CHAPTER FOUR

IT’S NEVER TOO LATE

Several times thus far I have emphasized the advisability of beginning early on an author collection. While this always makes sense both financially and in terms of availability of material, a late start is not necessarily impossible. Some of the choicest items turn up after an author has become popular with collectors, sometimes because the popularity has driven prices up. People are often willing to sell for a substantial sum things that they wouldn’t have wanted to bother selling when prices were low. It is almost a commonplace that an enormous, sudden price rise in an author’s work, or of a particular book, almost invariably brings copies out of the proverbial woodwork. A few years ago I discovered in an out-of-the-way shop in upstate New York a dull-looking little pamphlet entitled 12 Occupations by Jean de Bosschère and dated 1916, with a few pages of woodcuts and some lines of text. A bell rang in the back of my mind. I remembered reading that title and author’s name somewhere. So I bought the little pamphlet, and back in New York I was able to confirm the vague memory. The book was a scarce early pamphlet whose text had been translated anonymously by Ezra Pound. I had never seen a copy in a bookseller’s catalog, although by this time interest in Pound had already begun to reach fanatic proportions. I priced it at $100, and sold it immediately, with numerous disappointed would-be customers. My suspicions about its real rarity, in both the market as well as in institutional and private collections, were confirmed. To my amazement, five or six additional copies were subsequently offered to me. Several people had owned copies all along, but had not thought them worth selling until the $100 price appeared.

Gertrude Stein’s first book, Three Lives, one of the most important landmarks in American realism, was privately published in 1909 in an edition of approximately five hundred copies. It has always been a scarce book, and copies have always been extremely difficult to locate. Since the late 1960s, Stein’s prices have escalated to a point where a reasonably good copy of this book will fetch several hundred dollars. As a result, more copies are appearing on the market now than when a copy brought less than $100. It thus sometimes becomes easier, albeit more expensive, to find a book once a higher price range has been established.

The collector should realize that it is never too late to start on his chosen collection, despite the fact that everything worth having may seem to have been bought up or to have gone irretrievably into institutional holdings. This is especially true in the manuscript field. An important American museum/library had officially defined its area of collecting interest as ending with the nineteenth century, in spite of having acquired, at the Quinn sale in 1924, the manuscript of what is now generally regarded as the greatest single work in English literature in the twentieth century–James Joyce’s Ulysses. In the late 1960s, this institution decided that perhaps the twentieth century had developed a few authors worthy of its attention. Dylan Thomas and Marianne Moore were named as sufficiently “safe” and important to add to the library’s impressive holdings. Miss Moore was still alive, but Dylan Thomas was already dead, and the great period of enthusiasm for him had long since peaked among collectors. The director of the library confided to me his decision to move into the twentieth century, but added, wistfully, that he had been advised against starting on Dylan Thomas because everything worth having was already gone. Without knowing precisely why, perhaps guided by some lucky genie, I encouraged him to go ahead with Thomas, promising to look out for items of interest, all the while thinking to myself that his adviser was probably correct. Within a few weeks the miracle happened. One of the best-known British dealers, on a visit to New York, casually asked me if I might be interested in the handwritten manuscript of Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood. Trying not to let my enthusiasm show too much, I allowed that I might be, asking for an option for two weeks. The dealer was rather startled, and probably a bit disgruntled, by my response, since I suspect that he had been boasting rather than genuinely offering the manuscript to me. But now he could not back out. I telephoned the library director immediately, and he soon secured the approval of his board of trustees for the purchase. So off to London I flew to bring the treasure home. There was a cloak-and-dagger aspect to the trip, because another American dealer—himself the agent for another (and famously omnivorous) institution—had also got wind of the existence of the manuscript and had likewise flown to London to buy it. I had taken the precaution of sending an advance deposit, however, and had the pleasure of finding that though Mr. F. had been there an hour ahead of me, offering a higher price, the firm of Bertram Rota, Ltd., was honorable in the best traditions of the trade. They politely but firmly told Mr. F. that the manuscript had already been sold. Thus I was able to bring it back in triumph, though not without some difficulties both in taking it on board the plane as hand luggage (it was in a large leather case about three feet square) and again in clearing it through customs on Christmas Eve. The customs officials cared nothing about the manuscript but were intent on charging the duty on the leather case—and since it was Christmas Eve the appraisers were not on duty. This problem was resolved—after a number of firm, not to say excited, words on my part—when the chief inspector declared the whole parcel duty-free.

The day after Christmas I delivered it to my happy librarian, who now faced the problem of building a collection of Thomas’ books around this masterpiece. I never actually found out, but I always sincerely hoped that the first person he showed the new acquisition was the adviser who had predicted the impossibility of finding any such thing.

Some few years before his death, William Faulkner deposited all of his manuscripts at the University of Virginia. Virtually everything was there except the manuscript of his first novel, Soldier’s Pay, which was presumed to have been lost or destroyed. Faulkner himself had no recollection of what had happened to it. Yet a few years ago I discovered it, in the possession of an elderly gentleman who had been Faulkner’s roommate in the days after World War I in the French Quarter of New Orleans. Here it was, the entire manuscript with holograph revisions, along with several unpublished short stories, many poems in holograph (some of them unpublished), and even a variant ending for the novel. Everything was still in the original mailing carton addressed to Faulkner by the agent who was returning the material to him. The manuscript itself was in a shirt box. It seems that when Faulkner and the roommate decided to go their separate ways, Faulkner abandoned the material to be thrown away, but the roommate had the prescience to preserve it. The incident shows that once again it was not too late, despite what everyone thought, to acquire an important Faulkner manuscript.

Even more recently, all important literary material by Conrad Aiken was thought to have vanished from the market when his widow sold his entire archive to the Henry Huntington Library and Art Gallery in San Marino, California. But within a year of that transaction, the working draft of his most famous novel, Blue Voyage, came to light in the estate of one of his lifelong friends. Aiken had inscribed it to the man as a gift, along with several notebooks of poem drafts, and all the manuscripts came up for sale.

Working draft of an unpublished poem by William Faulkner. From the author’s collection.

Outside the rarefied world of manuscripts, there is no way of knowing when a large collection or cache of books of superb quality will come to light. Many wonderful collections, previously unknown to dealers or other collectors, are continually surfacing. One such nearly incredible collection was sold by the Swann Galleries a few years ago. No one had ever heard tell of the collector or the collection. Put on the market by the lawyers for the estate, it comprised superb runs of Faulkner, Joyce, and Stein, including the long-lost fifth copy of Stein’s The Making of Americans in the vellum edition, of which only five had been printed. For many years four copies could be located, and the fifth was surmised to have perished during World War II. But suddenly it surfaced along with such other gems as a signed, limited Ulysses, a handwritten book by Faulkner, and historically important letters by Stein describing the now famous Salon d’Automne, where Matisse first attracted public attention.

This kind of collection sometimes gravitates into a dealer’s hands and forms the basis of an exceptional catalog; sometimes, as mentioned, it comes up at auction; or occasionally it even finds its way into an ordinary secondhand bookshop. More about this aspect will be said in a later chapter. Meanwhile, don’t despair.