Used and Rare Page 2

  A document of historic interest. The tragic Princess Juana was the heiress to the thrones of both her parents after the deaths of her brother and elder sister. A sullen, rather plain girl, she was married in 1496 to the very handsome Philip the Fair, who was governing Flanders for his father, the Hapsburg Emperor Maximilian I. She fell passionately in love with her husband, who was completely indifferent to her, and her grief and despair drove her into actual insanity after a few years. After 1502 she was generally known as Juana la Loca—Juana the Mad. She returned to Flanders in the Spring of 1504 after a lengthy visit to her parents; the elaborate preparations are indicated in the present document. Shortly after her return she physically attacked her husband’s mistress in the presence of the whole court and the foreign ambassadors and cut off her hair. Philip, beside himself with rage, publicly cursed and repudiated her. The scandal reverberated throughout Europe, making Isabella ill from grief and shame. Unhappiness over her daughter probably accelerated Isabella’s death in November, 1504, nine months after the date of this document. Juana inherited the throne of Castile, with her father Ferdinand as regent because of her insanity. There were frequent disputes between Ferdinand and his son-in-law Philip, and Philip’s early death in 1506 gave rise to rumours that Ferdinand had had him poisoned. The son of the tragic marriage of Juana and Philip became the brilliant Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain, Charles V.

  Lucky for Columbus that he left when he did.

  Fascinating stuff, but Maggs was going to be no help in finding a twenty-dollar copy of War and Peace, or a twenty-dollar anything for that matter, except perhaps the catalogue itself. There didn’t seem to be anything in the Maggs catalogue that didn’t end in either two or three zeroes and their prices were in pounds. The Ferdinand and Isabella document, for example, was listed at £2,400.

  The search for War and Peace had by this time assumed the proportions of a holy quest. There was nothing to do but press on and take one last shot at the Yellow Pages. Back to “Book Dealers—Used & Rare,” where one used-book store all the way in Sheffield had paid for a slightly larger ad.

  “Do you have a nice hardcover edition of War and Peace?”

  “Let me see,” said the woman who answered the phone. “Can you hold a moment?”

  Uh-oh.

  But the woman was back on the line in a few seconds. “Yes,” she said.

  “You do?”

  “Yes.”

  “What does it look like?”

  “It’s a Heritage edition in very good condition.”

  “Does it have pictures?”

  “Illustrations, you mean? Yes. And the Maude translation as well.”

  “What’s the Maude translation?”

  “Louise and Aylmer Maude. They devoted their lives to translating Tolstoy’s works. They even went to Russia and spent an extended period visiting Tolstoy on his estate south of Moscow. Aylmer wrote a biography of Tolstoy as well. The Maude translation is considered definitive.”

  “Is the print small?”

  “Oh, no. It’s quite nice. It has maps of the major battles, fold-out color illustrations, and its own slipcase …”

  “How much is it?”

  “Ten dollars.”

  “I’ll take it.”

  “Will you be coming in, or shall I mail it to you?” asked the woman.

  “Happy birthday!”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s your present. Under twen-ty dolll-lars.”

  Pause. Flurried unwrapping. “It’s War and Peace.”

  “I know. I got it for you.”

  “Uh—great. Thank you.”

  “The print’s not too small, is it?”

  “What do I care how big the print is?”

  “Oh, right. The illustrations are nice, too. And see? There are maps of the battlefields …”

  “Oh yeah? Let me see.” Pause. “This is about Napoléon’s attacking Russia, isn’t it?”

  “Among other things. It’s the Maude translation, too.”

  “What’s the Maude translation?”

  “Louise and Aylmer Maude. They spent their lives translating Tolstoy. They even went to Russia to visit him and wrote a biography. The Maude translation is considered definitive.”

  “All right, all right. Thanks a lot. I’ll read it.”

  For the next three weeks, we talked about War and Peace.

  “Wow. Did you know that all the major figures that Tolstoy wrote about actually existed? This guy Kutuzov is unbelievable.”

  “Which one is Kutuzov?”

  “Which one is Kutuzov? He’s the general! The one who only had one eye! The one who saved the Russian army by retreating out of Moscow! I thought you said you read this book.”

  “I liked the parties.”

  “You didn’t read the battles at all?”

  “I kind of skimmed them.”

  “You’ve got no taste. Well, all the famous people at the parties were real, too.”

  “Like who?”

  “Oh, there was that actress and Madame de Staël … all the czar’s relatives … everybody but the main characters were real people.”

  “How did you find all this out?”

  “It’s in the notes. The notes are almost better than the book. Didn’t you read the notes either?”

  “There weren’t any notes in the paperback.”

  “You’re kidding. How could you enjoy the book without the notes?”

  “I liked the love story. I didn’t care if it was real.”

  “I can’t believe you. Remember when they went for the sleigh ride? How cold it was? You know what the notes said? It was thirty below! The nobility used to do that in Russia. Go sleigh riding at night when it was thirty below!”

  “Really.”

