Allan Milkerit, 1945-2007

Graham Greene, Stamboul Train (jacket only)

Heinemann, 1932.

Allan had a lot of dust jackets over the years, as well as a big bookcase of books that needed jackets. The supply of the former seemed to decrease more than the latter. I took some of each when he died although I have no great hopes of complete books emerging from either end. This one, however, I don't remember picking up. Its strengthened with paper attached to the verso, which at least has served to keep the whole thing intact. The cover illustration, of a train plunging to Istanbul, is lovely. 

The spine of the jacket states "Second Printing." Second printing means second printing, right? Well, this book has a convoluted history. The first printing was recalled because J.B. Priestley felt that a character libeled him. That issue is therefore very scarce. Royal Books has a copy of the book on offer in Catalog 35 for $4,500. It is the second issue text with the "second printing" notation on the jacket spine. Royal says the notation is hand-stamped although in the photo it looks like the notation on Allan's copy, which does not appear hand-stamped. Or maybe I just don't get hand-stamping.

The Royal description goes on: "It is our educated guess that Heinemann stamped a few copies of the wrapper in order to show J.B. Priestley and other members of the Book Society that their requested textual changes (i.e., first edition, second issue of the book) had been made. There is no recorded jacket variant such as this example, nor have we ever encountered another." I still don't understand why the Royal copy is not simply a second printing but whatever.

I guess I could spend $250 for a copy of the book and put this jacket on. Even then it would probably be a second printing, no? Not that I have $250 anyway. 

Update: Auction at PBA today that includes as item 93 a copy without jacket of Stamboul Train, the second issue. The opening bid would be $150 which seemed high but still tempted me. So I took the jacket over there. And it didn't fit. The jacket was noticeably taller than the book. Sigh. So apparently it will only fit a book stamped second edition.

John Fowles, two titles

John Fowles, The Magus (Cape, 1966) and The Collecter (Little, Brown, 1963).

In a recent review in the TLS, A.N. Wilson asserts that "popular English fiction of the twentieth century did not have much of a shelf life." He asserts that no one still reads J.B. Priestley, Angela Thirkell, Warwick Deeping or Dorothy Sayers. He further claims that later writers "are crumbling before your eyes, like exhumed bones exposed to ultraviolet." The two examples he mentions are Kingsley Amis and John Fowles.

Sayers retains a following, but nonetheless there's a degree of truth to Wilson's dismissal of the first four. With Amis he is on shakier ground; several of the major titles are being reissued both here and in England at this moment. As for Fowles ... Six years after Fowles' death and, more relevantly, 27 years after his last novel (and 43 after his last truly popular novel) he seems on a gentle but persistent slide downward. Most of the usual late career or posthumous things have been done: the collected nonfiction, the first biography (quite a good one), the journals (two big volumes, snubbed in the UK and ignored in the US). I don't think he was a big letter writer so that's out. There's not much, in other words, to brake the descent. The on-rush of new books is too great for a measured reconsideration of the past.

His reputation will rest on the first three novels: The Collector, The Magus and the French Lieutenant's Woman. Even as the others fall away, I think they will last. The first is an expert study of obsession; the second a bildungsroman that will always appeal to emotional adolescents; and the third is simply a good novel bolstered by a movie that is reportedly good if not great.

If the larger public has moved on for the rest of the work, there is still a devoted core of fans. This became evident after Fowles' second wife, Sarah, decided to part with the vast majority of his library. Surprisingly, no institutional buyer emerged for the entire collection. Charles Cox, an English bookseller previously unknown to me, put together exemplary catalogues of, first, the older material and then the modern books, including Fowles' own copies of his own titles. There was only one problem: Cox consistently priced the books too low. The best titles went instantly.

With the first catalogue, I put off ordering anything (it was the market crash of 2008 and I was distracted). With the modern material, I was at least six weeks late and only managed to purchase a couple of scraps, which I have obstinately refused to open. (Collectors are weird.) I wasn't completely disappointed; something about buying books that Fowles had inscribed to his wife struck me as a little too intimate, like buying his underwear. Or so I consoled myself.

