CREDIT WHERE CREDIT IS DUE

I left town with two boxes of books I figured I could trade at any interesting used bookstore I encountered on the road. 

I found a suitable place in Albuquerque and hauled both boxes to the front counter. The woman who greeted me was very nice, and I started poking around the shelves while she computed my trade. I was looking for vintage paperbacks, but there wasn't much.  


A Touch of Death by Charles Williams (Gold Medal K1353, 1963)

Message From Marise by Paul Kruger (Gold Medal K1323, 1963)

I found these two Gold Medals right off, which is exactly what I'm looking for. Pretty much any reasonably priced mystery or science fiction novel from the '50s or '60s published by Gold Medal, Signet, or Ballantine is something I want to take home. I scoured the shelves but couldn't find much else.  No John D. MacDonald or Ross McDonald, no Chandler or Hammett, no Heinlein or Bradbury or anything else.  

I checked back in at the trade counter and the woman told me she could offer me $193 in credit. I asked her how much I owed her for the two books in my hand.  "With trade credit, those are fifty cents each," she said.

I explained I was just passing through and didn't know when I'd be back. Was there a cash offer?  "I don't pay cash for books," she said, which I respect. She asked me if I had any friends who could use my trade credit. I told her no, I didn't have any friends.

We got to talking and she told me she bought the bookstore from her father.  "I've been working here 43 years," she said. "I've been paying social security since I was five years old." She was a pretty woman, tiny but tough, with a good sense of humor and a small dusting of weariness that suggested she'd been through some shit, either hers or someone else's.  

She told me her name (Elizabeth) and the amount of time it takes to get from Albuquerque to Fort Collins, CO by bus (13 hours). "I put my daughter on that bus yesterday," she said, which explained some of the fatigue I saw in her face.

Elizabth pulled a bartending guide from my stack of trade and asked me if I had any favorite recipes. She said the local tavern didn't open until 11 and I joked about picking up beer from a convenience store and getting started early.  

She asked what I wanted to do with my books and I asked her if she had any more vintage paperbacks. She told me I was welcome to look behind her counter and I quickly found a few more things.

Bad Day For a Black Brother by B. B. Johnson (Paperback Library 64-482, 1970)

Shaft Has a Ball by Ernest Tidyman (Bantam N7699, 1973)

Naked Lunch by William Burroughs (Grove BC-115, 1966)

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (Beagle Books 95123, 1971)

The Shuttered Room & Other Tales (Ballantine 23229, 1974)

The Lurking Fear & Other Stories (Ballantine 03230, 1974)

A couple of Lovecrafts, the Burroughs, Superspade #5, a Shaft novel. I asked Elizabeth to choose enough books to cover my purchase and gladly paid the extra fifty cents per book.

She reboxed my books and I grabbed one carton and she grabbed the other. I told her I didn't mind walking back to the car myself but she insisted on walking out with me. As I opened my car she pointed to a box. "Is that a comics box?" I told her it was, but that it contained compact discs. "Too bad," she said. I asked her if she had any comics and she told me to wait a moment. She went back inside the store while I packed the books into my car and she returned with a remote.

"Come with me," she said.  Behind the store was a gate, which swung open when Elizabeth pressed the remote.  "Is this where I end up chained to a radiator in the basement or you stab me or something?" She laughed. "Sure is," she said. 

Behind the gate was a small structure which Elizabeth unlocked. This is where she stored her comics, all neatly arranged by publisher. "There's nothing too valuable back here, but if you want to make an appointment I can show you some Silver Age stuff."

I looked around for a minute and thanked her for her time. She told me she was having a big sale that weekend and I told her I'd come back another time.  "Bring some more books," she said. I promised I would.

We walked back to my car. I asked her if there was a gas station nearby and she said there was, but that we weren't in a great part of town. Someone really had been stabbed a couple of weeks ago.  I asked her if she'd done it. "No," she said, laughing. "It wasn't me."

I got back in my car and followed my GPS to the freeway. I got gas three hours later in a quiet little town where nobody had been stabbed in over a year.
 

DAMN IT, HAMMETT

I knew a bookstore guy, a fellow employee in San Francisco, who used to shove a bunch of mass market paperbacks into his coat at the end of each shift.  He'd wave goodbye to everyone and walk out with 6-10 book-sized tumors bulging all over his body.

