Allan Milkerit, 1945-2007

John Updike, Of the Farm

Knopf, 1965.

One reason I'm so slow and getting slower is that I tend to actually read Allan's books now. I think I feel that when the books are gone I'll die or something -- so I must never finish. But that is mere superstition. (Or is it?) Anyway, as I think we've noted here before, back when bookselling was regional John Updike had little appeal on the West Coast. Perhaps they saw more clearly than the dealers who specialized in him? For all the celebratory reviews in the leading journals, I don't think much of Updike's work will last. 

Including this book. Someone's trying to sell an unsigned copy for $49 that has the front free endpaper missing. Someone else wants $75 for a signed later printing. Good luck to them. The cheapest signed first is only $5 more. Top price: $359 for a copy with a signed bookplate. Allan was asking $100; if Joe is right about the doubling of the first number in the code, he paid $25 in 1997.

Unfortunately there's the usual secret or not-so-secret flaw of an Allan book: in this case, dark markings on the lower board edges, perhaps from an earlier jacket protector. The trouble extends to the endpaper.  This is not a book a purist collector would want.

The only thing that could salvage this sale is if the tale, Updike's fourth, were an unacknowledged masterpiece. Alas, I think it's probably the opposite -- over-praised. Lots of emotions flowing around in this brief account of a man who takes his new wife and her son to visit his widowed mother on her farm. The mother is a cranky sort, but I think it's Updike who was trying to work out his own anger. One interesting point, 50 years on, is how irrelevant Joey's three young children are to his emotional life. He seems to presume he will rarely if ever see them again. In that era, children were decorative.

I also liked the mother, contemplating her mortality, saying, "The ghost in me wants to get out. I can feel it pushing." 

That's not enough. Although the usual kudos to Knopf for their handsome bookmaking.

 

Priced to Sell

A contribution from Joe that, as usual, took forever for me to post:

All this talk of recognizing Allan books, codes, pricing and the like and I realize we've not even touched the issue of how Allan physically marked/priced his books. For much of his retail bookselling life, Allan displayed in group environments ... shops set up kind of like antique stores, where you would rent space and work an agreed-upon number of days (usually based on the proportion of space you were renting).

The Gull, Tall Stories, Valhalla -- all previously mentioned in this blog -- provided what amounted to publicly viewable storage space for Allan's treasures. For the bookseller, there are exactly two appealing things about this arrangement:

1) You are not tied down to the store 24/7 so you have time to get out and do the truly fun stuff ... scouting for more treasures.

2) You can, unless you are the owner or manager, ignore the administrative end of the business.

The minuses are myriad:

1) At least some of the time, you have to leave your treasures under the care of another seller who may or may not share your opinion about the importance of security. Theft, always an issue in retail environments, can become more likely depending on who is working.

2) On days you work, you have to care for the treasures of other sellers even though you may not share their opinion about the importance of security ... i.e, "relax, nobody's going to steal your books." Never mind your opinion of their "treasures."

3) Dealing with customers who purchase a copy of a book from another seller even though you have a cheaper copy in your section. Ccondition being in the eye of the beholder, you can be convinced that your copy is cheaper AND superior, never mind the two-page previous owner inscription and the missing endpapers.

4) The root issue behind 1), 2) and 3) -- the real meaning of "independent" in the phrase "Independent Bookseller": Two words: Herding Cats. No? How about three, then: Herding Bitchy Cats (is that redundant?).

5) A group shop can be difficult for customers to browse. Sure, if each dealer has their own specialty with no overlap, it works. But the moment you get more than one "first edition specialist," you are setting up a situation where the customer must browse multiple sets of alphabets in literature, mystery, whatever. Booksellers kind of sense how this can be tough on the browser but because we would go up to and well beyond the gates of hell to find a book, we expect the same level of sacrifice from our customers who are, in our mind, by definition "book people."

It is a testament to just how alluring those two pluses are (and especially number one) that they easily outweigh all of the minuses. All this as introduction to a presentation of the hieroglyphs Allan marked his books with. Call it, if you dare, Da Milkerit Code.

Convention at these shared shops was to place your dealer code right next to the price. Allan, for reasons I can only speculate on, placed his code at the lower left gutter of the page where he priced the book (usually the front free endpaper or half title page). It looked like this:

http://home.earthlink.net/~shelfindulgencebooks/Allan/Hieroglyphs/ARM1.jpg

OK. Not bad. You can make that out. Sort of. Of course I took that picture using the Macro setting on my camera.

How about a little scale?

http://home.earthlink.net/~shelfindulgencebooks/Allan/Hieroglyphs/ARMwithScale.jpg

A bit more challenging, eh?