A few weeks ago, Cox began emailing lists of the leftovers. I got the first list on Friday but didn't see it until Monday. As usual I was too late, particularly for this:

NORMAN, Francis.  Catalogue of Old Books. Number 45[-48, 50-63.] F. Norman, 1968-82. Eighteen catalogues plus one duplicate and a photocopy, wrappers. A number of leaves with slips excised, but generally in fair condition. All but a couple of the catalogues are marked by John Fowles with a view to possible purchases and several bear or contain quite extensive lists of his orders, calculations of total prices &c. In the final number is an a.l.s. from Norman to Fowles, thanking him for a copy of Ourika "in such resplendent dress" and its "very unexpected reference to my bookshop. I know a bookshop is an education for the bookseller, but had not thought of it as such for the customer ..."  Also present are two letters to Fowles from a fellow customer reporting first Norman's illness and then his death in April 1983, and a letter from Norman's son on the same occasion: "I know my father valued your friendship ..." Fowles valued Norman too, as his tribute in Ourika amply testifies. He had known him since his Hampstead days in the mid-fifties: "Norman is a bluff, awkward, friendly second-hand bookseller with a mind like a jackdaw's nest and a shop which must rank as one of the dirtiest, most disorganized and lovable in North London" (Journals, I, 383, December 1956).  £50

Ah, for those days when there were dirty, disorganized and lovable bookstores on practically every corner. These catalogues would have been a fine souvenir of that lost era, but were snatched up by someone else. Now the relationship between shops and collectors is disappearing, just like the catalogues themselves. Cox's own catalogue of this material is merely an Internet list, which will be evanescent unless I and others print it out for our collections.

Meanwhile, I will note here that I long ago gave away Allan's Fowles books to my friend Liz. The Magus had a worn jacket and The Collector is common in the American issue unless very fine, which this wasn't. Did Allan ever sell a Fowles book? Probably not.

Update: Joe says in the comments that Allan did indeed sell Fowles. Maybe Fowles' wonky mysticism meshed with the San Francisco spirtuality. Anyway, Joe says, Allan sold at least five Fowles books at Valhalla.

"And Richard sold 2. I have sold 13 over the years. Of those 20 total, the first 10 were sold from 1998-2002 and all to dealers. The last 10, all mine, were sold from 2004-2011 and, it appears, were purchased by "real" people.

"Beyond that, I got nuttin’...

"Well, truth be told, I got the start on a meditation about the collectability of Fowles, another about the relationship (or lack thereof) between quality and collectabilty, a third imagining what an ‘84 Charing Cross Road’ of the Internet Age would look like. LOL. Consider yourself spared."

No, no, I want to hear all three!

(Post  slightly revised 9/2012)

First Book of 2012

We Are Many, by Pablo Neruda. Published in the U.S. in simultaneous cloth and paper editions by Cape Goliard/Grossman, the U.S. wing of Cape Goliard. I bought the book yesterday in the old-fashioned way -- I saw it on a shelf in Moe's rare book room, which seemed invigorated by new stock. It wasn't there last time, and I feared it wouldn't be there next time. This post really doesn't have anything to do with Allan, although his ghost shadows me everywhere.

Is there a bibliography or even a checklist anywhere of the Cape Goliard Press? It published Ginsberg, Neruda, Creeley, Burroughs and others in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The editions were attractive and often over-size, with signed and numbered runs for the collector. It was an off-shoot of Cape. A cursory Google search reveals nothing helpful.

I already have several copies of different states of this book. At least one is in storage but I was also able to find on my shelves a copy of the hardcover of the UK issue, issued a year earlier. The UK colophon calls for 1400 paperback copies and 100 hardbound signed copies, but my hardcover is not signed or in the special limited jacket but a pictorial white jacket.

This edition bought yesterday is only the paperback, but what prompted me to pull out my wallet was the review slip that was tucked in. Publication date was April 26, 1968, midway between the King and RFK assassinations and a rather tumultuous time in America. 

This copy of the book -- it's barely more than a pamphlet, really -- has weathered its near half century well. There is a tiny snag to the top of the glassine jacket, otherwise it is fine. The cover cut-out by Jim Dine in untorn. The pages are fresh. The cheapest fine copy of the UK trade paper edition is $56 from Any Amount of Books. The cheapest limited is from Bernard Shapero for $1100, which seems reasonable. There's only one other fine copy of the U.S. editon online -- weirdly, it is another review copy for $60.

 Ah, but what about the poems themselves. Since when do we collectors care about the contents? There are seven poems here, good but not great Neruda, which is enough:

I have lived so much that some day

They will have to forget me forcibly,
rubbing me off the blackboard.

My heart was inexhaustible.

 

New Hope for the Dead

This post is by Joe, with a postscript by the editor:

I Search Dead People.

Is that weird? Probably. But a series of trivial events ... a book order that led to the memory of a customer which collided with an image of a couple of dealers ... detailing the specifics would produce a graph that could easily be mistaken to be for a story on the search for the Higgs boson ... led me to google Allan today. Well, to be tediously accurate, I googled "allan" and "milkerit".

The web results were predictable. This blog, of course. A couple of other blogged RIPs. The seemingly active hundreds of listings of his business and "profile" (He’s been dead for four years, guys). Rather than traipse through pages upon pages of scraped muck, I tried something different today. I clicked the “books" link from the bar on the left. And with that one change, I went from disgust at the stunning amount of crap that the World Wide Web can generate to true appreciation for what it can provide.

