“Is this the place?”
“I think so. Let me check.”
We were in New York. It was a clear, sunny, very warm Saturday afternoon and the streets were teeming in celebration of spring. Messengers hurtled along the streets and sidewalks, their bicycles weaving hysterically through crowds of weekend shoppers. Tourist groups, huddling close together for security while clutching their cameras, moved in phalanx from one building and store window to the next. The streets were locked in bumper-to-bumper traffic, taxis, buses, and trucks all jockeying frantically to try and finally make that next light. The air was filled with humidity and the sounds of horns, sirens, motors, and yelling and cursing in any number of languages. It was so noisy that the sounds blended together in one pounding din. It even smelled like New York.
We were on West Fifty-seventh Street, standing in front of number 30, an unassuming mid-rise building between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, the kind of place that in other sections of the city housed Korean import/export firms. In our hands were the little slips of paper on which we had written the names and addresses that we had found
in the Antiquarian Booksellers Guide at the Pittsfield library. We looked up. On a picture window two stories above our heads, in two-foot-high letters it read: J. N. BARTFIELD FINE AND RARE BOOKS.
Up until this point, it had not been a particularly successful trip. We had already visited two other bookshops. The first was Ursus, which was located on the mezzanine floor of the Carlisle Hotel, on Madison Avenue and Seventy-seventh Street. Ursus was a very attractive shop, filled with old prints and finely bound books. The modern-first section was also nice, small but filled with a choice selection, Truman Capote, Graham Greene, Hemingway, and others, all in excellent condition, some inscribed.
Next to the first-edition section were two desks, each occupied by a slim and extremely pretty young woman with fashionably cut blond hair, dressed in an understated and tasteful print dress. Neither was overly accessorized nor overly made up. They looked as if they had walked into Ursus immediately upon receiving their undergraduate degrees in English literature from Smith or Wellesley. The young woman on the left seemed absorbed in paperwork. When we walked in, she looked up and asked in a perfunctory manner if she could help us. When we replied that we just wanted to browse, she turned away sharply and made it a point to offer no further assistance. The young woman on the right was on the telephone.
“Oh yes, Dr. W—,” she was saying, in a respectful and cultured voice, “I am well aware of that. That’s why I’m calling. When we saw that it was not in the condition we had been led to expect, we thought to inform you immediately … Oh no, of course not. You have no further obligation. We assume full responsibility … Oh yes, of course we will continue to seek a copy in the condition you require. It is no trouble at all, I assure you. That is what we’re here for … Absolutely. We’ll keep you informed of our progress … Oh, you’re quite welcome, Dr. W—.”
She hung up and spun around in her chair so that she could face the young woman on the left and, coincidentally, us.
“That man is such a prick,” she said.
Our next stop had been Argosy on Fifty-ninth Street. Argosy is a large, multistory used-book store, one of the best known in New York, and we had been intending to go for some time.
When we walked in, we stopped at a desk in the front and checked our backpacks. To our right, along the front wall, were shelves of old leatherbound books on the most esoteric of subjects, like the 1847 town records of Beekman, New York. These books were marked “$25 each.” We opened one and the inside was a mess. There was water damage and missing pages.
The first floor was about one hundred feet deep and, for most of its length, about thirty feet wide. The shelves and bookcases against the walls were old, dark wood and the lighting fixtures, also seemingly from another, more genteel time, hung down from a high ceiling.
The first thing we did was walk through to the back and go downstairs to the basement where the preponderance of used books were kept. It was stifling hot and it was immediately clear that if there was something worth having, it was not going to be worth looking for. There were thousands of used books down there, most in the ten- to twenty-dollar range, but they could charitably be described as in poor condition.
Almost immediately, we returned to the main floor, where Argosy had its “recommended” section of used books. The stock here was in much better condition and the selection was more manageable but the prices seemed extraordinarily high for what they were selling. For example, the three-volume Heritage Press edition of Boswell’s Life of Johnson, an excellent set of which we had purchased at Berkshire Book Company for thirty-five dollars, was here selling for a hundred and it was in far worse shape. Books that we had regularly seen at any number of used-book stores for ten and fifteen dollars, were here at thirty-five and fifty dollars.