Didn't fool a soul.  

We had a pretty liberal check-out policy in those days.  You could take what you wanted so long as you wrote it down in the book-borrowing journal and returned everything in good shape. How else to stay well-read on our hourly salary?  

But this guy! This guy would stuff his pockets and never write anything down. What's the fun in that? To his credit, he did return most everything within a few days. He always made a big production out of returning books he'd tried so surreptitiously to smuggle out unnoticed.

"When you're not wealthy, be stealthy," he said. Which is good advice.

He was a great mystery reader. I remember him rereading the works of Dashiell Hammett at one point, and insisting everyone do the same.

His only criticism was the covers, which he hated. Nothing pleased him more than a complete series with a uniform look, all lined up on the shelf together.  

But Hammett was a mess. Some of the books had white spines, some of the books had black spines, and The Continental Op looked the least like the others, with its silver spine and no photograph on the cover.

"Read these," he said, "but don't bother stealing them. At least not until they change the covers."

The guy was full of good advice.  

YOU KNOW, FOR ADULTS

We collect all sorts of things at the Museum of Stuff. Our interests are wide and varied, our patience for browsing is as plentiful as our trade credit, and the gas tank is always full.

I have boxes and boxes of old paperbacks stacked neatly in my storage space. Mysteries mostly, and cult authors, and items I purchased simply for the provocative cover art.

I love it all, but I get the biggest kick out of collecting vintage erotica.  Nothing classy, nothing written in French, nothing with any historical value or intellectual appeal. 

I'm talking about the poorly written, slightly seedy tomes from publishers like Connoisseur Publications, Art Enterprises, Inc., and Magenta Books.

You know, the "wink-wink, nudge-nudge" garbage they used to keep under the counter at newsstands and liquor stores, the stuff they used to hawk out of the back of men's magazines, the guilty pleasures your grandfather kept out in the garage or in a plain shoebox hidden in the bedroom closet.  

It's uncultured culture.  Plenty of booksellers specialize in it, and collectors are happy to pay premium prices.

I refuse to shop online, which means I add to my collection the old-fashioned way. It's mostly slow-going, but I've found some interesting pieces in the last month.

It's ridiculous, I know, but I couldn't be more proud.

  

IF I NEVER SEE YOU AGAIN, EITHER

Okay, the box count is mounting. Each day, I take another 20-30 cartons over to the storage space. The guy who runs the place waves at me every time I drive through the gate.

I had an ambitious pile of books to scan until it occurred to me I'd never finish packing. I quickly sealed several cartons and never looked back. 

Here are some things, some more favorite possessions. There's too much to take with me as it is.

Steve Allen's Bop Fables (Simon & Schuster,1955)

Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene (Heinemann, 1958)

Snow White by Donald Barthelme (Atheneum, 1967)

Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo (J. B. Lippincott Company, 1939)

ANTIQUARIAN

I have some old books in my collection, but antiquarian really isn't my thing.

Camp-Fires of Napoleon by Henry C. Watson (John C. Winston Co., 1854)

My Book House - Through Fairy Halls edited by Olive Miller (Book House for Children, 1937)

A Handbook of Short Story Writing by John T. Frederick (Knopf, 1928)

The Modern Devil by Rev. I. Mench Chambers (International Publishing, 1903)

Tess of The D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy (A. L. Burt Company, 1893)

Lynch Lawyers by William Patterson White (Little, Brown, and Co., 1920)

Officer 666 by Barton W. Currie and Augustin McHugh (A. L. Burt Company, 1912)

Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (John C. Winston Company, 1925)

SPINAL CRACKERS

Let's talk about spines for a second.  Not who has one and who doesn't, I couldn't care less.

I'm talking about packaging and design.

I'm boxing up my stuff, figuring out what to keep and what to sell, what to take and what to keep in storage.

I can't remember the last time I watched a VHS tape, but I have no intention of discarding my boxed sets of Twin Peaks or The Singing Detective.  

Twin Peaks (Worldvision Home Video, 1990)

The Singing Detective (BBC Video, 1997)

It's not about being stubborn or my tendency to hoard things. Well, maybe it is.  

These things represent something to me.  Not just the past, not just inferior home entertainment platforms. 

Besides, they're too pretty to give up.

And then there's this thing, this boxed set of Patricia Highsmith's Ripley novels from 2008. Five Highsmiths for a hundo, though I doubt that was the actual campaign.