About 54 results (0.19 seconds) ... of course, when you click to page 2, the total falls away to only 13. Still, a 1991 ad for The Gull in AB Bookman's Weekly ... his name along with other sellers, all trying to make a go of it. There he is in a 1990 AB Bookman's Yearbook as an “exhibiting dealer” with specialties in “19th- & 20th-century literature, Detective fiction, Poetry, Screenplays.” His "List 21: 169 Items" in the 1986 American book collector with his Pittsburg address (his doomed experiment with home ownership). A 1981-1982 Directory of specialized American bookdealers with an Oakland address.

Look! He’s an author. “List 38” by Allan R. Milkerit. Another titled “Books." A third: “List 40.” No details available. Snapshots of his life in books, presented in 13 links, some addresses, and a couple of book lists saved from the trash.

----

Note from the editor: I differ with Joe a bit on this. Looking at this list in Google makes me more sad than anything, since so little is preserved.

This was once the lot of nearly all of us who were not statesmen or mass murderers. As you get older and prepare to join oblivion yourself, you notice how much fades. That brilliant young ingenue who was the talk of the town and seemed certain to dominate the theater (or literary scene or journalism) for decades to come? Gone somewhere, no forwarding address. In the moment, things seem eternal, but they hardly ever are.

The Internet changed all that, of course. Now much is recorded there. Young people automatically track themselves and other young people. But if you were active before, say, 1990, your deeds have been lost.

One of the first editors I worked under at the Washington Post in the early 1980s -- I was a mere copy editor -- was named Lee Lescaze. He was, I have always heard, a great war journalism in Vietnam. But he died young, in 1996. There is no trace of his journalism on the Web, so it is as if it didn't exist.

Soon, I imagine, this will change. Children will set up what are in essence memorials to their parents -- "if you want to know what Granny was like, click this." Which is of course in essence what we are doing here. The literature on modern bookselling is paltry indeed. This blog is a tiny attempt to add to that record.

You Gotta Believe

"You gotta believe in your books." -- ARM's guiding philosophy

This post is by Joe with a postscript by the editor:

I suffer from the same delusion/fantasy/misconception /disease. I’m not sure there is a cure.

It is nearly impossible to get me to physically throw away a book. If the book intrigued me enough to buy it in the first place, then why should I abandon that belief (and book), even when evidence exists that it is unsaleable? I can’t even pitch books that I did not explicitly choose, the dregs of some collection or another that arrived as "part of the deal." I leave them outside the door as freebies in hopes that somebody will come along and rescue them. If I could send them off to an island of misfit books, I probably would.

The problem? A kind of a Gresham’s Law of books. Just as bad money drives out good, so, in a brick and mortar shop, bad books always drive out the good ones. It’s like this. You have a limited amount of space in your store. You stock them with books you believe will sell.

They are all, in your mind, ‘good’ books to begin with. Slowly your clientele pick and choose what they want. What is left, over the years, can only be described as "rejects," literally books that have been rejected by your customers. You rationalize that the right customer has not come along (which may very well be true) but in the meantime, those rejects take up space on your shelves.

You restock, again with high hopes. Customers come. Customers go with books in hand leaving you with more rejects. Repeat enough times and you have a bookshop that is filled with "bad" (read: unsaleable or worthless) books and no customers (because your customers have seen nearly every book each time they came in) and even if they did come in, they do not want to take the time to sift through all that bad to find the ever-dwindling good.

The correct solution is to ruthlessly cull your stock and pitch the drek. But you must have the time, the personality, and yes, the confidence in yourself to admit you made a mistake in the first place when you bought it.

But wait, you think. What about the Internet? Ssshhh. Don’t say that! Because that’s what folks like me and (somewhat ironically given his non-internet nature as a seller) Allan say/said to ourselves. "The right buyer just hasn’t found us yet." And, we imagine, with the whole world searching, s/he is bound to find our treasure sooner or later. Long tail and all that rot.

Alas, too many booksellers with too many books and not enough demand mean you wait a *long* time for that buyer. Meanwhile, it takes up space, either on a shelf or even in storage.

I’ve not thought this through yet (it occurred to me literally as I wrote this piece) but we are watching a form a Gresham’s Law on the Internet, too. Search for books much on-line and you can’t help but notice the increasing amount of drek cluttering the databases. Ex-libs, incorrectly cataloged books, PODs. Bad listings drive out good.

