Allan Milkerit, 1945-2007

E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime

Macmillan, 1976

Ragtime is that rare thing -- a book that got great reviews, was immediately popular, and has been popular ever since. Is it a genuine classic? Maybe a people's classic. I don't see a lot of academic criticism about it. On the other hand, it is probably keeping Doctorow's overall reputation alive. Not sure too many people are lining up to read "Loon Lake."

Allan was a big fan of Doctorow, although I think his copy of "Welcome to Hard Times" disappeared somewhere. Ragtime itself still has considerable value despite being printed in large numbers. Since it's such an American book, I don't think there's much market for the (rather blah) English edition, even signed like this one is.

Harriette Arnow, Hunter's Horn

Macmillan, 1949

However seriously Arnow was taken back in the day -- "will almost certainly be ranked among the best in our time," the jacket blurb says -- she's of little interest to anyone outside her native Kentucky these days. Allan had this marked as a first for $40, but it is a reprint. It doesn't help that the brown and green jacket is singularly unattractive. The English edition is much scarcer and much more attractive. Most expensive online copy is $65 from a top-end dealer. Even if this were a first it wouldn't be worth keeping. Luckily my friend Jim, in a striking turn of events, told me the other day he is reading Arnow. I nearly fell over. Hey, Jim, this one is for you.

Howard Moss & Edward Gorey, Instant Lives

Saturday Review Press, 1974

Edward Gorey used to be a cult, now he's an industry. His work is best in small doses, so I can live without the calendars, mugs and stuffies. In fact, I don't want anything published after, say, 1975, which marks the halfway point in his career. I covet the jackets he designed in the 1950s and early '60s, and the first, and best, books he did on his own. This book, a collection of literary sketches by Moss, would probably have disappeared entirely without the fame of the illustrator. Which isn't to say that Moss' work is not clever. "Penelope left a mark on St. Gaudin's that might more accurately be described as a scar," he writes in the piece on Aldous Huxley. But many of the jokes are so recherche that only a few will get them. I certainly didn't.

"instant Lives" was published by a mainstream press, which means a few thousand copies were done, which makes it only minimally collectable. What attracted Allan was the review slip, which gives the date of publication of May 15, 1974. Interestingly, the slip says there was a limited edition available for about twice the price of the trade -- $12.95. That was the edition to buy. The limited was 350 copies signed by both in a special binding, and it goes for about $200 now. This review copy is unpriced by Allan, but I would guess $25 max.

 

John L'Heureux, ed., The Uncommon Touch

Stanford Alumni Association, 1989

This book, subtitled "Fiction and Poetry from the Stanford Writing Workshop," was obviously prepared by a committee with little experience in book-making. Otherwise this slipcased edition would have a limitation, or at least a colophon that noted how many copies were done. Book people being asked to fork over more bucks for a limited edition want to know what they are paying for.

But there is nothing. I suspect the limitation was large -- that's how committees do things. On the other hand there are only a few copies of any of the three editions of this book online. The paperbacks go for about three bucks, there's a hardcover for $50, and one slipcased edition that is signed by nine of the writers for $183. Maybe the press runs were smaller than I thought.

Not to make this blog sound even more like a dirge than it already does, but I suspect the anthology is a literary form that has come to the end of its natural life. When I think of the classic experience of reading an anthology, I imagine a volume in a rural library in 1960 with no jacket. A reader stumbles upon it and devours all the stories in a week, unknown contributors as well as famous. The anthology was, to use the current lingo, a tool of discovery for obscure writers. Now we discover things online in single doses, the smaller the better.

I had always thought this book was a tribute to Stegner, but actually looking at it I see it was done to celebrate Stanford's centennial. Stegner does contribute a foreword, however, and the contributors were all Stegner fellows. I also see that some the living contributors commented on their work or their years at Stanford, which is a useful bonus. (Other writers, like Kesey, were commented on by someone else, it's not clear who.)

The all-cloth binding and slipcase are sturdy, although there is a hint of fading on the spine. Still, this is an item that will be around for generations, particularly since no one will ever read it. After almost a quarter-century, it still has the plastic wrapper on the slipcase. Best bet for a future owner: a Stegner completist. There must be one or two left. But maybe I should read some of it before selling it.

Allan coded the book but did not price it.

Eudora Welty, The Golden Apples

Bodley Head, 1950

This was another of Allan's English Weltys -- not in good enough condition to have found a buyer, they remained there forever. This one is foxed on the top page edges. The jacket is intact but has two tears on the front panel and a longer tear on the rear. The jacket also has spots of foxing. Like all copies of this book, there is no front free endpaper, which is some pretty sloppy bookmaking. 

