All Over But the Scouting

So the big book sale was a mild disappointment, but what happens sometimes is this: just when I think I'm going to have to wait a whole year before a pile of good books comes my way, I get lucky.

I go scouting for books and records a couple of times a week, everybody knows this.  I always find one or two things of interest, but on occasion, I'll find a whole bunch of neat stuff.

Sometimes it takes a trip to Tucson.  

Sometimes it's just a trip to Glendale and a thirty minute look-see before meeting my son for lunch.

Last week, at one of the used bookstores I frequent, I started scanning the fiction section and found a nice copy of John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor with a gorgeous cover by Edward Gorey.

I continued scanning.  A few shelves over, I found this copy of James M. Cain's Mignon.  It should have been in the mystery section, but who am I to quibble?  

It's just a reading copy, nothing particularly valuable, but I could tell almost immediately that it belonged to the same person who owned the Barth.  Whenever this happens, I get excited.  Anytime someone dumps their whole collection, it's cause for celebration.  

Especially when it's a good reader.

The next thing I found was this copy of The Motorcycle by Andre Pieyre de Mandiargues which is interesting for a couple of reasons.  

One, I collect Grove Press hardcovers.  Check. Also, this novel was the inspiration for Jack Cardiff's Girl on a Motorcycle (1968) starring Marianne Faithfull.  Check, check, and meow.


I continued scanning shelves, determined to find more books from the same collection.  I picked up an early printing of The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass but passed on Allen Drury's Advise and Consent, Jacqueline Susann's Valley of the Dolls, and Irving Wallace's The Prize before finding this perfectly nice copy of Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One.  I also threw a first edition of Mark Twain's Letters from Hawaii into my basket, in case I ever visit my cousin in Hawaii. 


Then I stopped by the vintage paperback shelves.  


Almost immediately, my eyes zoomed in on this copy of Peggy Swenson's Lesbian Gym.  This is one of those famously camp covers, the kind they reprint on postcards and refrigerator magnets.  

The story of a virgin who was seduced into the wrong kind of loving!

I continued scanning, hoping to find more vintage sleaze.  Nope, nope, nope.  

And then I found Suzy and Vera.  Same author, Peggy Swenson, which is actually a pseudonym for Richard E. Geis.

How can you turn down a book with a tagline like this: 

"The love story of a college girl and a confirmed lesbian."

The paperbacks were only a couple of bucks each.

I couldn't have been happier.  

Speaking Volumes (2/16/13)

There's an annual book sale I go to every year, the kind where you get in line at 3 a.m. even though the doors don't open until 8.  Five hours of waiting and there are still a hundred people ahead of you because certain diehards pitch their tent at 6 p.m. the night before, all for the simple thrill of walking in ahead of everyone else.


It's a terrific sale, tables and tables loaded with interesting books, but people don't donate like they used to and there just aren't as many rare and unusual books as there were just a few years ago.  

I've been attending the sale for nearly two decades, found my share of valuables.  It's still a thrill, still something I circle on my calendar, still something I cannot resist.  You wait and you wait all those hours and the very best stuff usually goes very quickly, within the first fifteen minutes.  Some years I stay two hours, sometimes three.  Depends on what I'm looking for, who I'm buying for.

It goes without saying that I spend more time in line than I do shopping for books.

This year was a relatively easy wait.  I had a good partner in line with me and it was much warmer than it's been the last few years.  

There have been times, waiting in that line, where I bought a cheap cup of coffee just to have something warm in my hands.  Just a few years ago, in what we felt was bitter cold, we took turns sleeping in the van with the heater on for 15-30 minute shifts.  

This year we sat in the same chairs we took camping, covered in blankets and extra layers of clothing. 

If course, it's not just the cold or the lack of sleep that you're battling.  It's the fellow eccentrics that surround you, the unabashed book addicts, the card-carrying dreamers, the socially awkward, the nutcases.  

The line was mostly quiet except for the people sitting next to us who droned on about personal things (their jobs, their sex lives, their unpublished novels). 

We listened in silence until one of the women paused to describe her unusually large hands.  "These gloves I'm wearing?  They're men's size large."

Which was all I needed to burst into laughter.  

I tried to blame it on the lack of sleep, tried to muffle my giggling in the folds of my blanket.  

I didn't fool anyone.

Goodwill Towards Me

Work  has been crazy lately.  

Long hours, six day work weeks.  It's dark when I drive to work and dark when I drive home.  These intensely busy periods happen a couple of times a year, but knowing it was coming hasn't made it any less miserable.  

Life goes on hold when you work too much.  Laundry piles up.  Dishes go unwashed,  television goes unwatched.  Netflix sent me the first disc of Homeland back in December.  

