The Thirty-sixth Annual New York Antiquarian Book Fair was held from April 19 to April 21, 1996, in the Seventh Regiment Armory, which occupied the entire block on the east side of Park Avenue between Sixty-seventh and Sixty-eighth Streets, a three-story stone fortress stuck in among the luxury high-rises. There was a preview on April 18 but, after Boston, we thought it prudent to wait for the real thing.
We had heard that the New York fair was different and the differences began at the door. The admission fee was ten dollars, not the usual five or six. Instead of an ordinary check room, there were young, attractive men and women wearing tuxedo shirts and black bow ties stationed at a small table outside the checkroom who called you “sir” or “ma’am” and noted with finality that they would be pleased to check your backpack for you.
Just before the entrance to the main hall was a large, glossy announcement mounted on an easel that said that Allen Ahearn would be conducting a seminar at one o’clock on Modern First Editions.
Just past the easel was an information table manned by prosperous-looking women with white hair who looked as if they
lived in the apartment houses up the street. The table was heaped with free literature describing the fair, free copies of “the special New York Book Fair issue” of AB Bookman’s Weekly (“for the specialist book world”), and announcements of future fairs, including those to be held in London and Amsterdam. The food area was in the rear, where little tables had been set up to allow participants to snack on $7.95 sandwiches of smoked turkey breast and arugula on whole grain bread and a small dish of fruit salad made with fresh blueberries, cut strawberries, and cantaloupe for five dollars. The only thing that was not different about the New York fair was the basic layout—booth upon booth in one long row after another—although even here, with 136 dealers to be accommodated, the scale was magnified.
Still, as we stood at the threshold of the main hall, it was hard to shake the feeling that, as with many things about New York, the differences were more of form (or grandiosity) than substance.
Wrong again.
First of all, it was a question of who was there. Pepper and Stern had a booth, of course, and so did Buddenbrooks and Howard S. Mott. The high-end New York dealers like Ursus, from above the Carlisle, and Bauman, from the lobby of the Waldorf-Astoria, were all there, too. (Although not J. N. Bartfield. Bartfield had taken a full-page ad in the brochure but Mr. Murray apparently did not make personal appearances.) But that was only the beginning. Of the 136 dealers, over twenty were from Britain and others were from France, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Spain. Among them were Quaritch and Maggs Brothers of London, legendary dealers we had only read of in places like The Amenities of Book-Collecting, or heard about from Clarence. On the domestic side, there were a great many California dealers, as well as others from as far away as Minnesota, Oregon, and Hawaii.
But more than the who was the what. These dealers brought with them strange and wonderful old maps and vellum books and pictures of ships. There were dealers who specialized in everything from Napoleonic history to alchemy to arts and crafts to dance rarities to Egyptology to Dr. Seuss to medieval illuminated manuscripts. They
had fore-edge paintings, gastronomy, and golf; horticulture, incunabula (books printed before 1501), and landscape architecture.
We saw a 1668 first edition, first complete state, of Milton’s Paradise Lost, the Duke of Buckingham’s copy of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathann from 1651, a second folio of Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories and Tragedies from 1632, an inscribed presentation copy of Florence Nightingale’s 1859 Notes on Hospitals, and the “rare true first edition of Lord Byron’s first regularly published book Hours of Idleness (1807) in the original boards”—and all of these were from just one dealer.
Another dealer had first editions of all of Charles Dickens’s work, including A Christmas Carol, and another had a first edition of The Great Gatsby in a crisp, bright dust jacket. There were first-edition Draculas, both English and American. There were firsts of Sherlock Holmes, Trollope, Mark Twain, Melville, and Kipling, letters from Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Robert E. Lee, George Patton, and Henry David Thoreau.
Everywhere we looked, there were signed copies, presentation copies, and copies with long, personal letters enclosed. And then there were the fine sets and private presses and limited editions and exhibition bindings. There were books embossed in gold and books embossed in silver and books with jewels on them. The only thing we didn’t see was a Gutenberg Bible but we feel certain that somebody had one and we just missed it.