This is Welty's fifth book, already pretty late in her career as a short story writer. These are not the canonical stories, which also serves to make it less valuable. There are a half-dozen copies online, one of which is only marginally worse than this but is going for only $9. There is a credible copy for $200. Allan was asking $150.

Fowles, Reconsidered: Part 2

(I wrote most of this last September but never posted it.)

So Joe's recent post about collecting Fowles, a response to a post of mine, provoked a variety of thoughts, foremost guilt. Six months since my last post? Yikes. It's just the intrusion of daily life, since I think about these issues -- collecting, books, firsts -- all the time.

Joe's points in the post are entirely reasonable and often fascinating, but I think he leaves out one of the biggest reasons some authors become collectible. Simply, they are someone the collector read as a child or teenager.

One of the most profound things ever said about collecting was the anonymous quote about science fiction: "The golden age of science fiction is 12." in other words, when the works were composed doesn't matter; when you read them is all. Graham Greene had a similar notion, pointing out that it is only as a youth that books truly excite us. This is when we are becoming fully formed individuals. Books, at least in my era, were one of the mechanisms that helped us to think, to become. They formed us.

Certainly the most memorable books of my life date from the period between 12 and 20: The Great Gatsby, A Wizard of Earthsea, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, The Golden Notebook, The Magus. Thirty years later, I can still recall the circumstances of reading these books, can still remember passages and the emotions they provoked.

So you grow up and, if you have a bookish bent and some spare cash, you collect this stuff. Are we trying to hold on to our past or re-create it? I don't know. But it has a powerful hold. Collecting is often a simple talisman, a memory tool.

The Magus has been read by many a miserable adolescent. Maybe it is not a great novel. Maybe it has little appeal to the current generation. I read it in Paris, where I was living when I was a 19-year-old student, studying at the Sorbonne, living in a group house run by a closeted homosexual who would make clumsy passes at me.

Later I interviewed Fowles as a callow 25-year-old, and then did a better job when I was 35. So I have the U.S. first, the U.K. first, the film tie-in, the revised editions, etc. etc. And I have a bunch of other Fowles books, and I bought a bunch more recently of his own copies of his books, although they went so quickly that I missed out on the ones I really wanted. Why did they go so fast? My guess is there are other people  -- most of them men, I'd venture -- who feel the same way about Fowles from their own adolescence.  

So there is a shelf of Fowles next to my bed, plus three more boxes full. The actual value of this material is minimal. A thousand dollars, perhaps, on a good day. But the psychological or should i say emotional value is immense.

We do not read all authors in our youth, and while there are other reasons to collect there is a limit on what people want. So I disagree with Joe's assertion that all authors are collected. The vast majority are not. Collectors once thought that the hypermoderns would grow into classics and be worth a bundle but I do not see this happening any more with Allan Gurganus or even Raymond Carver. Are there any trade editions from the last quarter century that are worth more than $100? How about $50? A few, I am sure. But not many. The collectors who rationalized the value of their hypermodern books are now duly chastened and probably collect something else. Baseball cards, maybe.

Jackets Redux

Joe immediately posted this response:

The ARM collection of jackets. There was nothing like it. I think every bookseller has a file of jackets waiting for books but Allan’s was distinguished both by its size and the nearly complete disregard for scarcity (or lack thereof) and condition of the jackets he saved. I’m both embarrassed and proud to admit I’ve fully bought in to his philosophy with regard to scarcity and condition. What is seen as trash today may well be treasure tomorrow and I, for one, won’t hazard a guess as to what will happen.

Pristine Grosset & Dunlap jackets of common reprints daring you to find the correct G&D book to slap it on. Trade edition jackets liberated from both ex-lib copies and later printings. “Allan, did this come off a flawed first or a later printing?” “I think it was a second printing.” “Is the jacket the same as the first?” “I think so.” And on and on to the point that you’d be scared to match a book with the jacket until you actually saw the correct first jacket.

Tell-tale flaws, as subtle as a faded spine everywhere but where the Library sticker was removed, as blatant as the entire heel of the spine ripped out in a petulant frenzy when the sticker removal surgery failed. He had a "high spots" folder of jackets that was decimated both in the scramble for cash in the last years of his life and in the free-for-all after his death. The lesser jackets made their way through various sellers. A goodly chunk returned to 2141 Mission (via RM and JL) a couple of years after his death.

I look through them at least twice a year, before the big Friends of the Library sales, in hopes of matchmaking success. They are alphabetized now so each time I get a jacketless book in, I can do a quick check... “Oscar Montague -- Paranoiac” by George Lincoln Walton... 1919. No luck. Ah, well. Maybe next time. I’ll leave for another time and place the question of matching jackets with books. That such "marriages" take place is well known and mostly accepted -- in the old days in a "don’t ask, don’t tell" kind of way, now, perhaps, better documented by reputable sellers. Suffice to say, it is not enough to match book and jacket. They should deserve each other in terms of condition.