  “And did you know that before Borodino, the biggest battle in the whole campaign, Napoleon put off a strategy conference so that he could talk to the artist he had dragged along with him and check the progress on a portrait of his son that he had commissioned and then sat there and made minute corrections to what the guy had done while all his generals sat around with their thumbs up their ass?”

  “Fascinating.”

  “I can’t believe you never read this stuff. Did you know that Tolstoy based some of the worst characters in the book on members of his own family?”

  “I guess you really like the book then.”

  “Of cour … didn’t you like what I got you?”

  “Sure, honey. The bath brush was great.”

  CHAPTER 2

  War and Peace had arrived in the mail with a business card stuck in it.

  BERKSHIRE BOOK COMPANY

  David and Esther Kininmonth

  Main Street, Sheffield

  So, one beautiful Saturday afternoon in early fall, we got in the car and headed down to Sheffield.

  Berkshire County forms a slightly truncated rectangle at the western end of Massachusetts. It is forty miles by twenty, with the longer side running north to south and borders Vermont to the north, New York to the west, and Connecticut to the south. It is divided by residents into thirds. “South County” runs from the Connecticut border north to Great Barrington, “Mid-County” from Stockbridge through Pittsfield to Lanesborough, and “North County” up through Williamstown to the Vermont border.

  Sheffield is the southernmost town in South County, about a half-hour drive from Lenox. Sheffield is much less densely populated than Lenox and is inhabited principally by second-home owners, antique dealers, and mosquitoes (it’s on a floodplain). It used to have the oldest covered bridge in Massachusetts but a couple of years ago three local kids burned it down.

  We drove south through Great Barrington and on into Sheffield, keeping a lookout for the Berkshire Book Company. Main Street is actually Route 7, the main north-south connector road for the county. Most of Route 7 is commercial but, in Sheffield, virtually all the shops and dealers were housed in the rambling old colonials that people used to live in before the Berkshires d
iscovered the New York tourist trade. We drove through the one-hundred-yard town center, past the BRIDGE CLOSED sign, and on south without spotting Berkshire Book Company. The buildings began to become more irregularly spaced and we were just about to give up, thinking we’d passed it, when we saw a small red, white, and blue sign that read BERKSHIRE BOOK COMPANY, with a smaller sign hanging underneath that said OPEN. We slammed on the brakes, ignored the honking horn behind us, and churned into a gravel driveway.

  On the right was a house, once again a charming, green-shuttered-white-clapboard-New-England-colonial. To the left was a grim, red outbuilding. In a previous incarnation, it appeared to have housed either a car or a hay wagon. Maybe a cow. Pasted to a small glass window on the door was a little sign that read BERKSHIRE BOOK COMPANY. We didn’t know exactly what we’d been expecting, but whatever it was, it wasn’t this.

  The red building maintained its image on the inside as well. The floorboards were creaky, the lighting inadequate. It seemed to be both too hot and too cold at the same time. Bagpipe music was playing from a tinny speaker somewhere. There was the hint of an odd odor in the air, somewhere between an old, musty closet and fertilizer.

  Everywhere we looked, we saw books. Every available inch of wall space was covered with shelves that were crammed full of books. Except for a minimal amount of aisle space, the floor was covered with books as well. Right by the door there was a tiny desk (it would probably have been a normal-size desk if there hadn’t been so many books on it) with an adding machine and a tin cash drawer shoved off to one side. On the floor were stacks of books two feet tall that made the desk look like a fort. A pleasant-looking man of about fifty with straight brown hair that fell forward over his forehead, wearing a short-sleeve, plaid, pastel button-down shirt, sat at the desk, leafing through, what else, a book. He glanced up and smiled as we walked in.

  “Goo’dye,” he said amiably, sounding like an educated Paul Hogan.

  We stood just inside the door for a moment, unable to decide which way to go. We were standing in what just one month before we would have dismissed as a junk shop, yet we found ourselves suddenly as silent and respectful as if we had just walked into a cathedral. It was an odd reaction. The vast majority of these books, on first perusal, weren’t even attractive. Certainly not new and shiny. In fact, neither new nor shiny.

  “Is there something I moight help you with?” the man behind the desk asked. The accent was not quite Australian either.

  “Uh, no. We just want to look around, if that’s all right.”

  “Help yourself.” The man nodded pleasantly and once again returned to his leafing.

  We discovered immediately that browsing at Berkshire Book Company was not like browsing in any bookstore we had ever been in before. When we browsed through the literature section of a new-book store, even one of the new chain mega-stores, we were at least noddingly familiar with the names of the authors they kept in stock. This stock list is obviously heavily weighted toward modern novels, books assigned in college literature courses, and whichever titles Merchant and Ivory or Emma Thompson happen to be making a film of.

  Here, the literature section alone occupied three of the shop’s four walls in the main room on the first floor, going around like a big U, filled with rows and rows of books by authors we had never heard of. Who, for example, was George Ade? Was George Lincoln a relative of Abraham’s? What about Josephine Tey? Was that Sterling Hayden, the actor?

  It got even more complicated. There was the type of edition to consider. This had never been a problem before. A new-book store usually carries only one edition of the book you want and, for all but new releases, that would be a paperback. You either bought it or you didn’t.