We didn’t have to worry about being tempted at this fair, however. Limitations of net worth took care of that. We had never been anywhere in the book world before where so many dealers had printed up little handouts delineating acceptable means of payment. (Bank drafts and wire transfers were popular options.) At this fair, one or two thousand dollars seemed cheap. There were books for five thousand dollars and ten thousand dollars seemingly at every other booth. There was a book in one book dealer’s case that cost one hundred fifty thousand dollars but we were so struck by the price that we forgot what the book was.
But it wasn’t the overwhelming variety of the books being offered
for sale or even their cost—it was the condition of those books that most amazed us. Many seemed to be the quality of museum pieces. It was astonishing to consider that books as much as two and three hundred years old could look as though they’d been bound yesterday.
We walked up and down the aisles gawking, calling “Look at this,” or “Come over here,” to one another. Eventually, we gravitated by habit and experience to those dealers offering modern firsts.
Here again, the selection was almost staggering in its diversity and in the quality of the books. There were pristine copies of just about everything in flawless dust jackets. Once again, we went from booth to booth, admiring what we saw and sometimes touched, until it began to slowly creep over us that something was wrong.
We couldn’t put our finger on it at first but it seemed to have something to do with the overall attitude of the place. This wasn’t like the other book fairs we’d been to and not just because of the books. The dealers behaved differently. The usual banter was missing. They were less accessible and friendly. They even dressed better. Often, they seemed to size you up to guess at your bank balance before they would even answer a question about something they had on display. They behaved more like the staffs of Christie’s or Sotheby’s or some snooty art gallery than people who, up until now, had always seemed to us to be doing this for love of the written word. It wasn’t that we begrudged them making a living but here they almost seemed to be saying, “If you can’t afford five thousand dollars for a Steinbeck, get out.”
And as we wandered, we saw that, wonderful as they were, the books were part of the problem, too. There was an enormous amount of overlap. Among the modern firsts dealers, everyone had Steinbeck, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner. Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, and Dashiell Hammett were also everywhere. There were gobs of Tarzan and more than a few Lovecrafts. Rare firsts by authors who later became famous, like Call for the Dead by John Le Carré, were as prevalent as if they had had hundred-thousand-copy printings. Anything in the world of modern firsts that commanded a high price
was there and more than once. It seemed almost as if every single available copy of these books were at this fair.
And it wasn’t as if these dealers were specializing in an author’s entire body of work. Only the expensive stuff was here. There were three copies of The Hamlet, for example, one at $600, one at $1,000, and one at $1,250, but none of The Town. These were the first copies of The Hamlet that we had ever seen but we knew that The Town (even with a gray top edge) cost about $175. We saw at least ten copies of Light in August, three or four copies of The Grapes of Wrath, an equal number of Of Mice and Men, all of which were priced in the thousands, but none of, say, The Winter of Our Discontent, which goes for under fifty dollars, and the one copy of The Moon Is Down that we saw was priced at four hundred. It wasn’t just The Moon Is Down—everything was more expensive here than we had seen anywhere else. It was not unusual to see books that ordinarily sell for hundreds to be here priced in the thousands. Had the dealers raised their prices just for this fair?
But this led to still another question: If everyone had them, how could these books be considered “rare,” how could they command such prices? Did only the dealers have them? And, if every dealer knew what every other dealer had—and charged—how could one hope to sell a book for $1,250 when a competitor less than fifty feet away was selling the exact same book for less than half that?
“What books! Did you see those books? You never see books like that,” said John Sanderson.
“Or for those prices,” we said.
“Yes,” he chuckled. “Things were very expensive there.”
“A little too expensive,” we said.
We were back in Massachusetts, standing once again in John Sanderson’s basement. We’d come to talk about the fair. Only to talk. With uncharacteristic foresight, we hadn’t even brought a check.
“Not really,” he said. “The books were in extraordinary condition.”
“And for that, a dealer can charge double or triple?”
The New York book fair was still bothering us. By the time we left, the transparent commercialism had become so disturbing that, even if we could have afforded something we wanted, we would not have bought any of those books, books we had been looking for ever since War and Peace. Of course, the fact that we couldn’t afford anything only made it worse.
