The Last Bookaneer

by Matthew Pearl

  Apparently pleased by what had already passed at my bookstall, and my discretion at the Crown, Whiskey Bill began delivering books at irregular intervals. He never came to my stall. He’d pass me the package in a crowded street or sidewalk, on an omnibus or a ferry, with no explanation of how he’d found me and no conversation beyond the most basic greeting. Then a customer, different each time, always a stranger to me, would purchase the volume at my bookstall, leaving a too-large sum of money in my hands and never waiting for change.

  My general interest in the bookaneers had given me some advance knowledge about Whiskey Bill. Despite what the printer’s devil proclaimed to me, Bill was not the greatest example of his field; in fact, had there ever been a Professor Agassiz to work out a classification of the literary pirates, Bill would have been placed in the second tier, forever trying to push up his rankings. Then at the bottom rung were the so-called barnacles, those who had some experience in bookaneering but no patience, resorting to careless thefts and inevitably spending time in and out of jails; as the name suggests, these were parasites of the trade, acting on intelligence purloined from better and more successful practitioners.

  The legends of bookaneers’ deeds passed around Pfaff’s Cave in the old days would inevitably include dramatic circumstances and intrigue, breathless chases through streets and buildings, confrontations with celebrated authors and battles of will with ruthless printers of wealth and power. As usual the truth is a source of disappointment. The commonplace bookaneer usually did little more than sit in dingy taverns to negotiate sundry transactions, act as a courier avoiding customs, and submit poems and stories plagiarized from an obscure magazine to other obscure magazines under false names, with the ambition of pilfering a few dollars here and shillings there. No heavily armed authors waiting in ambush, no sudden betrayals by trusted associates, no hidden passageways aiding an escape.

  But if so many representatives of the craft were drudges and Jeremy Diddlers, a small and unofficial guild of professional, expert bookaneers rose to the pinnacle of greatness. They moved frequently between both sides of the Atlantic. I believe I could count the ones operating at a given time on one hand. They grew beyond the control of the publishers, who came to fear as much as rely on them. Each was a king.

  These men—and one particular woman of note—were not mere publishers’ clerks moonlighting as amateur thieves or spies. They spoke and wrote dozens of languages, were as well read in literature as any professor or man of letters, could identify the handwriting and style, even the stray pen marks, of thousands of authors and book illustrators through the small lens of an opera glass. Little wonder the rest of their brethren looked at them with equal parts awe and bitterness. They have been called audacious criminals, but this is not entirely accurate—the greatest bookaneers stepped into a void and helped control the chaos caused by the broken copyright laws and the maelstrom of greed that rumbles just beneath the surface world of books.

  My prevailing interest in the tales of the bookaneers ripened into outright fascination once I became a footnote in Whiskey Bill’s operations. I filled my notebooks with any scrap of gossip and partial anecdote related to them. I myself might have composed a treatise, On the Classification of Bookaneers. But despite my thirst for a fuller knowledge of their practices, I confess I still could not bring myself to open any of the mysterious volumes Bill delivered to me. I knew just enough to know they were no ordinary books. They were bound by hand, usually in thick brown leather, with the metal clasp and a different title each time of a book that did not exist. I felt his eyes always upon me and imagined that if I did unclasp one of the volumes, even in the privacy of my own chambers, my connection with this secret world would vanish there and then. I would rotate the thing in my hand, squeeze the leather, and conjure possibilities. Proof sheets of a highly touted novel not yet published. Manuscript pages missing for a hundred years from an unfinished masterwork. A decoy meant to trap a rival publishing spy.

  Cast a look at my little cart. Some fancy the book a quaint, tame object, and it is not difficult to understand why. But take a longer look, Mr. Clover. Recall that when the first presses produced copies of the Bible, the scribes who had to spend years at a time on the same work, just as it had been done for centuries, streamed out from the monasteries with quills raised in the air, decrying the work of the devil. When one of the pioneering tradesmen printed certain words in red ink to emphasize them, it was proof that he had used his own blood. That was why the printers’ assistants began to be called “devils.” Soon printers were threatened with burning, and some were indeed put into the fire along with their equipment. From the beginning, the creation of the modern book was viewed as the work of Satan—an attempt to usurp the word of God.

  No tameness there, and those were just the opening battles. In my boardinghouse, you took note of my copies of Mary Shelley’s astounding and wild novel written when she was still more girl than woman. When Frankenstein was published, it was considered terrible and disgusting, a waking nightmare, yet it defied all intellectual hysterics by entrancing millions of unsuspecting readers. The book took on a life and importance of its own, not unlike how the creature does in that novel. Not unlike the bookaneers growing into a powerful monster nobody in the trade knew how to domesticate.

  Since the advent of the modern industry, there are no parties in the book world who are innocent of commodification, commercialization, and competition, for even the high-minded authors who come to it young and starry-eyed compromise with reality; the readers remain relatively unaffected and pure, though their money must change hands. To a bookaneer, the past, present, and future of literature was all fair game. To the fervent imagination of a bookseller and collector like myself, there was no end to what treasure and mystery might be pressed between two boards.

