Dr. Z

by Paul Zimmerman

  The most expensive was $35 at The Blue Duck in Prague, but that was such a terrific restaurant that I didn’t begrudge them the sale. Besides, the thing was too heavy to slip under the arm, and I liked the people there too much to do a number on them. I’ve now gone back to the old way, which is tougher than ever because not only do I have to be on the lookout for waiters and maître d’s but Linda as well.

  I know people who use menus as decorative art, who have a whole gallery of framed covers lining the walls of their house, but to me, that’s like keeping the wrapper and throwing away the candy. The cover is nice, of course, but it’s the inside that makes for the fun reading, especially when you compare prices. I’m lucky enough to have had this menu instinct for a long time. Thus I can boast of such now defunct rarities as Le Chapon Fin in Bordeaux, when I had lunch there as a GI on leave in 1957 and could afford only one fancy meal, or Henri Soule’s famous Le Pavillon in New York in 1964. (Editor’s note: Indiana University purchased Paul’s menu collection.)

  Cigar box labels are the late entry. Almost 30 years ago, when my children were six and seven, they attended a summer camp called Appel Farm in the heat belt of southern New Jersey, inland, next to a town called Elmer. One Sunday we were visiting and we took the kids for ice cream at an old fashioned soda shop in town. It was an interesting place, with an old fashioned antiquely look to it, and sure enough, there were collectibles on sale. A few advertising posters, the usual chipped World War II Coca-Cola tray, nothing very special. And then I spotted a few loose leaf notebooks.

  In them was a form of art I had never seen before, cigar box label art. The labels, the larger, 6 x 9 inner labels, or those that went inside the box, and the 4 1/2 x 4 1/2 outer labels, were neatly enclosed in plastic sheets, and some were stunningly beautiful. From the high gilt style of the 19th century to art deco or even the German Bauhaus style of some of the foreign labels, they represented innumerable themes. And they were cheap.

  I started thumbing through each book. Prices started at 35 cents apiece and topped out at about a dollar for an 1872 label called Strawberry, which remains the oldest I have. There were three loose leaf books full of them; all were in mint condition. The kids had finished their ice cream sodas, and their attention span was running out. My ex-wife gave one of those pseudo-cheery, sarcastic, “Time to go now” calls, the implication being there he is, as usual, making us wait for him while indulges in some foolishness.

  I had to move quickly. I asked the lady at the store how much for all the labels, all three books?

  “I’ll have to ask my husband,” she said, showing no surprise, or actually much of anything. Emotion was not a big thing in Elmer.

  “Look, I have to go,” I said. “Just give me a fair price.”

  “Cash only,” she said, answering a question but not the one I asked. “No checks, no credit cards. Cash.”

  Note to collector junkies. Always carry cash. You never know when you’ll run into something, and cash opens many doors because then the transaction will be off the books, and they can stiff the government out of the taxes it needs to equip a highly trained military presence. Even so, I didn’t know whether I had enough for all those labels and I didn’t have time to pick and choose and I knew she wouldn’t hold them for me, even with a deposit, not really being up for complicated transactions.

  I’ve had a persistent nightmare that I’m sure collectors have shared. I’ve discovered the find of a lifetime, an antique gallery or perhaps an old bookstore or coin shop with priceless treasures to be had at knockdown prices, but I didn’t have enough cash, or a vehicle in which to transport the goods. There was always some impediment. This time there wasn’t. There were about 200 labels in those books, a few dupes, but most of them different, and the price she quoted me was, if I remember correctly, something like $100. Average 50 cents per label. I could cover it, and that bunch became the start of a most interesting collecting avenue.

  In any new collecting venture, your interest gradually settles down, but you’re on fire at first. I found catalogues, a few books that mentioned the cigar box labels, a beautifully illustrated article in an old Fortune Magazine complete with reproductions. I found a labels-only dealer, Cerebro in Lancaster, Pa., whose prices were reasonable … it was always let’s make a deal … but then grew quite serious when the collecting interest began to grow. I would search for labels at ephemera book fairs and shows, hunt them up in old bookstores or secondhand shops while I was on the road. The fun of it was that they remained unknown commodities for many years, hence cheap.

