Allan Milkerit, 1945-2007

Thomas Flanagan, The Year of the French

Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1979.

   Flanagan lived in Berkeley although largely before my time there. (d. 2002). He was a good buddy of Seamus Heaney -- after Flanagan died Black Oak had for sale two books inscribed by Heaney at (this was rare for Black Oak) reasonable prices. I bought one, Heaney's Nobel lecture, and passed on the other, a paperback of Sweeney Astray, which someone then bought and consigned to Allan, who then sold it to me -- at, of course, hardly any mark-up at all.
   The Year of the French is the first and best-known of Flanagan's three novels, a historical doorstopper of 516 pages. Uncommon signed -- there is a second printing on offer for a very hopeful $328 and a near-fine copy inscribed "in friendship" for $194 and that's about it. This copy has obviously been read and just barely makes it into the near fine category. There is a sticker from Black Oak on the cover that says "autographed copy" which should be removed but sentimentally I will keep it.
    Allan was asking $200, which seems rich, although as always, he would have taken a lot less. The reputation of the book is somewhat unclear -- on Amazon, a recent reissue is acclaimed as literally the best historical novel of the century by one reader, while it is panned by another as tedious and monochromatic. The first few pages are striking but, with the best intention in the world, I will probably never read any more, and the book will be disposed of by my heirs when it comes to rest in my once and future house only a few miles from Berkeley.

Update: I saw online a review copy of this book from a store in Pennsylvania. It was so cheap I ordered it. It's now here. A red and white advance copy card gives a date of publication of May 15, 1979. The jacket is also somewhat better than Allan's copy, so I have swapped jackets. (I know, I know, this is a bad thing to do.) Total cost of the upgrade: $11.50.

John Gardner, The Sunlight Dialogues and The Resurrection

Ballantine, 1973 and 1974, respectively.

      Excuse me while I wax nostalgic. There was a time within living memory when there was a device shaped somewhat like an I-phone that could be carried everywhere and used for communication and entertainment. I speak, of course, of the mass-market paperback, which in its heyday from 1955 to 1975 presented contemporary fiction in its most attractive, cheapest and easily consumable package ever.
     Consider the volumes at hand by John Gardner. The Sunlight Dialogues is presented as Popular (14 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, the cover proclaims), Important ("a major American writer whose promise for the future seems unlimited," according to the Times blurb) and, with the lovely Paul Bacon painting of a stoplight in the foreground of a rural scene, Inviting. Not bad for a heavyweight philosophical tome about the struggle between faith and reason, light and dark, in an upstate New York town.
    The price for these 746 pages in late 1973? Buck ninety-five. The inflation-adjusted equivalent is about $8.50 but if you want a copy of the Sunlight Dialogues now -- and hardly anyone does; its Amazon ranking is 555,000 -- it will set you back twice that from New Directions. 
    As for The Resurrection, Gardner's first novel, this was the first paperback. It also has a Paul Bacon cover, this time depicting a rural cemetery. Howell's bibliography notes that this edition had 554 changes of diction and punctuation by Gardner, making it a first thus. The book is out of print.
    Allan wanted $5 for each of these. They are worth that and more as artifacts of our pre-modern life.

John M. Howell, John Gardner: A Bibliographical Profile

Southern Illinois University Press, 1980.

Amazingly common, considering only a handful of copies must have been done, and those more than three decades ago. Imperfect copies -- like this one, which has a stain on the front jacket panel -- are available for less than $20, and ex-library copies for less than $10. But this bibliography is out of date and of little practical use. More significantly, Gardner seems in terminal decline. He had a revival or two, spurred by friends and the publication of surviving manuscripts, but they didn't stick. The career was wild, the books were interesting, but Gardner didn't define his moment the way, say, Raymond Carver did, and was not as memorably idiosyncratic as, for example, his buddy William Gass. Grendel will be read as long as there are grad students in old English literature, which is to say not much longer. The Resurrection and Nickel Mountain have their fans for their depiction of a pastoral America. That's about it. On ABE, signed books by John Gardner the James Bond writer are far more costly than signed books by the "real" John Gardner.

It hurts to dump this book, like putting a kitten out in a snowstorm, but its only real value is in Gardner's brief but charming afterword, He talks about how he's spent so much of his life, from childhood upward, "cheating my employers and loved ones to write fiction ... what madness it seems! Well, that is how I've spent my life. It could have been worse, I suppose. As my friend Lennis Dunlap once said to me, 'Cheer up, it could've been heroin.' " He adds that "time is running short." He was right -- within a few years, he would be dead.

Update: I took this to the local usd bookstore on buying day. Basically, they would have had to give me a dollar for it. But it was one of the books they turned down. A sad fate for any book, not worth even a buck.

Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho

Grove, 1983.