The Complete Ripley Novels by Patricia Highsmith (W. W. Norton, 2008)

A generous gift from a publisher's rep. Not exactly the type of thing I'd buy myself, but exactly the type of thing I'd keep and not resell.

I might need a bigger storage space.

GOREY GOREY HALLELUJAH

The American Transcendentalists (Anchor Books, 1957) and Hamlet and Oedipus (Anchor Books,  1954)

Gogol's Tales of Good and Evil (Doubleday Anchor, 1957) and Tolstoy's The Kreutzer Sonata (Vintage Books, 1957)

THREE KINDS OF HUNGER

I had a bookstore job in college, and because I was shy and lived on campus it took a few months before the bookstore employees became my family. It was also well into the second semester before I learned you could eat all you wanted at the dorm cafeteria, so I lost a considerable amount of weight between August and December.

It was during one of those quiet weekends, just me and a box of Wheat Thins, that I first encountered Knut Hamsun's Hunger (1890).

Someone at work recommended the book, and I read it all in one dizzying weekend.  Was it the right translation?  No. I had the Robert Bly edition, with the forward by Isaac Bashevis Singer. I picked up the George Egerton copy years later, but I've never sat down and compared the texts. The Bly translation may not be faithful to the original Norwegian, but the story, about a starving writer, left a real and lasting impact.  

What I knew at the time was that Hamsun won the Nobel Prize in 1920 for Growth of the Soil. What I learned later was that he sided with Germany in both world wars, and sent Goebbels his Nobel medal in 1943. 

Awkward! 

Flash forward a few years.  I'm married, and my wife's younger brother is visiting.  He's about to spend most of the next two decades in the clink, but none of us know that yet.  He sees my copy of Hunger on the bookshelf and pulls it out to take a look.

"This was a trippy movie," he said, nodding his head in appreciation. "Is the book any good?"  

The movie he was referring to, of course, was Tony Scott's The Hunger (1983). Miriam Blaylock (Catherine Deneuve) dabbles in Renaissance art, Egyptian pendants, priceless antiques, and various sex partners. 

Yeah, that's right. She's a vampire. Miriam can't figure out why her husband John (David Bowie) suddenly ages two hundred years overnight. What's Miriam supposed to do, other than hit on Sarah Roberts (Susan Sarandon), a sleep researcher who may hold the secret to immortality? Brace yourselves, prudes: there's a sex scene. I haven't watched the movie in years and years, but I have it in case the mood overtakes me.

Which brings me to The Hunger (1981) by Whitley Strieber. It was Strieber's second novel, the one he published after The Wolfen and before Communion (1987).

I was browsing the other day and happened to see three copies of The Hunger sitting on a bookstore shelf. Two were book club editions, but the third was a first printing.  

I paid for it with my credit, took it home, cleaned it up. It'll go in a box, I suppose. I should probably bundle it with the dvd and sell them as a set.  

Maybe I'll hold onto them. Who knows, maybe I'll run into my ex-wife's brother.

A Musical Be-In

Let us say I have a soft spot for musicals.  

I'm not the biggest fan, I've never seen Phantom or Wicked or Les Misérables.  I was a high school thespian, so I know all the words to The Music Man.  I was raised Jewish, so I know all the words to Fiddler on the Roof.  I like the songs from Guys and Dolls, especially Stubby Kaye's.

I have a special relationship with the musical Hair, partly because of my older sister Jessie, partly because of cable television, but mostly because the songs of Gerome Ragni, James Rado, and Galt MacDermot are so goddamn catchy.  Ragni and Rado wrote the book and lyrics; Galt MacDermot wrote the music.

I came to the musical courtesy of Milos Forman's film version (1979) which played continuously on cable in the early 1980s.  

I don't really care if people think the film is flawed (Ragni & Rado hated it, apparently), because I love it.  I thought Treat Williams was great, I thought John Savage was great, and I thought Beverly D'Angelo's boobs were great.  It had Charlotte Rae from The Facts of Life, it had choreography from Twyla Tharp, and the guy playing Woof (Don Dacus) always made us laugh.

My sister Jessie and I could recite all the dialogue from the film.  We knew a lot of it by heart, particularly the scene where Berger and the gang crash the debutante party and end up dancing on the table, smashing all the plates in sight.  

