(this should have been posted weeks ago. Apologies to Joe for screwing up.)
Baa Bah Sale Scout, have you any books? Yes sir. Yes Sir! 3 bags I took.
Well, two boxes, but you get the idea. Back from preview night at the annual Friends of the San Francisco Public Library Big Book sale and sorting through my haul. Can you hear Allan? I can. "What's your best book?" he asks as he starts futzing with his stacks, ready to show off to you.
Not much this time. With all hardcovers priced at $4 for the first days of the sale and the book market pinned down in the crossfire of Economy and Internet, it's an old-school book scout nightmare. With books priced a bit too high to take chances on and market so weak, you're not sure whether to trust your judgment on books you thought you knew.
A long day. Parking receipt says Time in, 9:42AM. Time out, 8:38PM. Credit card receipt says $156. No paperbacks so divide by four ... a stunning 39 books. I get more in 40 minutes at the monthly sale at the donation center. But no complaints. All the fun is in the looking and there's always Sunday.
Still, stories to be told. Work to be avoided. What better place to do both than here? Of the 39 books I purchased, six were indisputably Allan books, his notations and price scrawled to the corners. I guess not surprisingly after working with him for 6+ years, I can usually sense an Allan book even before I crack it open. The flawed H. Rider Haggard. The "S. Morgenstern" Silent Gondoliers. The Porkchoppers by Ross Thomas*, an old Laurence Housman in jacket.
Of the other 33, I'd guess at least a few were unmarked Allan books. Certainly the McCullers. Maybe the Kroeber. Take this one ... The Precious Secret by Fulton Oursler. Stated first. A NBD (no big deal) book. This one happens to be inscribed and signed. Better but hardly earth-shaking. How about this, though? It's inscribed "To Mary Pickford and Buddy Rogers with the friendship of the author," signed and dated Oct. 10, 1947.
Cool huh? But wait. There's more! It's got a tragic flaw. The endpaper that has the inscription has fallen out, then been inexpertly glued back in leaving browning and glue residue along the gutter ... And then detached again! No explicit proof that this was an Allan book but nothing says Allan quite like intriguing, unusual and tragically flawed.
I won't even speculate about the path these books took. First generation, part of the batch cleared out of the store after his death in 2007? Second gen., from the stock that Abandoned Planet took over? Released into the wild and making their home again?
No matter. They'll always be out there, and fools like me will be there to buy them. Take the H. Rider Haggard. Maiwa's Revenge from 1888. It's an Allan Quatermain novel. Nearly 125 years old, for crying out loud. How could I not pick it up. And yet as soon as I saw Allan's $50 price scribble, I suspected I was in trouble and should slowly put the book down and move away from the table. But I can't help myself. Bought it. Brought it back and with one search, verified what I really knew all along... Maybe it will sell at $20 some time over the next 5 years. It would have been an acceptable Sunday Dollar buy. At 4 bucks, not so much.
Oh, almost forgot. My best book? Objectively in this nonfiction world we live in, probably "Du Pont. Behind the Nylon Curtain" by Gerard Zilg, a book that was effectively buried by DuPont at the time of publication (fascinating back story... Google it for details). But subjectively, it's got to be the Oursler.
*Nobody accumulated Porkchoppers with badly faded dust jacket spines like Allan.
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