  Perhaps it was not only superstition, not only the pure pleasure of guessing that stayed my hand from the simple act of opening Bill’s books. I now must wonder if I feared how what I’d find inside would change my life.

  • • •

  I BRIMMED WITH a new feeling of self-confidence about my place among other bookmen, and I gleefully frequented the best London social clubs and coffeehouses that served the literary and artistic circles. In these settings I was to encounter most of the reputable bookaneers of a generation. These were heady days, long before Molasses became mixed up in a case of murder, before the Berne copyright negotiations, when there was plenty of business for everyone. The trust Whiskey Bill had shown in me led other bookaneers to transfer books anonymously through my busy bookstall, as well as hire me for assignments that matched my talents for handwriting identification. I could never know when I was being tested or not, and always made certain to perform my tasks in a timely and straightforward manner, indulging only in necessary questions. It was in this way that I came to have a minor but useful part in the world of the most surreptitious of bookmen. It was in this way that I crossed into the sphere of Pen Davenport.

  Davenport was one of the three most infamous bookaneers in the world—the immortals, you might call them. An American by birth but long a citizen of the world with no home in particular, Davenport could often be observed keeping society among the London litterateurs. Then there was Kitten, a French lady who was considered the most determined and skillful of the set. You can still see a striking image of her on the third floor of the British Museum, in a painting of a green-cloaked damsel, for which she was used as a model by one of the great Bohemian painters of the past decades. The third bookaneer who was equally celebrated, Belial, an Englishman whose real name until recently was unknown, was rarely seen in public. He was always on a bookaneering mission, as far as anyone could tell. Davenport commanded interest and attention, but if you looked at Davenport you would look for Belial, and that gave the absent one of the pair a unique power.

  Neither Belial, Kitten, nor Davenport were among the bookaneers who had employed my services. It was ra
ther peevish of me to be discouraged by this. I confess that. I had been admitted into the world of the bookaneers by chance, and now all I wished, more than any earthly object, was to observe the absolute best. What is that Arab proverb old Mr. Stemmes would sometimes repeat? Beware the camel’s nose—for its whole body will soon follow. You have the gist. I had never been greedy, but in this instance I could not restrain myself. Though Belial might as well have been the invisible man, and Kitten was too intimidating to approach, I decided that the next time I happened to see Pen Davenport I would come right out and tell him my desire.

  I must have been invigorated by the breeze one brisk spring evening, because I thought I’d try some places where he might be, and found my way to the district of Covent Garden. When I entered the dark Italianate rooms of the Garrick Club, the clocks inside were chiming midnight while the noise and bustle of men was fresh and unflagging. Here was a place that made the thought of ever sleeping seem foolish. I hoped that listening to the after-theater conversations I might overhear some gossip related to the bookaneers, and more specifically a hint of a recent sighting of Davenport around London, though for all I knew he was on a remote mission and far from English soil.

  I was flattered when the unassuming usher bowed and told me to follow him. “We have a place waiting for you.”

  How highly my new associations with the bookaneers had elevated my social status. Here in New York, culture is only occasionally more powerful than money, but in London, wealth will never be even a close second.

  The Garrick was crammed with expensive collections of books and a range of paintings, modern and old, some of which the museums would consider too strange or obscene to display. Just as the wall space was split between art and literature, so was the roll of members and guests who frequented the place, these authors and artists also joined by many of the great actors of the theater. There were so many performers in wigs and false mustaches and heavy powders, you assumed everyone was in disguise even if they were not, and you felt that same feeling as in the best theaters of the day. Magical beings and not ordinary humans must reign here. There was one band of happy mummies and ghouls, raising glasses for a toast to a successful show. As I was conducted through a long passage off the main dining room, I prepared to ask the usher if there had been any interesting visitors that evening, when we stopped at the entrance of the smoking room.

  The usher stepped to the side and I saw him. Pen Davenport was at a table in the center, the air around him a swirl of bitter tobacco scents—from musk to mustard. I glanced back over my shoulder. The usher had vanished into the dining room.

  “I understand you have been looking for me.”

  My jaw actually dropped.

  Drowsy, thoughtful eyes the color of emeralds glanced up from beneath long lashes. His voice was quiet enough that I had to lean an ear toward him. Above him was a painting of David Garrick, the legendary actor whose name inspired the club’s, dressed as Macbeth and contemplating a dagger; to the left of the speaker, an elegant statuette of Thackeray.

  I clapped my mouth closed. “Pardon?”

  “Then you haven’t been searching for me?”

  I was so amazed I could hardly reply. Before the Garrick I had paused at a few taverns and clubs of literary bent where, my previous notes reminded me, I had seen Davenport in the past, but I had not given any indication of my purpose.

  I found my tongue. “I looked for you this evening, yes, but have not uttered your name to another living soul.”