I'm disgusted with myself.

I worked three consecutive Saturdays and after working the last one, I stopped by Goodwill on the way home.  The books and records are less plentiful and less interesting of late, but I did manage to find something.

This edition of Best American Short Stories caught my eye because it's from 1967, the year I was born.  It's popular among collectors because it contains the first appearance of Raymond Carver, whose story “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?” is reprinted here.  An earlier Carver story,  "The Furious Seasons," was among the honorable mentions in The Best American Short Stories 1964.

The book was in good shape and probably worth $50.  I paid two bucks.

I flipped through the records, but didn't buy anything.  There was a striking copy of Frank Sinatra's Sinatra Swings.  The sleeve was bright and beautiful, but the vinyl had a huge chunk missing from it, like someone had taken a bite out of it.  

I don't mind buying records with a scratch or two, but the record has to be intact.  I'm cheap, but I have standards.  

I'm going out again, just as soon as I catch up on my sleep.

Covalent Bonds

I saw Skyfall last week with my lady chums.  Saw it for free.

Last Saturday, I bought a copy of On Her Majesty's Secret Service (Peter Hunt, 1969) from Best Buy, because their $9.99 Bond Blu-rays were packaged with $10 coupons good toward the purchase of a Skyfall ticket.

I also had a $5 Reward Zone coupon, so my Blu-ray only cost $5.44. I chose On Her Majesty's Secret Service because I already own Goldfinger and the Lazenby is frequently ranked among the top 5 Bond movies.

I'm watching it now, as I type this.

James Bond (George Lazenby), handy with a blade

I can tell you exactly how many James Bond movies I watched with my father growing up, because it was the same number of professional baseball games we attended, which is to say zero.

Don't get me wrong, my dad was a great guy.  He drove me to the library a lot, and we ran plenty of errands together.  We just didn't do a lot of traditional father-son things.  He never taught me to whittle.  We never teamed up for a three-legged race or went fishing or slept with the same prostitute.

Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Telly Savalas) tries to make Bond forget all about Donald Pleasence

So it's really no surprise I came late to the Bond franchise.  I came of age during the Roger Moore era, so my bond was campy and lightweight, a real wise-cracker, not tough and misogynistic like Sean Connery.

I know JFK was a huge fan of the Bond novels, and I own all of them, mostly in vintage paperback editions.  You want to know how many of them I've read?  Double-oh-zero.  But that's the nature of collecting.  You can't just collect what you're interested in right now.  You hedge your bets and collect anything you might be interested in in the future.

This Bond omnibus (Macmillan, 1961) collects three novels: Casino Royale, From Russia with Love, and Doctor No.  Another collection, Bonded Fleming (Viking, 1965) contains two more novels (Thunderball and The Spy Who Loved Me) plus five Bond short stories: From a View to a Kill, For Your Eyes Only, Quantum of Solace, Risico, and The Hildebrand Rarity).  I like to think I'll get around to reading them eventually. 

I have one more unread Ian Fleming book in my collection.  It's Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (Random House, 1964), the book he wrote for children.  I saw the film adaptation with Dick Van Dyke at a tender age, and despite my relative inexperience with film criticism, I wasted no time telling my parents the movie stank.  This was no Mary Poppins, no Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory.  Have you seen this film?  It's shitty shitty lame lame, and I say that as a fan of Dick Van Dyke and his ottoman tripping antics.

But back to Skyfall, which I found perfectly entertaining.  Daniel Craig is dynamic, Javier Bardem is deliciously creepy, and the theme song left my head the moment the lights came up. 

 

My only gripe is with AMC management, which made me dump my dinner leftovers before entering the theater.  They offered to hold my two slices of Thai Chicken pizza while I watched the movie, but I politely declined and tossed the food in the trash. 

 

Then I paid $8 for a bag of popcorn, but since I got a free movie ticket it seems awfully petty to complain.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 










 




















 

The Last Place You Look

Michael Ondaatje is coming to town, and I've spent the last two weeks trying to get my mitts on my British first edition of The English Patient. 

It's been driving me crazy.

I knew exactly where The Cinnamon Peeler was.  Same with Handwriting.  In the Skin of a Lion took some digging, as did my second copy of The Conversations, Ondaatje's excellent discussion of film craft with ace editor Walter Murch. 

When I moved, I thought I was careful to put all my valuable books in the same spot, and this edition of The English Patient certainly qualifies.  On the other hand, I've had to make more room over the years, and that means boxing up books and sending them to the garage.  If I was smart, only dead authors would be exiled there, because you really never know who's coming to town and with over a hundred boxes of books in the garage, it's a pain in the ass to look for things. 

