JOIN USA Nabokov devotee I know asked his friends going abroad to search for Ticonderoga No 2 pencils, because that’s what the author used when sketching or writing. Paul Theroux once profiled an Anthony Burgess collector (probably fictional, but no less interesting for it) in the New Yorker, who, in addition to owning everything Burgess had ever written, also possessed two old passports of Burgess, some concert tickets he had once used, and an umbrella he had left behind at a bookshop.
I like to think of these as collecting accessories. “After first editions, what next?” wonders the book collector. This isn’t greed, but a natural extension of the collector’s longing to connect with everything associated with the book. Collecting broadsides and letters of a cherished author, and by extension, special/ limited/ signed editions, galley/ advance proofs, book jackets, vintage paperbacks, literary bookmarks, printed book catalogues, and even notebooks and bags with literary motifs (quotes/ sketches of famous authors).
One of the more interesting collecting accessories I’ve spotted on eBay is a seller who specialises in custom-made literary bookmarks. Is there a favourite author that you want to turn into a nice bookmark? You can have one that comes laminated and with pretty tassels. The bookmark will contain several book jacket images of the author’s work, three of the author’s best photos, and a small passage from her best-known book. I bid for Fitzgerald and Nabokov, and won. Later, I added a guilty pleasure: J D Salinger.
Strictly verboten, actually, but I couldn’t resist. That’s a collectible bookmark if I ever saw one. A further transgression in ephemera-collecting was when I ordered, online, a facsimile book jacket of a first edition The Catcher in the Rye from The Phantom Bookshop. An artist named John Anthony Miller keeps countless book lovers across the globe happy (and well fed) by making high-quality facsimile book jackets of famous books — from Stoker’s Dracula to Burroughs’s Tarzan the Terrible, to that holy grail of jackets, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Made from the original source, the material is digitally scanned ‘and meticulously restored on a pixel level many times more’.
Miller sees it as an art form. And indeed, when I received that facsimile Catcher (and it very clearly states facsimile) wrapped in a Mylar-protected cover, it was fetching. It looked bright and sharp, like it was printed yesterday (which it was). I had with me a jacketless first edition of Catcher and I — as they say in the antiquarian trade — married the jacket to the book. Salinger would not have approved, of course, but that jacket in the true original is scarce and expensive.
My newest accessory is the book catalogue. Our booksellers have never had a tradition of putting out catalogues (those photocopied booklets don’t count), so I’ve taken to asking bookshops abroad to post theirs to me, which they are glad to do. Until now, the experience of browsing for books through a catalogue was an unfamiliar one for me. I recommend it – it’s a new bibliophile high. Book catalogues today are, however, not as common as they once were. The contemporary trend to browse for books on the internet has altered book-buying practices everywhere. Once booksellers (and not just antiquarian dealers) regularly printed catalogues and sent them out on request. Today, they mostly post a PDF version online. It still does the job, but in so many ways is a lesser and diminished experience than perusing a sumptuously-done book catalogue.
An exemplary book catalogue I often return to peruse is the Bruce Kahn Collection, offered jointly by two high-end, respected antiquarian dealers specialising in modern first editions. And what editions! What condition! How often can you find near-mint copies of first-edition high spots? And, fantastic as this sounds, it is all the collection of just one man. Bruce Kahn, a successful lawyer-turned-book collector.
Among numerous treasures in the catalogue is a limited, signed edition of Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy; a near-flawless copy of Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice; a signed copy of Raymond Carver’s scarce first book of poems, Near Klamath; the nicest possible signed copy of Catch 22; On the Road in a perfect dust jacket; a beautiful copy of The Catcher in the Rye in an unrestored dust jacket; and that exceptionally scarce first issue of Raise High the Roofbeam, lacking a dedication page.
In the catalogue’s introduction, the booksellers note that Kahn ‘always wanted his books to be in perfect condition, and even the slightest flaw would be either unacceptable, or if he finally decided he could overlook some nearly microscopic flaw, it had damn well better be mitigated by being a unique copy or an exceptionally rare book, or an important association copy, or preferably both. What’s a bookseller to do? This set a pretty high standard for selling him books, and to some degree it is amazing that he has managed to assemble a collection of about 15,000 books in beautiful condition. He collected in the style of old-time book collectors — that is, he collected authors in depth, pursuing all their published titles, variant editions such as proofs, advance copies, and broadsides... As a result, the author collections themselves end up being bibliographically significant, especially for those authors for whom there is not yet an “official” or definitive bibliography.’
Making a print-worthy catalogue — writing, illustrating and designing it — is an art. I am grateful to all these booksellers who still take an interest in writing and printing catalogues. The production costs for fine catalogues are obviously high, and they can easily just stay with an electronic version — and yet these booksellers print them because both the aesthetics of such a thing and its place in antiquarian bookselling feel important to them.