  “You did not have to. In the past four hours you visited the Beefsteak, the Green Room, the Canary House, the Hogarth, and now the Garrick, and did little else but whistle to yourself and hide behind your spectacles. I know who you are. You have performed trifling assignments for some middling bookaneers, and outside of that fact I would wager your life is rather plain. White-rim spectacles are only worn by a man who keeps clean. So if you are doing something unusual, it is surely connected to our profession, not yours. If two of the five places had been different, if you went to the Crown or Stone Tavern on your tour of London club life, even if only one of the five had been a favorite haunt of some other bookaneer, of Molasses’s or that redheaded lout Whiskey Bill’s, for instance, then it would have been less obvious you searched for me.”

  “But how did you know where I’ve been? Were you . . .” I swallowed my next word.

  “I have not had you followed,” he said, guessing my question. “I’m afraid, bookseller, you will never be important enough to follow.” It is difficult to accurately describe how Davenport could speak with sincerity but without much inflection; only he could manage pronouncing “you will never be important” not as an insult, but as an impersonal observation.

  “No, of course I couldn’t. I didn’t mean—”

  “I maintain multiple sets of eyes across the city wherever there are literary characters. The clubs, the drinking dens, the coffeehouses, the circulating libraries, the printers’ shops and their warehouses. I am informed of visitors’ routines, and breaks in those routines. Unlike some of my more grandiose challengers who fancy they are too distinguished to be viewed by fellow men, I make myself just visible enough to know when someone wishes to find me. Now, if you please.” He flicked his hand for me to take a seat.

  Shaking off my nerves, I lowered myself into the chair opposite, almost slipping down the big leather cushion onto the floor. There was a sample of the club’s famous gin punch waiting for me on the table. I could not stop myself from staring at the man.

  “When they dreamed of turning iron and metal into gold, they called it alchemy. The much more far-fetched dream of turning bound sheafs of plain paper into fortunes, they call publishing,” he mused with an arch expression on his face. Though I was nearly a decade his senior, at twenty-six years old he commanded a conversation in a way I never had. “Usually when a man seeks my company,” the bookaneer continued, “I expect him to do some of the talking.”

  “Of course, Mr. Davenport.” He held out a cigar to me. “No, thank you; tobacco rather irritates my—”

  “Hold it, at least. I will not be seen in the smoking room of the Garrick with a nonsmoker.”

  I complied. “That’s sensible.”

  “It is a doomed calling, you know.”

  “What?”

  “Bookselling. Your problem is the educational system. It’s become too good. Aristocrats enjoy spending as much money as possible on books. The greater portion of the population that learns to read, the more they will revolt against having to pay to do so. Now, your business.”

  I explained how recently I had been given the unexpected chance to be of some service to some in his field, and that I thought, perhaps, that if he should ever need assistance similar to that which I had performed from time to time for his fellow bookaneers—not that he would, being so accomplished—but in the odd event, the unexpected and unlikely occasion, the rare spot that he did find that he did, I thought to leave him my card.

  “Oh. You are finished?”

  “Well, I—Sorry.”

  “Do you know how many of the great bookaneers have passed through this room over the years?”

  “No.”

  “They were individuals who rose, usually without the name of a college or a family, to hold as much sway as rich publishers and esteemed authors, more so in some cases, in determining the public’s access to books. If they did wrong sometimes, well, so have the publishers—so have books themselves, which have started wars and have ended them, have saved lives and vanquished them without mercy. I understand you are a sort of encyclopedia when it comes to knowledge about our trade. I wonder if you noticed how I rate among the bookaneers—”

  “Oh, the very top of the pile, I’d say! Pen Davenport? A master. Right up alongside Belial.”

  Later, I would understand that Davenport was not to be read all at once, like a broadside, but unfolded gr
adually, as the pages of a long, multivolume set of books. I had made two mistakes in a single breath. I had interrupted his monologue, without intending to, and I had said Belial.

  His deep annoyance showed itself only by the downward slope of his brow and the pursing of his fine mouth. He punished me with three long beats of silence before his face relaxed. “Belial,” he began in a grumbling voice. “Belial would eat your heart if given the chance. Tell me this, bookseller. Imagine Belial sitting beside me right now, and he offered you a place helping him, and I offered the same. You must accept one or the other, for we two are men of opposite principles.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I am a man who respects the supremacy of books; he is one who seeks to gain supremacy from them. Which man would you accept?”

  “Why, I suppose whoever needed my help more.”

  I took his elaborately crumpled chin and his hunched shoulders to mean I had insulted him. “If you noticed how I rate among the bookaneers, if you possessed that modicum of knowledge, you would know that the reason I am first-rate is that I need no help. Certainly not the help of a man who believes I would do anything in the style as a ruffian such as Whiskey Bill.”

  “My apologies.” I gave my spectacles a good polish and then took another quick glance around the room. “I am sorry I do not know what bookaneers have been in this place through history, Mr. Davenport. But I can tell you that Edgar Boehm said he made that statuette behind you in only two sittings with William Thackeray in 1860, but in fact he completed it only after the novelist’s death. One of those four seemingly identical—seemingly, I say—early editions of Shakespeare on that oval table in the far corner is a forgery, and I would venture to guess a misprint on the title page of the third novel from the left on the shelf to the right of you has led the librarian of this club to believe it is a much older volume than it is.”