In the future, we will have no time for anything but beautiful books. Anything less will be sold for pocket change. In the past, or so we imagine, people settled for inferior copies simply because they didn't know any better. That's what Allan must have thought when he bought this semi-scarce late Beckett for $4.50, less discount, and put it on the shelf for $20, less inevitable discount. The jacket is fine, but there is a ripple on the front pastedown as if from a pulled bookplate. There are fine copies online for $30. This would never fetch $20. I will fling it to the secondhand bookshop in the hope it may catch that rare thing, a reader who simply wants to read those happy sentences:

"All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."

Evan S. Connell, Deus lo Volt!

Counterpoint, 2000.

A "Chronicle of the Crusades," to give it its subtitle. Not the book Connell will be remembered for. This copy is signed, done on a stealth visit by the author to San Francisco. For some reason, there are more signed copies of this than most of his other books. Allan wanted $40, which was fair for a $26 list price. But he didn't get it.

T. Coraghessan Boyle, Budding Prospects

Viking, 1984.

An uncorrected proof of Boyle's third book and second novel. As might be expected, a problematic copy: someone wrote the word "local" on the cover and the name and title on the spine -- ok, that was done by the newspaper who originally got this. But the spine is also beginning to split. Well, that could be repaired. But there's also a grease stain on the front cover. That, I am afraid, will never come out.

Every time I see Boyle, he reminds me that he refuses to sign proofs, although he is kind enough to do it for me, who has been following his work for 25 years. So this is now signed with his usual "con amistad." Three copies of this proof are online, from the Strand ($100, but only very good condition), Between the Covers ($200) and Maser ($250). None are signed. In fact, there is only one signed Boyle proof online at all, a copy of Riven Rock for $100. Possibly this book was consigned. There's a half-erased price of $35 on the first page but that wasn't Allan's price. His price has disappeared.

James Thurber, Thurber Country

Simon & Schuster, 1953.

Did Allan ever throw a book away? After he died, we opened boxes in the back of the store, full of many many copies of the same dead book, no value except as firestarter. Since he moved his shop a couple of times, he actually lugged these suckers around. It's a wonder he didn't die of a heart attack years before. But this, as I said before, was part of his charm. The shop was not maximized for value, to put it mildly.

So we have here a copy of a later Thurber book, without jacket, marked $17.50. Did I remove the jacket to put on the spurious "inscribed" copy of this book that Allan had? Otherwise, I can't imagine why I took it, and why I brought it halfway across the country. But even in jacket, this book is worthless. Nothing dates faster than humor, unless it's political memoirs. Off to the recycling shop.

Samuel Hirsh Gottlieb, Overbooked in Arizona

Camelback Gallery, 1994. Two copies: the trade edition, inscribed, and the later limited, signed by auhor and artist as issued but not personalized.

This short tale of an Arizona retiree who finds and then loses his big score nicely nails the true mania of the book collector. It's all here -- the slow realization that there is such a thing as a "first edition"; the trawling of local secondhand shops in the hopes of discovering a treasure; bringing the day's accumulation furtively home in plastic sacks; the day's accumulation elbowing aside yesterday's unread, uncatalogued accumulation; the stacks piled high in the living room, kitchen and bathroom; telling your wife to keep the curtains drawn so the books don't get sunned; hanging around the mailbox waiting for catalogues; the frustration in always getting your copy of AB Bookman's Weekly a day too late, all the good books scarfed up by someone on a better postal route; your wife finally leaving you in despair; the road trips to increasingly distant cities; the wholesale acquisition of remainders in the hope they will ripen; waking early for yard sales; the impossible yearning when you see a fine copy of something you want that you can't afford; realizing that your wife has left you; how some other scout always gets to the good yard sale first and is petting his new treasures as you arrive. We've all been there.

Or were there. Less than 20 years later, much has changed. AB is long defunct and the catalogues are largely gone; the stores themselves are disappearing. Anyone operating a yard sale knows enough to first check the value of the books on the Web. "Overbooked in Arizona" has become a period piece, and is perhaps more valuable for that.

Although not too valuable. "Overbooked" was published first as a paperback in 1993 and then a year later as a hardcover in an edition of 1,500 copies. Signed copies of the paperback can be had for less than $10, and even the limited edition of the hardback -- the copy at hand is No. 107 of 501 slipcased copies signed by the author as well as artist Joe Servello -- goes for as little as $25. This is not one of those collecting tales like Booked to Die -- admittedly, a real novel as opposed to Gottlieb's affectionate parody -- that crosses over to a wider audience.

Allan knew Gottlieb, and presumably got the limited copy from him, although unlike the trade it's not inscribed. Allan is not specifically mentioned in the text, although Tall Stories is. Gottlieb certainly knew his dealers. Here's how he describes the first one his hero encounters: "... when I explained to him that I had recently decided to become a collector of rare books but that I was a novice with no real idea of what I was doing, his eyes lit up, and I thought I saw a small stream of saliva dripping from the corner of his mouth."

I'll keep these.