“Of course. Perfection is everything. Book collecting is about the search for perfection, to get as close as you can to one-of-a-kind.”
John had been at the fair. We’d seen him and, unlike many of the other dealers, he had been completely natural and friendly, but he was alone at his booth and so busy talking to customers that we had had a chance to do little more than nod and briefly say hello.
“But everyone had the same books,” we persisted. “They couldn’t all be perfect.”
“Close to it. You must understand,” he explained, “dealers only bring their best copies. If they have three copies of a certain book, they’ll only bring their best to New York.”
“So, for a perfect copy of a book that collectors want,” we said, “a dealer can charge …”
“For a perfect copy of a book that collectors want,” said John Sanderson, “a dealer can charge anything.”
“And someone will buy it,” we said.
“More than that,” he replied. “There will be competition to buy it.”
“But didn’t they know that every other dealer was going to bring the same books they brought?”
“It doesn’t matter,” John replied. “There are enough big money collectors out there. Sometimes they don’t even come themselves, they just send representatives. They don’t care what they pay. They just say, ‘Get me this.’ The worst thing possible for them is to pass up a book because the price is a little too high and then find out that they lost it to a rival collector. Don’t forget, a lot of these people are going for history. If they put together a collection with only the finest books in the finest condition, they can give them to Yale or Harvard
and get a room or a plaque with their name on it … or it may even go at auction and then forever be known as ‘so-and-so’s’ edition.”
“We didn’t seem to see anybody buying anything … was it a successful fair?”
“Oh, heavens yes. One dealer was talking about how he did seventy thousand dollars in one day. A lot of dealers said that this was their best fair ever. A lot of these dealers sell to film stars and people in the entertainment business, like John Larroquette.” He smiled. “In Germany you have the big industrialists and in the Netherlands you have the chocolate barons. They are the ones who buy that vellum continental stuff. Here it’s the entertainment business.”
“Did you have a good fair?”
“It was all right. I made expenses. And that’s not so easy in New York. It costs two thousand four hundred sixty-five dollars for the booth, which is more than all the other book fairs combined, and seven hundred dollars for a hotel room. So I’m thirty-three hundred dollars in the hole before I even sell a book. And my books are hundred-dollar books. I don’t have thousand-dollar books,” he said. “Some dealers bring four or five people with them. That’s a lot of airfare from London or California, but their books are such that if they sell they’ll make it back. Plus, it helps with having to go to the bathroom. I go alone to New York, so I have to beg people to watch my booth so I can go to the bathroom. But it’s worth it.”
“Why?”
“Well, it would be worth going just to see the books. But also, a dealer like me, working alone, gets to walk around, talk to the other dealers, see if there’s anything I might not have brought with me that has a market I wasn’t aware of. Also, I’ve had a lot of my stock for a long time. I can find out if my prices are out-of-date.”
Out-of-date obviously meant too low. That led us to the big question. “Do dealers raise their prices just for the New York fair? Because they know the big money collectors will be there?”
He thought for a moment. “Some might, a little, but generally, no, I don’t think so,” he said. Then he grinned. It was conspiratorial, as if he was about to glance side to side to see if anyone was listening.
“I bought some golf balls while I was there and raised a couple of book prices by five or ten dollars to cover the cost. I had one book listed for one hundred forty-five dollars, why shouldn’t it be one fifty?”
This wasn’t what we were talking about. We decided to let John slide.
“One last thing,” we said. “For a collector, isn’t it a stacked deck? How can a collector ever hope to get a decent price on a book they want … let’s say less than a perfect copy … if the dealers are buying up every copy in sight and all the dealers know what the others are charging?”