  They’ve had a curious history. Once upon a time, late in the 19th century, going into the early 20th, there were many different kinds of them. They were actually proud examples of the engraver’s art, both in this country and Europe. But in later years, the factories began closing, and when they were sold, their new owners often found rolls of these labels left behind. Rather than being dumped on the market in huge quantities, the ones that weren’t actually thrown out were released judiciously, but there were still plenty to go round with very little demand. And that’s the market that I stepped into that day in Elmer.

  They were marvelous things to devote evenings to, sorting them, classifying, assigning places in notebooks according to theme — pretty girls, foreign labels, 19th century heavy gilt, sports themes, romance, Greek mythology, animals. They were a sorter and cataloguer’s dream. Prices have climbed, though … actually to where they should be based on their quality. Collecting them is now an expensive pastime. So, personally, they’re in what I call a passive, rather than an active phase. I’m happy with what I have, I won’t be actively pursuing too many more, but if a few good ones come along at decent prices … well, you never know.

  And that brings us to the most serious collecting habit of all — books. You start by being a reader, which I was ever since, well, ever since I learned how to read. And since I never threw anything out, my library has a section of stained and worn and torn volumes, some still bearing faint food smells, that formed my childhood reading … Junket Is Nice, Here and Now Stories, Japanese Fairy Tales, Indian Fairy Tales, The Five Chinese Brothers, and best of all, a book that I’ve re-ordered from an antiquarian shop because my daughter, Sarah, loved it so much, Professor Peckham’s Adventures in a Drop of Water.

  When I reached high school and then college, I learned about another way to build a library. Book clubs. Especially the ones whose ads bore the notation to be checked off, Bill Me Later. Those were before the days of rampant credit cards, and I’d say Bill Me Laters formed a huge part of what was a significant teenage library, leaning heavily toward the classics.

  I developed a gang of aliases, each one a dedicated Bill Me Later devotee. There was Ralph Weaver and Warren Fleming, who like sports books, and Rabbi Nathan Feinberg, who specialized in pre-19th century classics, and Dr. Jurgen Buhl, whose tastes were mostly Thomas Mann and the heavier European volumes, plus a few others. Except that sometimes I would get them mixed up, or lose track, since, let’s face it, I was too young to paralyze myself with intricate record keeping. Thus my house was a beehive of books arriving, bills, dunning notices, threats and still more books. My parents both worked, so I could get to the mail before they did, thus embarrassing questions generally were avoided.

  I concentrated mostly on two clubs, The Heritage Club and The Classics Club, since they were the most persistent advertisers. Instinct kept me away from the Book of the Month Club. Too mainstream.

  I was worried that they might have more sophisticated methods for dealing with the Warren Flemings and Jurgen Buhls of this world. The other two clubs, though, seemed to be more into flailing blindly, without too much care whom they struck. I remember vividly one afternoon when a very stern letter arrived from the Heritage Club for Dr. Buhl, c/o P. Zimmerman:

  “You have persistently ignored every letter we have sent you requesting payment. The next correspondence you receive will be on,
and this was underlined in red, for emphasis, (drum roll, please) Lawyer’s Stationery.”

  And in the very same mailing, from the same Heritage Club, a nicely illustrated copy of The Vicar of Wakefield, addressed to Warren Fleming, c/o P/Zimmerman, with the salutation, “Welcome New Member!” (Damn two-faced Heritage Club … the very idea.)

  You’d think that someone might have wondered about this gang of thieves all sharing residence with poor Zimmerman, but the matter never came up.

  When adulthood came, I put away, as Paul the Apostle said, childish things and began to learn about something that became a lifelong drive, the collecting of books. Not catfish collecting, as much of my early assemblages represented, but collecting with a point of view. What is catfish collecting? Well, at one time I took my children, Sarah, and her younger brother, Michael, down to the Malcolm Forbes Galleries on 5th Ave. and 12th St. to get a look at the million dollar Faberge eggs from Czarist Russia, not really knowing what the rest of the museum held.

  What we saw were some interesting examples of scatter-shot collecting of all manner of Americana, plus large glass cabinets filled with rank upon rank of military miniatures, mostly hand painted, jammed together in close order. Taken individually, some of the pieces would be interesting, but as a horde they lost all meaning. This, I explained to my children, is catfish collecting. Everything gets swallowed. Then we turned a corner, and I saw displayed something that represented exactly the opposite of what I had just told them about.