When Jim Shepard visited, I couldn't find Batting Against Castro or Kiss of the Wolf.  I had a similar problem with Brad Watson.  Of course, signed copies of their books aren't worth $450 (no offense, fellas).

You're probably asking yourself, "why not a spreadsheet, hotshot?" to which I reply, "what am I, a freakin' psycho with OCD?"

Last weekend, I exhausted all the places The English Patient could be inside the house. 

This morning, after spending almost two hours on yardwork, I went to the garage. 

I started in one corner, and found this perfectly respectable 4th printing of Ulysses (Random House, 1934).

Technically, this book belongs in the garage, since James Joyce is never going to sign it.  But it's such a striking dustjacket I couldn't leave it out there. 

And while I was at it, I figured I may as well liberate Jean Stafford, too.

But that was it.

I was in the garage with a single purpose. I had to remain faithful to my system of opening boxes, resealing them, and stacking them in an orderly fashion. 

I was miserable for much of the morning. 

I did find other things of interest.  My signed Maurice Sendak books, which definitely do not belong in the garage.  Some of my favorite art books (Weegee, Halsman, Damien Hirst).  A couple of Lillian Ross collections and an old William Maxwell novel that belong inside the house with my other New Yorker authors.  In all, I stacked at least five dozen interesting, worthwhile books on my dining room table.

I managed to clear out a large segment of the garage, but The English Patient refused to present itself and I slowly resigned myself to the fact that even though I own the book, it just wasn't going to get signed. I'd find it eventually, just not in time for Michael Ondaatje's appearance.

I gave up.  Threw my hands up in defeat. I came into the house, had a drink of water, and surveyed the mess I'd made dragging various books from the garage. 

But I couldn't quit. 

I went back out for one last, desperate attempt.  Over in the corner, in an area I had't bothered with, I pulled out an unusually lightweight box.  Definitely not the place for a valuable book. 

Inside, I found this:

That's right, a box of cereal from 1985. Empty, of course, but in archival quality.

I've had it longer than any of my personal relationships, which might explain why none of those personal relationships lasted.

There was also a cardboard promotion for Elvis Costello's Kojak Variety (1995).

And there was a lot of dust.

But there was also a single plastic bag from a popular used bookstore, and inside the bag was my copy of The English Patient.

Go figure.

Sometimes I remember a book being in better shape than it really is.  A torn dustjacket, a remainder mark, a later printing. It's rare, but it happens. 

My copy of The English Patient has no visible flaws. 

Even the used price, written in pencil on the front free endpaper, is light and easily erased.

It was only $6.

Next week, when all my Ondaatje books are finally signed, they'll be lovingly wrapped in paper and plastic and carefully sealed inside a box
marked "Ondaatje." 

And that clearly marked box will stay inside the house for a long time.   

OOPs (Out-of-Print)

Today was my first scouting day in almost two weeks.  I have a regular routine, a handful of spots I typically browse once a week.  Some visits take fifteen minutes, some take two hours.  Work has been busy and I've had other distractions (friends to see, new bars to try) and so I've had no new books or movies or music to report. 

Today was a relatively quick trip, but I did add my 26th out-of-print Criterion to the collection:  Bruce Robinson's Withnail and I (1986).  It's playing as I type this, and everything that comes out of Richard E. Grant's mouth makes me laugh. 

My credit also paid for a couple of Humphrey Bogart Blu-rays: The African Queen and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.  I've seen the latter many times, but this will be my maiden voyage with the former.  I suppose I can always trade it back, but I'm anxious to see Jack Cardiff's camerawork in 1080p. 

And then there's this odd little number: William Steig's Persistent Faces (1945).

Long before Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, Doctor De Soto and Shrek, Steig was a prolific New Yorker illustrator-cartoonist. 

Steig's early collections (About People, The Lonely Ones, All Embarrassed) are long on pictures and short on words. According to the dustjacket, the quirky visages in Persistent Faces "appear often enough in life to persist as images in memory." 

I grew up on Steig's abstractions (my father was a huge fan), but I admit they're not for everyone. 

Needless to say, this book smells superb.

By the way . . .

Is it just me, or does "Intellectual's Woman" look an awful lot like Shirley Jackson?   Of course, the dates are all wrong: Jackson didn't publish "The Lottery" in The New Yorker until 1948, three years after Persistent Faces.

On the other hand, Jackson went to Syracuse University.  What are the chances Steig glimpsed Jackson and her future husband Stanley Edgar Hyman at the park or on the bus and decided to immortalize her with a quick sketch?

Is that so hard to believe?  Is it?