“Oh, you’d be surprised. If you know what it is you want and look around a little, you can often find what you’re looking for at a lot less than you thought you were going to have to pay. No dealer can know everything. I made a mistake myself last year. I bought a book by Booker T. Washington for twelve dollars and sold it at a fair for one hundred twenty dollars. I was very pleased until I found out that subsequently it had sold for one thousand dollars and then two thousand dollars. And it was all because I didn’t read a reference book by Allen Ahearn about writers’ first books. It turned out that I had bought Booker T. Washington’s first book. It didn’t even look like original writing to me. It looked like an anthology. But it was in that reference book listed at a certain price and I should have known it and I didn’t.”
“So sometimes even a dealer can have a book at a price that’s a lot less than it should be.”
“I suppose that’s true, if you can ever be sure of what a price ‘should be.’”
For a moment, there was silence. Then, “Do you still have the Henry James?” we asked.
John thought for a moment. “Oh, you mean The Awkward Age? The one you were looking at last time?”
We nodded. John nodded back. He had his dealer look on again.
He raised the price, we thought. He walked around, talked to the other dealers, found out that Henry James was going for a lot more
money than he was charging, and then came back to Stockbridge and raised the price.
“Yes,” he said. “I believe both copies are still there.” Was there a trace of a grin in the corner of his mouth? We couldn’t be sure.
We made our way around the room to the nineteenth-century-literature section. There they were, two copies of The Awkward Age. We glanced at one another, removed the better copy from the shelf, and opened to the front endpaper. “1000 copies. 1st issue. First U.S. edition,” it read. Then, “$200.00.”
What a break. And we had just stopped at the cash machine before we came here.
“That book fair was about commodities,” said George Minkoff. We were sitting in his living room amid his books, handmade furniture, antique spoons, and beautiful paintings.
“Commodities … as in pork bellies?”
“People who buy books at that fair don’t know or care critically about the authors they collect,” George went on. “It’s the spokesman effect again—that’s who everybody wants to buy and the prices reflect that.”
“So, in other words, those writers who were chosen will have their books sell for substantially more than other writers of the same period who might have been just as good.”
“Prices have nothing to do with literary merit,” said George.
“But still, that implies that it’s the culture and not the dealers that sets the prices for the books. It didn’t seem that way at the book fair.”
“Look,” said George, “since the depression, books have been very cheap. The high point in the book world was the Kern sale … that’s Jerome Kern … in 1929. After that, books went into decline. There wasn’t any book you couldn’t buy cheaply.
“Prices of books have been depressed, relative to the art market, for example. You could always have a great book collection for the price of a bad painting. Only now are prices evening out.”
“You’re saying that the prices we saw in New York were not artificially high?”
“No. Look, in the 1960s, you could buy a first edition of Gulliver’s Travels for eight hundred dollars. At the book fair, there was one for forty thousand dollars. And that’s right. You should not be able to purchase a first edition of one of the world’s greatest books for eight hundred dollars.”
“Okay. It’s hard to disagree with that. But that doesn’t explain what we saw at the book fair. We bought a first-edition Martin Chuzzlewit from you for six hundred fifty dollars, right?”
“Right.”
“Printed in 1843 and bound by Morrell, an excellent binder, right?”
“Yes.”
“Well, there can’t be that many Martin Chuzzlewit first editions bound by Morrell around. Certainly not as many as a book that’s only fifty years old that was printed for the mass market by an author who was already well known. So how can The Hamlet sell for almost twice as much as Martin Chuzzlewit?”
“It’s the book in its moment,” explained George. “The Grapes of Wrath, in its moment, was the perfect depiction of the depression, of its era. On the Road was the same way. Kerouac had the fifties, the beat generation. Hemingway had the post—World War I restlessness …”
“Gatsby?”
“Certainly, although I don’t care much for Fitzgerald personally. I like the deep, mystical writers like Melville or Joyce. But, anyway, it’s all romance. A book in its moment has romance. The book business is a romance business. Sometimes the dealer tries to build the romance but in general, for the right books, it’s already there.”
(George’s “book in its moment” theory seemed undeniably true. Every time we perused a catalogue, we noticed that the dealer tried to add significance to things he was selling. Books were always being described as “important” or “unique,” often with words like “scarce” attached. For example, in one catalogue, to describe a signed
copy of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, for which the dealer was asking fifteen hundred dollars, it read:
The first edition of Le Carré’s third book, the definitive Cold War novel, which brought a new level of realism to the genre of spy fiction … Signed copies are uncommon; signed firsts especially so; and signed firsts with contemporary signatures are nearly unheard of A very nice copy of a landmark book.)