----

Note from editor: Well, maybe. Pre-internet, of course, this was the thrill of bookshops. You found something that everyone had passed over, including the owner, for years. There were fashions in literature then, not this 24-hour buffet where your subculture could feast at any moment. Cormac McCarthy went from being unsaleable -- the era of the Southern writer had ended, the Gothic had never taken off, and a Southern Gothic writer couldn't get the postage to get out of town -- into a modern classic whose individual titles were worth hundreds of millions of dollars. For a brief moment, you could find his books on the shelves for $5 -- and be smart enough to pick them up.

(I remember Allan selling a shelf of McCarthy books to an LA dealer. They agreed on a price of $600. The books included at least one early proof, something that is literally unfindble now. The dealer sent Allan a check for $600 minus 20 percent. Allan was annoyed but didn't stop doing business with him. He was proba bly happy to unload the books.)

Some writers, perhaps most, never came back of course. Serendipity, to its closing day, had bookcases of Joseph Hergesheimer and Gertrude Atherton that had never been touched in my lifetime. But for the amateur scout, deciding who was dead and who was only sleeping was part of the fun. Allan had books on his shelves that no one wanted, that I failed to buy, and that I've literally never seen again.

Priced to Sell, Part 3

Take it away, Joe:

"Starting my own blog has provided a lesson on why I enjoy yours so much... One word: Focus. My blog as it sits now provides too large a canvas for me to use effectively. My mind flits from topic to topic with little rhyme or reason leaving fragments of thoughts where I would prefer seeing a unified vision. A topic blog provides borders, framework, a tennis net, if you will, that forces me to restrain myself, at least a little bit. In short, while I have a shiny new place where I can spread out a bit, you can be sure I will be back often, and not just to do my laundry ;-)

"The Niatum book was Ascending Red Cedar Moon. Harper & Row (1974). I could easily imagine Allan’s very ownership of the book in question coming as a direct result of a conversation, imagined here in this totally contrived rough sketch of a dialogue from the alt.universe I live in (and all typed while still holding the belief that Allan may well have had perfectly valid evidence for making his claim in the first place and the entire premise of my questioning the inscription is so much hooey):

ARM: Look at this. It’s a 1974 published book inscribed in 1973. That’s a selling point.

KS: I don’t think so ... [presents other options]

ARM: No. It is. 1973 .... You should use that as a selling point.

[a couple of more back and forths]

KS: If you think so, you sell it.

ARM, stubbornly: You know what, I will.

"The most likely outcome of your foray into 'convincing Allan' would probably have been a grudging acknowledgement that you *could* be right while his eyes flitted from the book to a point just over your right shoulder, then back to the book ... real eye contact would only be made if he wished to continue the 'discussion.' You'd walk away with the suspicion that all you have convinced him of is not to make his claim to you anymore."

Yep, that sounds about like the way it was.

Priced to Sell, Part 2

It always happens. Your kids grow up, move up away, and ignore you just like you ignored them. (Cue the Harry Nilsson song here.) Your loyal employee, whom you depended on to make your excellent pizza while you were on the golf course, suddenly quits and opens his own pizzeria. Your protege, whom your counseled in the arts of deception, betrays you to your boss. 

It's the way of the world. So it pains me just a bit to report that Joe has his own blog now, found-to-be-obsolete.blogspot.com, not that he ever would have told me. It's got graphics and everything, and is an excellent homage to Allan and more besides. I offered Joe the keys to THIS blog but no. He wanted to make his own. I only learned that while checking the vast traffic this blog receives -- 80 visits on one day! -- and noticed they were coming from someone who proved to be Joe.

Meanwhile, Joe sent in this response to my posting of his latest:

"Yes, Editor, as I am sure you are aware, you are following me correctly and your conclusion:  'Not completely impossible, but rather unlikely' is correct as well. I suspect that anybody who has interacted with Allan for any extended period of time has run into one of his ‘Conclusions’ that seems 'not completely impossible, but rather unlikely.' And if you’ve encountered enough of these ‘conclusions,’ you learn that you may well have better luck trying to alter the entire space-time continuum so as to make it line up with Allan’s reality than wasting your time trying to convince Allan he was wrong.

"One of my more vivid memories of Allan and our blog host interacting was at the aforementioned Santa Monica book fair. Allan and I were tending our booth together when David came up to me and said something along the lines of 'I need to steal your partner briefly to get him to admit to him that he is wrong.' Talking about some book or another, never did find out which one. But as Allan was hauled away, I just sort of half-smiled, shook my head and deadpanned to nobody in particular 'Good Luck with that.' Submitted with the utmost respect, a smile and a shrug ... It was just one of the many facets of Allan."

Fair enough. I remember that incident at the Santa Monica Book Fair, but not the book. Or whether I was convincing. By the way, Joe, what was the title of the Niatum book?

Coming soon: More posts by Joe!