 

 



C is for Collecting

A couple of times a year, a friend and I head east and scout for  books.  It's only a day trip, less than twelve hours from start to finish.  We start early, loading up the truck with a dozen or more boxes we've saved for the occasion. We never spend cash.  Cash is for people who don't know how to trade trash for treasure. 

I shouldn't say trash.  They're perfectly good, these books we're trading, every last one.  Later printings, quality paperbacks, reading copies. Nothing wrong with the books or the stories in them.  They're just not first editions, which is what we're after.  I have a garage filled with books to trade, and a house filled with books for keeping.

Our last trip was in May, and it went pretty much like it always does.  We hit the first store and unloaded half our boxes.  While the employees computed the value of our trade, we shopped.  My friend found something right off, some old French novels on a special display.  I really don't give a shit about Gide, so I started browsing.

How we do it:  I start at one end of the alphabet and he starts at another and we usually meet up around Cormac McCarthy.  That's not true, actually.  I scan a little faster than he does, so we usually meet up around Lawrence, or maybe Ken Kesey.

Once we meet in the middle, we compare the contents of each other's baskets. His was full, mine was not. We've been doing this for ten years without fighting or bad feelings.  We're interested in a lot of the same things, but not always at the same time.

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Once, in Chicago, we switched sides after completing our inital half of the alphabet and I found a first edition of Mario Vargas Llosa's The Time of the Hero. Vargas Llosa had just won the Nobel Prize and the book was published by Grove, a press we both collect.  No gloating, no "look what you missed." Just, "hey, nice find" and "isn't this a nice bookstore?"

As it happened, he found something he wanted: a later printing of Truman Capote's Other Voices, Other Rooms.  I had seen it during my tour of the alphabet, but disregarded because it was an ex-library copy. Even so, neither of us had a copy or had ever seen a copy for sale, and there we were, in Chicago, with per diem money we'd set aside to buy books and records.  For once, we were there to spend cash.  There's never any trade credit when you're on the road, and besides, it's good to support local bookstores.  He bought the Capote and some Henry Miller books from behind the counter and I bought some vintage paperbacks to go along with the $8 Vargas Llosa.

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My half of the alphabet had yielded nothing, and even though his basket was mostly filled with things I had no interest in, I was a little jealous of one book, an American first of The Plague in a handsome jacket.  Camus is a French writer I guess I do give a shit about. 

In the early days of our scouting trips, we were very arbitrary about who took what part of the alphabet.  Given our similar taste in books, who bought what was more about opportunity than skill.  But in the last few years, we've fallen into a routine at the stores we visit.  Had I been standing in front of the Camus, I would've bought it.  He got there first.  C'est la vie.

We each collected a few hundred dollars in credit and headed to our next location.  We unloaded a few more boxes, and began browsing.

And just like that, my luck changed.

There it was, sitting on the shelf.  A perfectly nice copy of Truman Capote's  Other Voices, Other Rooms. I hadn't seen a copy since Chicago, almost two years earlier.

I have a ritual when I find a book like this.  First, I check for the price.  Intact, $2.75. 

Then, I check for a previous owner's signature.  Perfectly clean.

At this point, it's time to confirm the edition.  Surely this was a later printing?

Nope, stated first printing.


I already know I want it, that  I will walk out of the store with it.  But how much are they asking for it, and how hard did they press with the lead pencil when they recorded the number?

$5.  A measly five bucks.

I feel giddy inside.  Giddy because this is a lovely copy of the Capote book.  Giddy because someone has written the price
with a light hand, easily erased.  Giddy because I get a 20% discount and the $4 I do pay will be taken off my store credit. 

But that's not all.  Inside the book, someone has tucked two publicity pictures of Capote, along with a Michiko Kakutani review of Gerald Clarke's Capote biography from 1988.  The clipping has not discolored the book in any way.

Is it worth $400?  $500?  Something like that.  I didn't buy it to resell it, I bought it because I'm a collector and this is what collectors do.  Take a big stack of Stephen King books or a box of Penguin classics and see what you can trade for them.

I got something else that day, a special edition of Twilight signed by Stephenie Meyer that had been badly overpriced at $250.  But the way the price was written in the book, it looked like $2.50.  Again, I'm not here to resell or make a profit.  I try to turn less interesting books into blue chip books. 

I brought the Meyer book up to the register, stuck it in the middle of the stack.  If I'd been charged $250, I would've happily put it back.  No harm, no foul, no skin off my beak. 

The cashier looked at the price, the book, and then the price again.  She started to say something and I shrugged and said, "yeah, I know," and then she charged me $2.50, less my 20% discount.

In all, it was a very good day.