Allan Milkerit, 1945-2007

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.

Edward Gorey, Amphigorey Also

Congdon & Weed, 1983.

Okay, we're back. I know. I know -- for months, this looked like another blog orbiting the Planet Dead. But I always knew it was just a hiatus as I moved domiciles, including 300 boxes of books, ten of which were Allan's. Plenty of his books to plow through in the coming years.

As usual, the current title was plucked at random from one of those boxes. Unusually for Allan and this book, it is mint. Between the Covers has an equivalent copy for $250. There's also a copy that is just about fine for $85.

I interviewed Gorey at the beginning of my career, perhaps for this book. That was nearly three decades ago. Sheeesh. We went to lunch, but I don't remember if I ever wrote it up. I was so young and knew so little. Towards the end of my bookish career I did a long column item about him based on an interview at his Cape Cod house that made it into his book of selected interviews. I later paid him a social visit at his house, where he signed some of the Anchor paperbacks he had done the covers for. Those were his finest work although the set for Dracula, which I saw on Broadway, was pretty close.

Yet for all of that I have ambivalent feelings about his work. It is best in small doses, and anthologies like this one destroy the effect by repetition. Which is why, lovely as it is, I'll try to sell it. Allan's price: $75, which was eminently reasonable then.