working the shelves, when I came hustling out a minute later. I didn’t worry much about her after that.