We were just about to leave when we spotted a sign for Argosy’s old-and-rare-book section at a cluttered desk in the middle of the room. That might be interesting, we thought. There wasn’t anybody at the desk, so we approached the woman behind the checkout counter at the front of the store.
“We’d like to see the rare-book section, please.”
“I’m sorry. That section is closed. Mrs. Lowry who manages our rare books isn’t in on Saturday,” she said. “Just Mondays through Fridays. Please stop back then.”
We looked around. The store was not particularly crowded and there were three or four employees who seemed not to be doing much of anything.
“Couldn’t someone else let us in? We’ve come from out of town and we won’t be here on Monday.”
“I’m afraid not. It’s locked.” She paused. “But let me give you one of Mrs. Lowry’s cards. Maybe you can call the next time you’re in New York.”
Now we stood in front of the building that housed J. N. Bartfield’s Fine and Rare Books and wondered if this, too, would be a disappointment. Perhaps they didn’t work on Saturdays, either. But we were already there, so we went ahead and opened the heavy metal and smoked-glass front door and walked inside.
As soon as the door closed behind us, the noise from the street (as well as most of the light) disappeared, and we found ourselves in a cool, hushed, darkened hall. There was a directory on the wall to our right and a desk at the end of the hall that was obviously meant for a security guard although no one was in sight.
“J. N. Bartfield Fine and Rare Books,” we confirmed on the directory. “Third floor.”
The hall was L-shaped and the building’s one elevator was in the short leg, an alcove to the left of the security desk. Once we turned the corner, all remaining signs of the street disappeared.
The elevator was on seven, the top floor. We pushed the button and waited. For several minutes nothing happened. Then the elevator started to descend. It went to six and seemed to stop. Then to five … four … three … two. The light stayed on so long at each floor we assumed that, despite the deserted lobby, many people were getting on and off at each stop. Several times we were tempted to
walk, but the doorway to the stairs was covered with a locked metal grille.
Finally, the elevator got to the ground floor and the doors began to creak open. We stepped back to let all the people out but there was no one there. The elevator was empty. We looked at each other, got in, and pushed the button for the third floor. After a long time, the doors closed and the elevator ascended—slowly, slowly—to the third floor. Once again, the elevator door creaked open and we stepped out. As soon as we did, the door closed quickly behind us.
There was a plate glass door on either side of the hall. The one on the left read J. N. BARTFIELD FINE ART. We looked through the glass and saw several large paintings of cowboys and buffaloes, but otherwise, the gallery, like the elevator and the hallway, was deserted. The plate-glass door on the right read J. N. BARTFIELD FINE AND RARE BOOKS. We looked inside. There was no sign of life there, either.
We tried the handle of the door to the bookshop, but the door was locked. A sign read PLEASE BUZZ FOR ENTRY. After a moment’s hesitation, we buzzed. We waited. Finally, there was an answering buzz. We turned the door handle and walked in.
The room we entered was rectangular, about twenty by thirty feet, as hushed and still as the rest of the building. There were no windows, no classical music piped in from concealed speakers, no murmur of conversation coming from some unseen corner of the shop. The room was perfectly climate controlled but there was no hum of air-conditioning. Everything was still, with no sight or sound of the outside world.
The room itself was magnificent. The walls consisted of floor-to-ceiling bookcases made of highly polished mahogany or cherry that shone in the artificial light emanating from recesses in the ceiling. On the shelves were the rich browns, blues, greens, and reds of the books, the leather gleaming softly, luxurious and discreet. Some of the covers had amazingly intricate filigree designs worked into the spine.
The bookcases on the left and right stopped short of the far wall,
apparently leading to other sections of the shop. A massive, ornate rectangular claw-foot oak table sat square in the center of the room on a polished hardwood floor. There were no chairs.
Then, suddenly, two men emerged from the opening at the right.