Allan and I talked about that as he was searching for books to match his jackets. He’d include "jacketed copies" in his searches, pointing out that his nice jacket deserved a copy of the book that had at least some jacket protection over the years. As the search became tougher and the wolf crept closer to his door, he’d compromise but you could tell it hurt him to do so.

William Gass, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country (jacket only)

Harper & Row, 1968.

In addition to books with jackets, Allan also had books waiting for jackets as well as jackets waiting for books. He had many of these, and I occasionally leafed through them. I ended up with some when he died -- a previous post documented my adventures, so far unsuccessful, with a Graham Greene jacket. I don't know where the rest ended up. Maybe in a dumpster. It's hard to do much with them. I once spent a few hours looking for jacketless copies of these books on the Web. There were none. So much for the notion that everything is for sale out there.

This Gass title is not particularly expensive as a first. In fact, I bought my mint copy in 2009 for $1 from an Evanston, Ill., shop. It had no jacket but I remembered that one of the jackets I had rescued from Allan was this. Result: instant marriage. In the meantime, Gass was kind enough to sign the book. Tiny bit of fading to the spine but otherwise near mint. Onto the shelf it goes, and never mind that I have at least a half a dozen other copies and other editions of this, my favorite Gass book.

Bonanza Banquets

Book Club of California, 1950

In the old days, books naturally showed up in the area where the author lived and worked. He generally had a local fan base, local bookstores who supported him, good coverage in the local media that prompted more sales. Over time these books would filter down to local dealers. But since these writers were so familiar to the community, the books tended to be cheap and even so didn't sell. They sat waiting for a visitor from out of town who would seize on them as something scarce.

Over the years, Allan saw a lot of Brautigan books and a good supply of Stegner and Snyder. Alice Walker, too, although as her writing became increasingly spiritual in the late 1980s the value of her work nose-dived. I always kept an eye for new arrivals by M.F.K. Fisher, who was perhaps my earliest collecting interest despite never liking her books that much (collectors are weird). The first book I ever bought from Serendipity was a copy of "The Story of Wine in California," a minor Fisher item to be sure but inscribed to her editor William Targ. It was, I recall, $65 in a rough jacket. I still remember Burton Weiss, who sold me the book over the phone, telling me what a sweet inscription it was, compelling me to act immediately, although that conversation was in 1988 or thereabouts and I can't remember what happened yesterday. Book collecting is a memory machine. Burton, Fisher and Targ are all dead now.

An even more minor Fisher item is the Bonanza Banquets. These were 850 of these sets done in 1950 by the Book Club of California. Edited by Joseph Henry Jackson and printed by Anderson & Ritchie, they consisted of 12 folded sheets, each with a facsimile menu tucked inside from the golden age of San Francisco. Luminaries of the moment, including Fisher, provided the commentary. (We are further in time from 1950 than 1950 was from at least two of the featured meals, and just about all of the commentators besides Fisher have faded into obscurity everywhere but the Bay Area, and I wouldn't want to test them out even there. Did I know who Joseph Henry Jackson was before this week? No.)

Fisher's banquet is No. 8, given for the Grand Commandery of California Knights Templar at the Occidental Hotel on Tuesday, Oct. 18, 1864. She notes how at first glance the dishes appear so "Victorian and elegant" but in another light "are almost poignantly native and naive." For instance, "the stylish 'Bruxelles Sprouts' were grown by a couple of pigtailed China-boys on a vacant lot." Local sourcing may be the big buzzword these days but it is clearly nothing new.  

It's a measure of the lack of interest in this set that I can't tell from the copies available online exactly how it was originally published. One bookseller speaks of a box; another says his set is in the original three mailing envelopes; a third talks about a single envelope. Maybe they're all right. Sets go for around $50.

Allan's set, naturally, was simply loose. Even more problematic -- you knew this was coming -- is that the menu is missing from the first banquet, which is Jackson's account of an 1889 dinner attended by the 24-year-old Rudyard Kipling. ("I devoured a dinner," Kipling nicely said, "the memory of which will descend with me into the hungry grave." The boy might be going places.) That explains why neither I, nor anyone else, bought this while Allan was alive. It seems to be unpriced so perhaps no one ever looked at it.

Fowles Reconsidered

Has it really been six months since a posting here? Joe brought me back to my senses with this:

"Been some time since we’ve seen something new from David but if you think that’s going to stop me, then you haven’t been paying much attention ;-) ...*

"I keep coming back to this question of Fowles, quality, quantity and the collectibility of authors... You’ll be shocked, I say Shocked! to learn that I have a theory. Ranging from the madness of crowds to the magic of movies, from lumberyards in SSF to Law and Order SVU and Criminal Minds, from prolificity to profligacy, it is, to put it mildly, unwieldy. The prospect that I will be able to weave these disparate threads into an aesthetically pleasing whole seems dim. Still, I try because Hey! I got issues!

"Proposition: All authors are collected. By somebody, anyway. Friends. Themselves. Mom? Somebody! But I’m more interested in what creates a consistently saleable ‘collectible’ author.

"The reader in me wants desperately to talk about quality here. And quality, however it may be defined, does have an impact. A certain number of people will be drawn to any specific author ... what the author writes, the words s/he chooses, the rhythm of those words as they are crafted into thoughts, phrases, sentences. These folks provide the baseline for ‘normal’ demand. Fowles draws enough people to his writing style that you cannot go wrong stocking plenty of reading copies, priced to move, in your brick and mortar (or even virtual) shop.

"Of this set of people (call them fans if you must), a small percentage will be predisposed to ‘collecting.’ These ‘fans-who-are-also-collectors’ set the baseline for ‘collectible’ demand. It has been my experience that the subset of ‘fans-who-are-also-collectors’ is, given the volume that books are usually produced in, insufficient to sustain a strong *collectible* marketplace for an author all by itself. To generate more than just ‘reading copy’ prices, you need what I used to call demand ‘multipliers.’ These days (in my cynical old age), I am more prone to call them ‘bubble-makers.’

"Any factor that gets scouts, dealers and other speculators involved is a potential ‘bubble-maker.’ Not surprisingly, since I’m writing this bit, Fowles has a number of these multipliers at work for him. In no particular order, here are a few:

"1) An, if not truly elusive, then at least ‘not-too-common’ book. The Collector in the correct first British printing fits this bill quite nicely, thank you very nice. Seriously, if you are going to collect something, it simply can’t be *too* easy to gather the collection together. As much as collectors piss and moan about the difficulty of finding something, in their hearts they know that the challenge is part of the fun. And face it, if it were truly easy to find, in our supply-and-demand driven world, then how valuable could it be? Which leads to ...

"2) Value. One of the ways collectors rationalize their collections to loved ones, friends, future exes’, even to themselves, is the potential for appreciation in value over the course of a lifetime .... 'See, honey, I *only* paid $350. It’s worth $600 easy right now ... Imagine how much it will be worth in a decade.'

"3) Periodic bursts of public visibility... Fowles has this in spades, courtesy The Collector and the number of serial killers who have obsessed over this opus on obsession. Leonard Lake and Charles Ng are, of course, the most well known. Each time A&E, Discovery, the History Channel cover the crimes, an obligatory image of the original edition of The Collector is shown as they detail 'Operation Miranda.' And when the non-fiction troika takes a break, the various ‘ripped from the headline’ franchises rush in to fill the gap.

"4) Special circumstances. That would be the appeal that a novel of obsession has on folks who are predisposed to obsession.

"5) More than one respected work but an oeuvre that is not overwhelming. Fowles certainly fits this bill. As David mentioned in the original post, both The Magus and The French Lieutenant’s Woman are solid, respected works, the second with a respected movie treatment attached to it (the first, not so much ;-).

"6) A Treasure Hunt bonus... Some of Fowles nonfiction will be shelved away from ‘Literature’ giving a joy to a particular breed of collector, the digger... S/he prefers the joy on unearthing little nuggets where they are least expected. For a writer with a (relatively) small number of “A” items in their bibliography, Fowles has a surprising number of titles that could end up just about anywhere in a bookstore. And what digger among us has not fantasized about finding a signed first printing of The Collector in Hobbies and Crafts. ;-)

"That should do for now. As promised, not particularly pleasing as a whole but some morsels for you to chew on, anyway. While it may make an appearance on my own blog, I’ll spare you the diversion into a theory of aesthetics -- however appropriate the topic, if not my treatment of it, would be while discussing Fowles, as well as the tedious discussion of the formation of economic bubbles.

"*I’ve come up with a couple of working theories to explain David's lull, BTW. The first (and certainly most reasonable): The Real World. You know... work, family, friends, Life, the Universe, Everything. leaving no time for what is, in the end, a deeply discretionary expenditure of time, and as such, easily (or perhaps not-so-easily) sacrificed. But how about this alternate explanation, drawn from my own digital experiences... A long unused email address linked to the blog. A computer crash (or theft). A new computer. A forgotten password. Add ‘em up and what do you got? A forlorn blogger, nose pressed to the screen, trying to find a way in. On the other hand, maybe he’s just tired of it... or my compulsive need to add where I can. No matter. I’ll keep adding on until he tells me: 'STOP!' "