Many booksellers, myself included, share an irrational belief that we could always recognize our own books. Only the slightest bit of reflection would make clear how absurd this belief is. (In my defense, I did say it was irrational. Additionally in my defense, I posited in another post that I can, indeed, often recognize an "Allan" book.)

By extension, we believe that other booksellers will readily recognize our books, especially in this group selling environment. Add our inimitable handwriting and the dealer code seems a superfluous waste of our valuable time. Allan could have taken this to its natural conclusion, placing the code in an odd place, a sort of protest of this silly "rule" he must follow. 

But he didn't. So there is a second possibility here. A surprising number of booksellers like to mark their books in such a way that it might always be identifiable as a book they owned. I'm out of my element here. I despise putting any kind of writing whatsoever in a book, instead providing pricing information on a note tucked into the book. But I suspect that part of the reason Allan place his dealer code away from the price is to prevent it from being erased in one fell swoop when (if) the buyer erased the price.

One thing there can be no doubt about. Allan's pricing scribble was immediately recognizable (if not readable) as his: http://home.earthlink.net/~shelfindulgencebooks/Allan/Hieroglyphs/ARMPrice.jpg (that scribble to the left of the price is to be interpreted as '1st.' Looking at it in this cold 'hard' digitally rendered macro image, I realize I'm not entirely sure just what he was going for after the number '1' perhaps 'ed' for edition? The KL to the top right is another dealer's code and the reason I hate writing in books: over the years, too many dealers make too many marks with too many erasures. In Kantian terms, it doesn't universalize well.)

And, from a different book and with a penny to provide scale:

http://home.earthlink.net/~shelfindulgencebooks/Allan/Hieroglyphs/ARMPriceScale.jpg

That reads 1st $40- | Signed in 1973. (The book was released in 1974. To be honest, I cannot say for sure what year the author noted under his signature:

http://home.earthlink.net/~shelfindulgencebooks/Allan/Hieroglyphs/Niatum_Duane_sig.jpg

Is that last number a 3? a 5? Even an 8? I cannot say for sure which may be why Allan added the note. Still, what to trust? Allan's note? I sure wish I had more information. But that was enough for Allan. He may well have decided he had at one time all the evidence/information that "proved" it was 1973. Once he decided something was "so," that should be the end of the conversation.

(Note from the editor: If I'm following this correctly, Allan was insisting a 1974 book was signed in 1973. Not completely impossible, but rather unlikely.)

Which leaves us one last code, usually in tiny (*really* tiny) scribble to the rear free endpaper at the lower left corner. Back in the old days, before databases, and even to a certain extent still, dealers place some sort of mark in the book, coded information indicating when they bought the book, how much they paid for it and (for some dealers) who/where it came from:

http://home.earthlink.net/~shelfindulgencebooks/Allan/Hieroglyphs/ARMCode.jpg

A frequent sight at any store Allan was working was to see him peer at this code, his nose about four inches from the book. He's checking to see what he paid as he calculates what (inevitable) discount he's going to give you. Sometimes, I had the feeling that he barely even paid attention to what he paid. It was more of a show to make you feel good about getting a discount and help you believe he could afford to give it to you on a book that he clearly should have charged his (already quite reasonable) asking price.

I never felt comfortable asking Allan about his code. I considered it proprietary information that, if known, would give others a competitive advantage when dealing with Allan and I wanted no part of that. The first part is supposed to be some sort of reference to the price paid. JL tells me the number was double the original price Allan paid for the book.

OK, on this one, is that first number a 4 or a 7? Probably a 4. Does that mean he paid $20? It seems unlikely. More on that shortly. The second part is date bought. In this case, 0007 or July of 2000. The third part is a code for who he bought it from. Common "Allan" codes would be PBA (for Pacific Book Auctions), BS (generic bookstore buy), the actual codes that other dealers used in the group store (SYN, JBM, SI, etc).

When I first saw this one, I made out KS, which I'd guess was Ken Sanders. While Ken used to come in to our shop to buy whenever he was in town, Allan would only have a chance to buy from Ken at bookfairs. Back to the records and sure enough, we were at the Santa Monica Book Fair in July of 2000. This also explains the pricing as it was likely that this would have been in trade from Ken and $20 in trade makes more sense for a book that Allan priced at $40 and never sold. Finally, the letters trailing off at the end could be "td," one of Allan's indications for trade. But this is all guessing on my part.

Wow, that ended up way longer than I expected. Well, length not withstanding, consider it just a quick glimpse into the nuts and bolts side of Allan's bookselling world.