Allan Milkerit, 1945-2007

Graciliano Ramos, Anguish

Knopf, 1946.

"You gotta believe in your books." Allan said that, over and over, until I believed it too. That meant, among other things, that once a book entered his stock it stayed there until sold. No special $1 table out front; he'd give the book away first. But in many cases, it just collected dust. Many booksellers were like that back in the old days, before 1995 or so. You never could tell when that one special customer who had been looking for this particular title forever would come along, happy to pay the price demanded.

So this is yet another volume that sat for along time. Ramos (b. 1892) is an unknown name here, and Brazilian literature is uncollected. It's a tale of approaching madness, which at a glance seems impressive in its way but not so definitive as to have become an international classic. There are a handful of firsts online, all of which I suspect will still be there in 2015. That's a small pity. The book, like many Knopf volumes from the era, is a quiet triumph of bookmaking: bound well, with the author's name on a device on the front boards and an understated deep blue jacket. It was designed to last lifetimes and would grace any shelf. Allan's price: $50.

Vladimir Nabokoff, Laughter in the Dark

Bobbs-Merrill, 1938.

His first book published in America, in a new translation that supposedly improves on the impossibly scarce UK edition from John Long. Booksellers ask quite a bit for fine copies in jacket -- Between the Covers wants $7,500. Allan was asking $50 for this, which he marked "as is" in an unusual concession. Most of the time, there was no signpost to the flaws in his books. He was not one to write "note condition" or "rear endpaper missing." He assumed the buyer had eyes.

The book is in the first state green boards, a little worn at the edges and more so at the corners and tips. The second free endpaper is loosely attached, and on the rear pastedown there is an unsightly gash involving the removal of a pocket. This was a library book, and has a few stamps saying so arbitrarily buried in the text. Some pages toward the end were very roughly opened. But hey, the book presents well. There's no jacket, of course.

Allan had this book a long time. I used to wonder why no one wanted it. I used to wonder why I didn't. But it was an era when collectors only wanted perfect books. Most of them didn't have $7,500 for a perfect copy, but they thought one would be coming up soon for much less. How, they never said. Maybe they would find that little shop that had just opened yesterday with a happily clueless owner. Maybe they'd arrive first at a yard sale with similarly ignorant sellers.

Allan despaired of this. Such collectors had tremendous collections, he would say, but only in their mind. They were virtual collections. In the real world, you had to take what you saw. But his Laughter in the Dark sat on the shelf. A few months ago, I was offered a copy that was just about fine in jacket for $1,000. A bargain. But it was the second state binding, which meant it wasn't quite right. That book, too, sat on the shelf. The Internet has made us all very choosy.

I had never read Laughter in the Dark before. The first two paragraphs pull you in:

"Once upon a time there lived in Berlin, Germany, a man called Albinus. He was rich, respectable, happy; one day he abandoned his wife for the sake of a youthful mistress; he loved; was not loved; and his life ended in disaster.

"This is the whole of the story and we might have left it at that had there not been profit and pleasure in the telling; and although there is plenty of space on a gravestone to contain, bound in moss, the abridged version of a man's life, detail is always welcome."

One of those details I particularly liked involves a woman being left by her lover for the last time: "He walked up to her, kissed her ear and went out quickly.The kiss sang in her ear for quite a while."

And then there's this: Albinus installs his mistress in the apartment where he had lived with his wife and child: "He grew accustomed to Margot's presence in these rooms, once so full of memories. She had only to change the position of some trifling object, and immediately it lost its soul and the memory was extinguished; it was only a matter of how long she would take to touch everything, and, as she had quick fingers, in a couple of months his past life in these twelve rooms was quite dead."

This copy is 72 years old. It has held up well. It is good for another 72 years. The first of them -- a decade? a quarter-century? -- it will spend on my Nabokov shelf.

Willa Cather, December Night

Knopf, 1933.

Allan lived -- and died -- in an apartment near the Panhandle, a fourth floor walkup that was owned by a customer of his, a lawyer who didn't get bent out of shape when Allan was late with the $1,150 in rent, which was almost always. It was a relatively spacious place that had never been modernized -- no granite countertops here. That was okay with Allan, since he never cooked much and didn't appear to notice his surroundings anyway. It was, of course, crammed full of books -- books awaiting repair, his personal collections, first books waiting for the authors to be discovered (this was called "the incubator"), books he was reading. Pride and joy was his collection of City Lights Pocket Poets, but he also had good runs of Tillie Olsen, James Salter, William Gaddis, Annie Proulx, B. Traven (in German) and Willa Cather. This last collection was something I never really looked at, having no interest in Cather, but it was extensive. When he died, the best Cather books, I was told, were not to be found. Perhaps he had sold them off to raise money, as he had done with the Gaddis books and the City Lights books. There are of course other possibilities.

Supposedly, everything in the apartment was moved into the store after his death. This slim but gaudy volume is one of only two titles I saw there that obviously came from the Cather collection. It's a brief extract from "Death Comes for the Archbishop" done at the height of Cather's popularity in the depths of the Depression, a Christmas greeting by other means. Ten thousand copies were done, and this -- plus the general disinclination these days to collect Cather in depth -- has insured that it is still common. What sets this copy apart is that both the brown boards and the brown paper jacket are near mint, with no smudges or tears. And it wasn't even covered in mylar. Three prices in pencil on the book -- 50 cents on the back flap, $24 on the front paste-down, and $5.95 in the usual second-hand spot. I prefer to think Allan paid the 50 cents. I prefer not to think about what happened to the rest of the Cathers.

.

Marguerite Yourcenar, Coup de Grace

Secker & Warburg, 1957.

First edition in the UK of her second book in English and my favorite, about a brother and sister and the Prussian officer they both love, set against the backdrop of a civil war in the Baltic states. The jacket blithely gives away the shocking ending. Better known now for the  1976 Schlondorff film. Difficult and expensive in the original 1939 edition, common in English. This is a nice copy with a tiny bit of foxing on page edges and a dirty rear panel. Allan was asking $40.

 It begins:

"It was five in the moring, and pouring rain. Erick von Lhomond sat waiting in the station buffet at Pisa for the train which was to take him back to Germany. He had been wounded at Saragossa, and was just off an Italian hospital ship. Though nearly forty, he seemed young, as if his kind of hard, youthful elegance would never change; the narrow profile bespoke French ancestry, but his mother was Balt and his father Prussian, hence the pale blue eyes, the tall stature, the arrogant smile and the heel-click, the latter now in abeyance, of course, because of his fractured and bandaged foot. It was close to that hour between dark and dawn when men of feeling confide and criminals confess, and when even the least loquacious among us try to fend off sleep by story after story, or by summoning up the past."