  Here everything was in hardcover and there were often two or three editions to chose from. We could see, for example, that all War and Peaces were not created equal. Was our single-volume Heritage War and Peace for ten dollars better or worse than the fifteen-dollar two-volume Heritage edition that was on the shelf now? And why was the 1942 Simon and Schuster Inner Sanctum edition (nice dust jacket, Maude translation, great maps, no illustrations, no notes) priced at twenty dollars while an older Modern Library edition (better quality than the current Modern Library edition, inferior translation, no maps, no illustrations, no notes) was selling for nine-fifty?

  We wandered around the store trying to figure out how things worked here. Eventually, we meandered on back to the desk.

  The pleasant-looking man looked up again. “Foind everything you were looking for?” he asked.

  “Do you have a Heritage Press edition of The Great Gatsby?” Before we had gotten into the car, we had made a mental list of books that might be nice to have around the house. We had noticed a couple of days before that our paperback of Gatsby was falling apart.

  The man considered. “I down’t think there is one,” he said, “but let’s gow and tyke a look.”

  He led us to a bookcase near the far wall that we had missed. There were about fifty volumes from Heritage Press in a section labeled PRIVATE PRESSES. Next to them were Franklin Press and Easton Press. We recognized the Easton Moby-Dick from the ads in Smithsonian. It was their teaser. Nine dollars and ninety-five cents for Moby-Dick, then some indeterminate number of additional books at forty dollars a pop. They seemed very handsome. We had once considered enrolling.

  “Oh, Moby-Dick.”

  “Yes,” noted the man. “The leatherbounds.” He said “leatherbounds” the way Harold Bloom might say “Judith Krantz.”

  Okay, what was wrong with the “leatherbounds?” It was clear from his tone that this was not a subjective issue. All those people who had responded to the ads in Smithsonian had obviously committed an expensive blunder.

  But why? We stared at the books. There didn’t seem to be anything wrong with them. They were finely bound, the leather looked expensive, the quality of the paper was good, it had gilt edging, and there was one of those soft little ribbons to keep your place with. Were they too gaudy? Was the gold embossing overdone? Was this like seeing a polyurethaned sideboard in an antique shop?

  “What’s wrong with the leatherbounds?”

  “Ow, there’s nothing wrong with them,” the man said dismissively. “People bring them in here all the toime. They spend a couple of thowsand dollahs on them to build up a loibrary then decide they don’t loike them anymore and bring them in expecting to recoup their investment. They get very upset when they foind out that they’re pretty much worthless. There’s just no demand. A lot of dealers wown’t tyke them at all.”

  “Oh.” We looked at each other. “What about the Heritage editions?”

  “Oh, they’re qwoit noice,” he replied, his tone changing. “It’s an offshoot of the Limited Editions Club, y’know.”

  “What’s the Limited Editions Club?”

  “The Limited Editions Club was started by George Macy,” he said, pronouncing it “Mycy.” “It was in the lyte twenties, I believe, before the stock market crash. Mycy took books he thought people wanted in their loibraries and commissioned a proivate printer to produce a qwoite handsome printed and bownd edition in a very limited run. Everything was first-ryte. The best printer, the best pyper.” He paused for breath and to see if we were still interested. “He commissioned the best ahtists of the toime to provide the illustrytions. He got Matisse for Ulysses and Norman Rockwell for Mark Twyne. He even got Picasso to do Lysistrata. The books were soigned and then sowld to collectors.” He smiled. It was a stiff little smile. We couldn’t tell if he was trying not to smile and couldn’t help himself or trying to smile and not quite being able to get it out all the way.”The limitytions on the run were supposed to droive up the proice.

  “The Heritage Press editions used the syme text and illustrytions as the Limited Editions version but were bownd and printed commercially. Also, they weren’t soigned, of course, and were issued from a much lahger run for a more general audience.” He squinted at the bookcase in front of him and plucked a vo
lume from the shelf. It contained both H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds and Time Machine. “They’re qwoite nice, actually,” he repeated, taking the book out of its slipcase and looking it over. He did not seem to hold the book as much as caress it.

  “In this one, the two works are bound dos-à-dos, back to back. If a dos-à-dos book is placed flat on a tyble, it is always fyce up.” He showed us. “It’s always fyce down, too, of course,” he added. Then he pulled a small folded piece of pyper … uh, paper, from the slipcase.

  “Each Heritage selection was produced with a little newsletter called The Sandglass, which talks about the book and the author and the illustrytor.” He showed us the newsletter. It was entitled Of Martians and Morlocks,

  “See here,” he said, pointing. “Wells was only twenty-noine when The Toime Machine came out …”

  “We’ll take it.”

  “I down’t think you’ll be disappointed,” said the man. “Needless to sye, the Heritage editions are substantially cheaper than the Limited Editions Club books. They were about forty dollars new, I believe. A perfectly serviceable library can be stocked exclusively from used Heritage editions at no more than ten, twenty, or, at most, twenty-five dollahs per book.” He checked inside the front cover. “This one is ten dollahs.”

  We looked through the rest of the bookcase and withdrew a copy of Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie.