Anthony Burgess, Napoleon Symphony

Cape, 1974.

A frequent -- okay, dominant -- point in our discussions here is how much second-hand bookselling -- one of the oldest and most stable if often most marginal of professions -- has changed in a handful of years. This book, which I picked up for reasons I cannot fathom, is yet another example. There aren't really very many copies around, yet there are more than anyone wants or needs. One wonders why, with a universe of literature available, anyone will ever want it.

Burgess wrote way too much, and little is likely to survive: A Clockwork Orange, of course; his two-volume autobiography; Nothing Like the Sun (at least for Shakespereans) and ... that's about it. Earthly Powers, the Malayan Trilogy and the Enderby novels have their fans, but the future only has time for masterpieces and those novels ain't it. Napoleon Symphony was attractively published by Cape in its prime but our interest in writers who extend "the possibilities of the novel still further" (jacket blurb) is severely limited these days.

Peter Harrington is asking $100 for a copy with the previous owner's initials. Argosy has a presentation copy for $60, which is more like it. Fine unsigned copies can be had for $20. I often read these books of Allan's, dragged into them by superior prose against my will. But I read the first page of this and decided to go no further.

Allan had this book for a while, I would guess. He did not price it but left in an old price of $40 -- a number, I imagine, that got attached to the book before Burgess' death in 1993, when he might come to town and sign or at least produce a new masterpiece that would drive up old values. No chance of that now, no chance at all.

Comments

[Joe Marchione]

While I try to keep my comments in this blog focused on various facets of Allan, one line you wrote got me thinking in more general terms about the future of bookselling... need to purge by posting even though it's not done or I'll never get my Q3 sales tax done...

" ...how much second-hand bookselling...has changed in a handful of years."

On my good days, I read a comment like this one about Burgess and try to convince myself that if you think about it, things really are not *that* different now from the way they used to be. Authors come into vogue, slip back out, same as it ever was. I rationalize that every generation imagines themselves on the edge of something new, of some radical change that will fundamentally change an aspect of life that is important to them. No matter if that place is viewed as a cutting edge or a precipice, the tendency to believe that we stand on the steeply sloped part of an exponential curve at the moment we live in, here-and-now (whenever that here-and-now may be) could be a fundamental human trait and, in retrospect, proves to be illusion. That's on my good days. I haven't had a lot of good days recently.

Earlier today, a fellow bookseller (brick & mortar, general stock, highly techno-phobic) who used to pick Allan's brain about 1st editions came in with a stack of books that had, at one time, been something. A mid-list mystery writer, always salable with a least one title that consistently commanded (and received) mid- to high- two figure prices. My half-smile and shrug probably told him all he needed to know but I went through the motions anyway, checking each title on-line for him. The good news was that I was wrong. The bad news is that my indifferent shrug *way* overestimated value. The collectible market for this author had basically collapsed. Still salable, but at reading copy prices for signed first editions. Mind you, the author is still alive, writing and selling new books. What happened?

That illusion I was talking about in the first paragraph? Sometimes it's no illusion. I sit here composing this draft on Google docs, my efforts periodically and seamlessly saved to The Cloud. I am a click and a search from what most of us, 30 years ago, would have imagined as heaven..., a bookstore in that same (OK, not really, but close enough) cloud, where a nearly unimaginable number of books proclaim their availability, needing no more than a click and a credit card to bring them to us. That technology has radically affected the supply side of the book marketplace need hardly be examined. A curmudgeonly rant about what we are losing might make me feel good but is, in the end, useless. Worse, the supply side of the equation is not what I am most worried about.

Are we a generation or two away from childhood completely without books? I mean the physical objects... with covers and pages and smells and texture. And if so, what difference will it make? Remember, I'm not positing a world without stories. In fact I can imagine a child being every bit as enamored with Ferdinand the Bull as I was. The exact same story. But for them, the memory may well be of words on a computer screen, moving illustrations above the words, an actor's voice. Better? Worse? Probably neither. Just different. Twilight of the booksellers? Probably.