Camilo Jose Cela, Cuaderno del Guadarrama

Arion, 1960.

If I had to guess which Nobel laureate in the last 25 years proved the least collectible, it would be Harold Pinter, which was a surprise to me. When Pinter won I bought a shelf of his books from Serendipity, all of which are probably worth less now. Playwrights, I should have known, are almost never collectible. (Dario Fo in 1997, the weirdest Nobel ever, is probably another example, but there is so little Fo in English it is hard to tell.) The only saleable Pinter material is signed, perhaps because there is hardly any of it.

A runner-up, however, would be Camilo Jose Cela from 1989. The Spaniard was hardly known in this country before the award. Since then, only three new books from his vast oeuvre have been translated. The last of them, Christ Versus Arizona, gained so little traction I doubt the most foolhardy publisher will venture another.

The little oblong volume at hand was picked up, I imagine, from the Spanish shelf of some small shop. Always look there, Allan counseled; interspersed among the Teach Yourself Spanish book was frequently a gem or two. Little more than a pamphlet, it is an account of Cela's trip to the Guadarrama Mountains. The drawings by Eduardo Vicente are delightful.

Only a handful of copies online, all from Spanish dealers, between $50 and $100. Allan wanted $100 for this, which is steep considering it had flaws: a small brown stain, as if from a drop of coffee, on the front wraps, and a little chip to the back wraps.

Comments

[Joe Marchione]

Allan's pricing on this one triggers a thought or two on scouting and the nature of booksellers in general and Allan in particular. First, let's accept your quite plausible assumption about where he found the book. Cheap, tucked away in the foreign language section of some otherwise unpromising bookstore (OK, the bookstore doesn't *have* to be unpromising... but face it, it makes a better story if it was ;-)

I've fallen victim to this more than once. You find a treasure tucked away and immediately start thinking about value. To be honest, you're not really thinking about value. You want the bragging rights/stories that the find will generate. You bring it back to catalog and, away from the rush of discovery, a quiet but insistent whisper tells you it isn't *quite* what you thought it would be. It's good! No doubt. But not the kind of find that stories can be told over many years of burrito lunches. You have two options. Sigh, ratchet down the expectations and price accordingly. Or drown out the whisper and go for broke. Over the years, I've noticed that its *way* tougher to ratchet down the expectations if I've already shown off the book. Since I am rarely able to get out and scout with other sellers or my wife anymore, it is easy to hear the whispers now. It wasn't always.

One moral of the story could be "Always Scout Alone." But that would never work for Allan. Scouting was both a social event and a competitive sport. Don't get me wrong, *nobody* was more generous with his finds while out scouting than Allan. His goal was not to end up with the best books at the end of the day. Not even close. But one goal was most assuredly to *find* the best books. And the slimmer the pickins', the better it was when he found that gem.

[Joe Marchione]

More thoughts on the nature of pricing and selling books, perhaps telling you more about me than Allan but so that goes...

I've noted many times before, though not on this blog, that there may be no profession more inaccurately named than that of 'bookseller,' especially at the level that Allan and I worked at... the muddled middle... . We're not really bookSELLERS. At the core of our being, we are bookBUYERS. No sale, no matter how lucrative, can match the adrenalin rush of finding and buying a good book. The newly acquired book seems to hold nearly unlimited potential. Yes, that potential is almost always doomed to be unrealized. And we know that going in. Still, we embrace the anticipation like a junkie. Each time we see the book on display, we are reminded, even if only at a subconscious level, of the original rush. Yeah, it pisses us off some times that it hasn't sold. But on the other hand, we get to see it again, ride that little adrenalin wave one more time. The actual sale leads to, dare I say it, an almost post-coital malaise (and one of the reasons it was so tough to get Allan to do the post-sale dirty work... the packing, the shipping... the book no longer told tales of its potential but rather horror stories of its future... postal abuse, disappointed customers, who knows what else). Good, bad or indifferent sale, we know we won't have that book around to whisper sweet tales of its discovery and potential. But cash in our pocket, we're armed and ready to do it all over again. And it will be even better this time.