Prudes, cover your ears.  There's a song in the musical called Sodomy.  In the movie, Woof sings it atop a horse in Central Park.  Here are the lyrics:

Sodomy

Fellatio

Cunnilingus

Pederasty

Father, why do these words sound so nasty?

Masturbation can be fun

Join the holy orgy Kama Sutra

Everyone

Jessie wrote all the words to the song on a piece of paper and stuck it in her underwear drawer.  My father was big on reference books, always urging us to consult a dictionary. Jessie had every intention of looking up the words later, but my mother found the piece of paper when she was putting the laundry away.

Holy shit, did that cause a commotion.  We almost had the cable television removed.

None of this dimmed my view of the musical Hair. I still think it's terrific. 

Hair was a genuine cultural phenomenon. I'm about six months older than the musical, which debuted in October 1967.  I don't remember the draft, but I remember Vietnam and I remember hippies.  

I collect records, you know this already. Whenever I find a copy of the soundtrack or some variation I haven't got, I pick it up. 

The soundtrack from the off-Broadway production (RCA, LSO-1143) features songs not found elsewhere, like "Going Down," "Exanaplanetooch," and "The Climax."  

The songs from Hair are presented in a different order on the Original Broadway Cast recording (RCA, LSO-1150), adding "Donna," "Hashish,""Sodomy," "Colored Spade," "I'm Black," "Abie Baby," and "The Flesh Failures (Let the Sunshine In)," among others.

The movie soundtrack (RCA, CBL2-3274)is a two-record set.  According to the packaging, it's also available on Stereo 8 and cassette.  It features many songs ("Air," "My Conviction," "Abie Baby," "Frank Mills," and "What a Piece of Work is Man") which were recorded but ultimately cut from the final film.

One of my first Hair variations is an album attributed to a band called The Aquarian Age (Itco, 10001).  According to the liner notes, the band is "ten talented people from Texas" who "felt the music was the perfect vehicle for their first album.  The eye-catching artwork is by Bob Venosa.  It's perfectly fine, a bunch of by-the-numbers renditions.

Hair Styles by The Terminal Barbershop (Atco, SD 33-301) isn't exactly daring either. 

According to the notes: "If you've never heard the music from 'Hair' (as unlikely as that is), you'll thoroughly enjoy this album.  If you are already a devoted 'Hair' fan, you'll dig these fresh 'Hair Styles' by The Terminal Barbershop." 

The lead off track, a quasi-baroque instrumental of "Let the Sunshine In" is pretty mellow. "Air" (also instrumental) would not be out of place on a commercial or a game show.  The album notes promise a mix of instrumentals with vocals provided by The Wondrous Joy Clouds.  I didn't hear any human voices until the last song on the second side, a reprise of "Let the Sunshine In."  Additional research indicates The Terminal Barbershop featured band members from the psychedelic band Ars Nova, whose first album appeared on Elektra.

This Stan Kenton album (Capitol, ST-305) is a proper mix of instrumentals and vocals. "Sodomy" is certainly instrumental only, as is "Colored Spade," "Walking in Space," and "Easy to Be Hard."  According to the sleeve: 

"Here's 'Hair' the Kenton way, complete with a score and a half of musicians who play everything from the mandolin to the flugel horn, joined by a dozen boy and girl singers who rocked so hard during the recording sessions that they raised the hair on everybody's head and succeeded in transferring the entire spirit of their thing exactly on to this disc.  There isn't a molecule of original inspiration missing."

The Kenton abum is definitely upbeat, if just a little too white bread for genuine hippies.  The energy cannot be denied, but I wouldn't exactly call it rocking hard.

The last two albums in my Hair collection are actually the same record in different jackets, courtesy of budget label Pickwick International.  Pickwick enjoyed success issuing bargain albums with soundalike groups.  

The Music and Songs from Hair (SPS 482) was distributed by Sears, Roebuck, and Co.  I have an identical album (SPC-3169) on the Pickwick International label.

They're not great, but they're not exactly terrible.  

The songs from Hair have been recorded hundreds of times.  I love Nina Simone's take on "Ain't Got No/I Got Life," I love Brian Auger & The Trinity (featuring Julie Driscoll) doing "Flesh Failures (Let the Sunshine In)," and I certainly don't mind The Fifth Dimension.  

I'm still digging Hair, still searching for unknown variations.  

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.