Venice is a place for the young or the old, and so when young I went there as often as I could. The rest of the time I read about the place. Jan Morris' Venice was the best, but William Dean Howells made a strong showing. Nearly a quarter century ago, in January 1987, I bought from my local bookdealer, Quill & Brush, a copy of Howells' Venetian Life, the autograph edition. It was No. 118 of 550 copies, signed by author, illustrator and publisher. The covers were soiled and the labels were worn but it set me back $75, plus I presume the tax. It was a fair amount of change back then, at least for me. Why I bought it I have no idea. If I had thought about it, I would have presumed it was uncommon but in truth I would have had no idea even how to look for a copy. Quill & Brush was the only dealer I knew.
I never read it. It went from shelf to box. I never even looked at the plates. Sigh. I dragged the box to California, then to a second address, then a third, then a fourth, then to Chicago, then to storage in Chicago. The other day, I espied the two volumes again in a forlorn corner of storage. I am now middle-aged, and haven't been to Venice in a long time. While Howells is not in the first rank of 19th century writers, he is firmly in the second rank. Surely time had been kind to my volumes. If I could clear a C-note in unloading them, I would regard it as a victory, and never mind their carbon footprint -- or the fact that, after inflation, I would need $143 just to break even. For that matter, I wanted at least $500 to stop feeling ridiculous.
Time has not been kind. David R. Spivey has a copy online for $80, although he does not seem to realize it is signed by Howells. There is another set for $100, and two for $125, one for $130, one for $250, two for $275, one for $350, one for $388. Ten sets, overall. Looks like I'll be keeping them for another 25 years. By which point, I suspect, there will be 20 online.
If you're looking for something specific and uncommon at the right price, it often isn't on the Web. But it's still astonishing to reflect how much is there, and at what modest prices. I have been reading Cheap Sons of Bitches: Memoirs of the Book Trade, by William Hoffer, published in the anthology Carry on Bumping (1988). Hoffer, who died too young, was the preeminent Canadian dealer of his era. He didn't like the stuff much, which made it easier to sell. He thought that no one else liked it either: "Canadian poetry has always sold so badly that most of it is undistributed rather than actually rare." (Irving Layton was an exception: he attempted to actually distribute his books of verse, "a fact that resulted in the wholesale destruction of most of them.")
A few years before I bought Venetian Life, Hoffer bid on a copy of the signed limited edition of E.J. Pratt's The Iron Door (1927). He got it for $90, and says he was delighted: "If the collective consciousness of this country is of the opinion that a brilliant copy of one of a hundred copies printed on hand-made paper, signed and numbered, of an important collection by the most important Canadian poet of the early part of the 20th century is worth nothing, that country and that consciousness deserve to die." He said he would wait 15 years, if need be, to get a proper price for his book.
And now, 25 years later? You can pick up a reasonable copy of the limited online for $125. If you're a dealer, that's $100. Hoffer would weep, or at least laugh. Before he died, he gave up Canadian literature and moved to Moscow.