The first was stooped and balding. He wore glasses and looked to be about seventy years old. He was shuffling along, squinting sourly over the tops of his glasses, peering at us from either side of a prominent nose. He was dressed in a black sweatsuit, a neck warmer, and mustard-colored shoes, Ebenezer Scrooge in leisure wear.
Half a step behind him was a very handsome, unsmiling man of about thirty, pale, slender, and artistic looking, dressed in a light gray polo shirt, buttoned to the top, no tie, with a soft light brown suit and brown lace-ups. Here was Bob Cratchit, just returned from Barney’s.
The older man stopped and frowned at us. “How did you find us?” he demanded, without bothering with pleasantries. “We control our advertising very carefully.”
“Uh …” Despite all that had gone before, we were unprepared for this greeting. Was this a trick question? After all, the man had two-foot-high letters on his front window. There was also a prominent advertisement for J. N. Bartfield Fine and Rare Books in the Yellow Pages. “We went to the library and checked in the Antiquarian Bookseller’s Guide,” we replied.
This was apparently an unsatisfactory answer. The man in the sweatsuit abruptly turned away and headed back from whence he had just emerged. “Well, perhaps Kevin can help you,” he said, not bothering to turn and look at us. “Kev-in!” he barked, just before disappearing around the corner.
The younger man, who was still no more than two feet away from us, stepped forward. This, it seemed, was Kevin.
“We’d just like to look around, if that’s all right,” we said, speaking very softly in the quiet of the room.
“Of course,” said Kevin, equally softly, stepping back. He was very polite but the words came out stiffly, as if he had memorized
lines for a play and didn’t quite have them down yet.
We walked to the wall opposite the door and began to browse. The books were all in sets. Shakespeare, Swift, Molière, Voltaire, Goethe, Dante, Schiller, Aristotle, Plato, one beautiful set after another, sometimes two or three or four different sets of the same author.
“Are you looking for anything in particular?” asked Kevin, padding soundlessly behind us.
“Dickens?”
“Dickens is over here,” said Kevin.
J. N. Bartfield’s had three sets of Dickens, a blue one, a green one, and a red one. Each contained over twenty volumes. We removed the first volume of the red set. It was The Pickwick Papers. We opened the cover. It contained the original title page, text, and illustrations. You didn’t need ABC for Book-Collectors in J. N. Bartfield’s. There wasn’t any foxing, or sunning; nothing was chipped, torn, bubbled, shaken, or rubbed. Although this set had been printed in the 1870s, the pages were as crisp and unsoiled as if the book had spent the last 120 years in a climate-controlled vault.
We turned to the free endpaper, which is the blank page opposite the front cover where dealers customarily enter the price in pencil. There was nothing. We put back The Pickwick Papers and took out Oliver Twist. There was no price there either.
“We keep the first book of each set over here,” said Kevin, gesturing to a bookcase on the right. “You’ll find the price of the set inside the front cover.”
We followed him to the bookcase where the first volumes were kept. Smoothly but delicately, Kevin withdrew a red volume, Sketches by “Boz,” from a middle shelf. He opened the cover and there, written in pencil, was a little number.
“This set is twelve thousand dollars,” he said.
Kevin must have noticed a slight change in our expressions because he reached for the first volume of the green Dickens. “We have another set that is less expensive,” he said, opening that Sketches by “Boz.” His voice had no echo, no residue, like a man standing in the
sun and casting no shadow. “This one is ninety-five hundred dollars but it is not nearly as well done as the other. One volume of this set, I think it’s David Copperfield, has been rebound. It was done professionally, of course, but still, any rebinding detracts from the value.” Then he handed each of us one of the books. They seemed to come our way at not quite full speed. “Also, if you’ll notice, the gilt work on the binding is not as intricate and the illustrations in the less expensive set are not as clearly rendered as those in the more expensive set.”
We looked at both volumes. The illustrations in the red set had a bit more contrast but it wasn’t like the illustrations in the green set were smudged or something.
We handed back the books and glanced around. We noticed Sense and Sensibility on a higher shelf.
“Jane Austen?”