“So the dealers know which books have romance … or may be made to have romance … and try to drive up the prices.”
“Dealers are certainly involved in making the market,” George said. “But it’s also the way people collect today. You get a lot of cabinet collections … a little of this, a little of that … whatever is in favor at the time, like somebody’s idea of the hundred greatest books.”
That’s what Peter Stern had said. “And you’re saying that this kind of collector is less sophisticated about prices?”
“I’m saying that dealers know their markets. Remember, you’re seeing the highest end of the market at the New York Book Fair.”
“Yes. We saw a copy of a first-edition Dracula in Peter Stern’s catalogue last year for ninety-five hundred dollars. From the description it seemed to be in excellent condition, and Peter is certainly no cut-rate dealer. But then we picked up a copy of Bauman’s catalogue at the fair and we saw another first-edition Dracula that did not seem to us to be in good condition, and that was listed at fifteen thousand dollars.”
“Are you sure it wasn’t the same book?” he asked with a totally straight face.
“The same book?”
“Sure. Dealers swap all the time. Look,” he went on, “Bauman’s set up shop in the lobby of the Waldorf-Astoria. Their location makes their market. People who come through the Waldorf and want some unusual gift or want a particular book will pay those prices.”
He paused. “There’s an old story about two dealers, one from Lucerne and one from Geneva. Someone asked the dealer from Geneva why the prices were so much higher there than in Lucerne. And he said, ‘Because I’m not in Lucerne.’
“It’s like the dealers who sell to Hollywood. Hollywood is the market today. Dealers who sell to movie stars who make fifty million dollars on a movie know that they can come into a bookshop and drop one million dollars on books, that it’s petty change to them.”
“Why are movie stars buying these books?”
“I don’t know. Maybe they think if they have a library with great books in it people will think they are intelligent.”
“So are they the ones driving up the prices? If a movie star buys a thousand-dollar book for five thousand dollars, won’t all the other dealers rush out to their customers and say, hey, this book just sold for five thousand dollars but I can get it for you for three thousand dollars?”
George smiled. “They’d probably say twenty-five hundred.”
“Which has nothing to do with the underlying value of the book. Like a spec stock.”
“Look,” George said, “you were on Wall Street. How many times did you see the price of a stock run up the same way?”
“There’s a difference,” we insisted. “If you buy a spec stock for five thousand dollars and the price doubles, minus commission, you get the full value of the stock when you turn around and sell it. If you buy a book for five thousand dollars and the price doubles and you turn around and sell it, you’ll be lucky to get your original five thousand back.”
“Wait a minute,” George said quickly, “I would never advise someone to buy books to try to make money and I don’t work with people who collect for that reason. I’m not a stockbroker. People who come to me want certain kinds of things in their libraries because they care about them and I tell them what might be available, what it is going to cost them, and then try and get what they want. I know what is important and what is not important, I know what is real and not real, and those are the things I try to pass along to the people I work with.”
“But you don’t do a lot of modern firsts,” we noted.
“I’ve never been sure exactly what I do,” said George.
“Then isn’t it a stacked deck? How can you ever hope to have a decent collection if you’re not enormously rich and are competing against people who don’t care and just buy up everything blind?”
“Oh,” said George. “I think the collector always has the advantage, because if he or she has good taste and gets good advice, he’ll always come out ahead. First, he will have great books. Second, he will get great prices. And third, he or she will have a collection with the sort of books that nobody else can get.”
“That sounds good but it seems a little tough to work in practice.”
“Not if you’re patient and pick your spots. If you’re willing to pass up a book that you want because it’s too expensive or not in good condition, eventually you’ll find it for less money in better condition. What a collector needs most and usually has the least is self-discipline.”
“Do you ever talk to other dealers about these things?”
“I never talk to anybody about these things,” George Minkoff replied.