Kevin removed a deep blue volume from the shelf “Yes,” he said. “This is a six-volume 1892 edition, published by Little, Brown and Company.” He turned the book so that we could see the spine and the cover. “As you can see,” he said, “the spine is slightly faded. That is true of the entire set, although the fading is even.”
The spine was slightly faded. These books actually had a flaw. “How much is this?” we asked. Our curiosity as to the price of the set certainly did not spring from any intention of buying it. This was our first detailed exposure to “fine and rare books” that were not first editions. It was like wondering what a Fabergé egg would cost.
“I believe it is twenty-one hundred dollars.” He opened the front cover to check. “Yes.”
“Really.”
He returned Jane Austen to her place. For a moment, the three of us stood there. We didn’t want to leave. It was intoxicating being in Bartfield’s, in the cool and the quiet, where everything moved slowly, surrounded by magnificent works of art. But more than that, for as long as we were there, we could pretend that we belonged there. All the same, we were impostors. Kevin was treating us like customers when we knew we weren’t. We would have loved to have
been, but we weren’t. If Kevin had made the slightest dismissive move or gesture, we would have been gone in a second.
But instead he asked, “Is there anything else you’d like to see?”
We looked at him, trying to decide if the question was perfunctory or, worse, sarcastic. But there was no sign of that. He seemed genuine.
“Do you have anything that isn’t in a set?”
“Yes,” he replied. “We have some individual volumes and small sets in the other room.”
He directed us toward the opening to the left of the front door. We now saw that the sidewalls were actually floor-to-ceiling partitions and Kevin was leading us to a closed door set back about ten feet into the opening. The door was locked. He took a key out of his pocket and opened it.
It led to another room, a smaller version of the first and, if anything, even quieter. It was about fifteen feet square but completely ringed by bookcases, making it feel even more intimate. Suddenly, the books were very close to us.
“Literature is over here,” Kevin said, pointing to a section two steps away.
We walked over and immediately found ourselves face-to-face with Bleak House.
Bleak House is a great book. It is considered by many to be Dickens’s masterpiece, one of the greatest novels ever written in the English language. Although, on its face, Bleak House is a satiric indictment of the British court system, Dickens’s brush is much broader than that. Bleak House is about the mistreatment of children, the hypocrisy of the upper classes, false charity, and vain hopes. It is filled with mystery, satire, suspense, pathos, and intrigue.
Charles Dickens was a court reporter in his youth and a prodigious stenographer. But, more than that, nearly every day of his working career he stopped writing at 2:30 in the afternoon to walk the streets of London, sometimes twenty to thirty miles at a time. When he was working hard he would sometimes walk all night, complaining that his characters were pulling at his coattails. He walked in the
slums and he walked in Hyde Park and he walked into taverns and shops and inns. As a result, his portraits, while often hilarious, are timeless and chillingly real. And nowhere is this talent for characterization more evident than in Bleak House. Not a day goes by that someone or other doesn’t remind us of Harold Skimpole or Mrs. Jellyby.
This Bleak House was in two volumes, bound in dark blue leather. We took out the first and began to leaf through it.
“That was part of a set that someone broke up,” said Kevin, “although I can’t imagine why anyone would. It’s an 1874 edition, bound by Zaehnsdorf, with all the original illustrations. If the set was complete, it would easily be the most expensive in the shop.”
Looking over the shelves, we now saw, in various places, a similarly bound, two-volume Our Mutual Friend, single volumes for Great Expectations and Hard Times, as well as a number of others. We opened the cover of Volume I of Bleak House. A little notation in pencil read “350x.”
“This is only three hundred fifty dollars?” we asked. We never would have thought to apply the word “only” to $350 before.
“No,” said Kevin. He pointed at the “x.” “This means that the price is three hundred fifty dollars for each volume.”
“Oh.”
“I’m afraid that’s the way we notate our books,” he said.
“Seven hundred, huh?”
“I’m afraid so.”
We put Bleak House back. It was on a middle shelf right next to us, perfectly placed so that we could see it every time we turned our heads.
Kevin didn’t change expression a whole lot or alter the tone of his voice but somehow, in this little room, he seemed happier. “I have some other things you might enjoy looking at,” he said.
“Sure.”
He opened the door to one of the cabinets that made up the bottom section of the bookcases and withdrew a three-volume set, each in a black leather slipcase, and put them on the table. “This is very unusual,” Kevin said. “Take a look.”
We withdrew the first volume from the slipcase. There was an exquisite painting, like a cameo, set into the front cover.
“It’s Napoléon’s memoirs in an exhibition binding done by Riviere in 1885,” said Kevin. “Each volume has a hand-painted ivory miniature mounted on the front and back. On the front is a portrait of Napoleon at a different stage of his life and on the backs are Josephine, Marie Louise, and the King of Rome. It’s wonderfully illustrated. And look at the gilt work. It’s marvelous, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” we said, feeling the leather on the front and looking at the miniature. “How much does something like this sell for?”
“Ninety-five hundred dollars,” he said. “Wait. Here’s something else. These are wonderful.” Leaving Napoléon’s memoirs on the table, Kevin opened the door to another of the cabinets and withdrew two volumes in a light brown binding that we recognized from Clarence’s Shakespeare set as Nonesuch Press.
“This is Homer in the original Greek with Pope’s translation,” Kevin said, opening one of the volumes. “You can see,” he continued, “on the left is the Greek, on the facing page, the translation. It’s Nonesuch Press, printed in 1931. They only printed thirteen hundred of the Odyssey and thirteen hundred fifty of the Iliad. You can’t polish them, so there are very few left. The set is fifteen hundred dollars.”
“Can’t polish them?”
“Yes. Most binders use calf or morocco … morocco is goatskin, small ‘m’ … you can use British Museum formula to keep the bindings from deteriorating …”
“British Museum formula?”
“It’s a special polish that keeps the leather shiny and supple. You have to know how to use it but if you bring your books to a professional every ten years or so … more often if you live in a humid climate or near the ocean … the bindings can stay in perfect condition almost indefinitely. But Nonesuch Press used salmon niger morocco, which discolors when it’s polished. Over time, Nonesuch Press editions are going to get more and more rare.”
We leafed through the Homer.
“Here,” Kevin continued while we were still examining
Homer, this time removing a volume from a middle shelf on the wall near the door. “Look at this.” He handed us a book, Four Months in Algeria; with a visit to Carthage, by Joseph William Blakesley, published in 1859. While it was nicely bound in red leather, it was not in nearly as good condition as his previous offerings and the subject, while interesting, seemed obscure. We looked it over briefly and made to hand it back.
“Take a closer look,” he said. “See if you can figure out why this book is special.”
We turned the book over to look at it from every angle. We opened the book and leafed through it. “Is it the illustrations?” we asked. There were a number of color plates and fold-out maps, although nothing that seemed unique.
“Not in there,” said Kevin.
We closed the book and looked on the outside but there were no other illustrations to be seen.
Kevin took back the book. “Watch,” he said, then opened the front cover and held the pages at an angle so that just the end of each page was visible, like a deck of cards fanned out on a table top.
A painting appeared, ships in a harbor with hills in the background. The colors were rich and the detail fabulous.
“This is called fore-edge painting,” said Kevin. “It was originally done in Italy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries but was most popular in England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.”
“How do they do it?”
“The artist has a press that holds the pages in the correct position while he paints. He has to work relatively quickly so that the pages don’t stay in that position too long and become damaged. When the paint is dry, the book is closed and the edges are gilded in the normal way.” Then he let the pages fall back to their natural position and the painting disappeared. “If they are not aware of it, a person can own a book with a fore-edge painting for years and never know that they own something special.” He fanned the pages again and the painting reappeared.
“Is that how you get them?”
“Sometimes. We don’t see that many. Usually fore-edge painted books have been bought by collectors long before they get to us.”
We nodded. It was amazing, being so close—touching books like these, which we could never hope to own, of whose existence we hadn’t even been aware. Books with ivory miniatures on the front and paintings on the side. It was like getting a private showing in the Louvre.
“If you like Dickens,” said Kevin quietly, even for him, “I’ve got a treat for you.”
He opened the door to one of the cabinets and withdrew a red box big enough to hold a hefty-size volume. He placed it flat on the table with the spine of the box facing him so that we could not see what it was.
“We just got this,” he said. “It’s very special.” He proceeded to open the box, which folded open, and took out the contents, five red sleeves, and placed them on the table. Then, gently, almost tenderly, he lifted the first of the series, a thin book, bound in red leather, out of its sleeve. We still had no idea what it was.
Kevin placed his hand on the cover. “This is a first edition, first state. There were only six thousand printed and very few are left. I’ve never heard of one in this fine a condition before.” Then, he lifted his hand and opened the cover to the title page.
“A Christmas Carol. In Prose,” it read. “Being a Ghost Story of Christmas. By Charles Dickens. Chapman & Hall, Publishers, 1843. John Leech, Illustrator.”
“Dickens supervised the entire printing himself,” said Kevin, incredibly handing us this book. “He wanted everything to be just so, and to use red and green, which was very expensive. In fact, the green endpapers are one of the main bibliographic points of the first issue. Also, four of the illustrations are in color. Find one, they’re wonderful.”
Very, very slowly and very, very carefully we turned the pages until we found a color illustration of Fezzywig dancing at his Christmas party. For all we knew, Charles Dickens himself had touched this book.
And now, so had we.
After another moment or two, we gave A Christmas Carol back to Kevin. Then, as if someone had called our name, we both turned to the right. Bleak House had not moved. It was still on the shelf, looking at us.
When we turned back, Kevin had replaced A Christmas Carol in its sleeve and was putting it back in the box.
“How long have you been here?” we asked.
“Not too long,” he replied. “Just over a year. I worked in another bookstore before this, but the books here are beautiful.”
“And that’s J. N. Bartfield? The other man when we came in?”
“No,” Kevin replied. “J. N. Bartfield was his brother. That’s Mr. Murray.”
We thought that we had heard wrong or Kevin had meant to say just “Murray.” “How long has he been doing this?” we asked.
“He’s been here for thirty-seven years,” Kevin replied. “Before that, he and his brother ran the rare-book department at Brentano’s when Brentano’s had a real rare-book department. In fact, we still have some books that are stamped ‘Brentano’s.’ He knows more about rare books and fine bindings than anyone I’ve ever spoken to.”
“Who buys these books?” we asked. “Collectors?”
“Sometimes,” Kevin replied. “But most of our clients are interested in amassing a library.”
It was time to go. “Thank you,” we said. Anything else seemed inadequate. We turned to look at Bleak House one last time.
“You know, if you’re really interested in that, Mr. Murray might be willing to discount it a bit since the set is already broken.”
Bleak House was off the shelf and in our hands before he had finished the sentence.
“How much?”
“I’m not sure, but he might be willing to give it to you for six hundred.”
In this small, sealed corner of the universe, surrounded by first edition Christmas Carols and ten-thousand-dollar books with hand-painted
miniatures of Napoleon, six hundred seemed like a deal.
“All right,” we said.
“No, I can’t do that,” said Mr. Murray, shaking his head, frowning, and leaning over the table in the main room, peering over the top of his glasses. “Let me show you what you’re paying for. Here. This is a Zaehnsdorf binding.” He pointed to little red flowers on the spine. “These are hand-painted floral onlays set into the spine. Excellent condition. Very unusual.”
A hundred dollars for some little red flowers? We hadn’t even noticed the little red flowers. We looked down at Mr. Murray, then glanced quickly at Kevin who, still without changing expression, was looking embarrassed.
“Okay,” we said. “We’ll take it anyway.”
Mr. Murray softened. “Leave it with us. We’ll polish it and mail it to you. You’ll save the tax.”
Within moments, we were back out on Fifty-seventh Street. It was hot, humid, crowded, and noisy.
“Holy shit! We just spent seven hundred dollars!”