  It was a diorama of the gun deck of Lord Nelson’s HMS Victory during the battle of Trafalgar, the figures shockingly lifelike, puffs coming from the guns, blood-stained swaths around the gunners’ heads, tiny mirrors fitted into the walls to expand the aspect of the scene. Never have I seen a more beautiful one.

  Years later, Lane Stewart, a Sports Illustrated photographer who specialized in military miniatures, explained to me that the famous diorama had been done by the Chicago artist, Shep Haines. So highly regarded was he that when the captain of the HMS Victory — yes, Nelson’s Victory is still a fully staffed flagship — comes to Chicago, he stays overnight on the couch in Shep Haines’ living room.

  It was all a lesson in catfish versus focused collecting designed to make collectors out of my children, a project I’ve essentially abandoned. Oh, they’ll show an interest in things, but the true madness is not there, lucky for them. But there came a point when I progressed from catfish to collector, and one blessing was that it required less room in the house.

  I focused on authors who were meaningful to me, or had been at one stage of my life — B. Traven, Ring Lardner, H. P. Lovecraft, George Orwell and especially Rudyard Kipling. Then there was a second tier, such as Vladimir Nabokov, Graham Greene, Ambrose Bierce, Joyce Cary, etc., plus individual books that had enough of an impact that l wanted them in first edition — some of Larry McMurtry’s early works, here and there a Henry Miller or an H.G. Wells. Luckily, I began when most authors I liked were fairly affordable. Some never were, at least on my budget. Hemingway, for instance. Choice works were always out of sight, except for For Whom the Bell Tolls, a regular $10 item at the auction galleries when I first started frequenting them in the late 1960s, but you can add a couple of zeros to that now.

  If you’re interested in books, not necessarily as collectibles, but just as, well, nice things to read, I’m sure you’re aware of what I’m going to tell you now. Never lend books. For some reason there’s something about them that leads people to feel that they don’t have to be returned. The last time I made this mistake was, oh, about 25 years ago, and the result was a near disaster.

  I had an old friend who lived in Bethesda, Md., a Redskins fan, naturally. One evening he and his wife were at our house for dinner. Before we sat down, he was browsing through the library and he picked out a first edition of Charles G. Finney’s Circus of Dr. Lao, with the dreamlike Boris Artzybasheff illustrations.

  “Hmmm, never read this,” he said. “I’ll just borrow it.” I felt sick.

  “You can read it before we sit down,” I said, as the waves of panic rose. “It’s a short book.”

  Everyone looked at me as if I were nuts. I had no allies in the room. He borrowed the book. And it remained borrowed. A year, two years went by. I’d call him up on some pretext or other. Oh by the way, comma, do you think you could send me that book? I’ll send it, don’t worry, I’ll send it. The thing was obsessing me, keeping me awake at night.

  Finally during the football season of the third year ML, Minus Lao, I talked my editor at Sports Illustrated into letting me cover a Redskins game in Washington. I called my friend and told him I’d be down his way.

  “Oh, you’ve got to stay with us,” he said. Damn right I’ve got to stay with you. Why do you think I’m coming there? So we had dinner. I mentioned the book as casually as I could, given my twisted expression. Oh, it’s around somewhere, don’t worry. Has anyone ever stopped worrying because someone said, “Don’t worry?” Or taken it easy when someone said, “Take it easy?”

  In the meantime I gave the living room bookcase a careful search. No Lao. Where could it be? Could he have gotten rid of it? We went to bed, after casual mention that it would be looked for the next day. I couldn’t sleep. Could it be that there was a bookcase in their bedroom? Instinct told me yes. It was 3 a.m. I turned on the hall light and opened the bedroom door just enough to let me squeeze in and to provide a bit of meager light. There was a bookcase. They were asleep. His wife was naked from the waist up and uncovered. For God’s sake, don’t wake up. I mean, we were friends and all, but I could still see the headlines: Bedroom Freak Caught in Bethesda.

  And then God finally decided to smile on his humble servant. There on the top shelf … easy while you’re reaching up, now … was the off-white spine of the jacket, with the spidery red script writing, The Circus of Doctor Lao, and out of the bookcase it came, into my bag and home to its dear place, alphabetized between Faulkner and Fitzgerald.

  I was at a party once and a woman asked me, “How can you be an author and a book collector, too?” The question sounds a bit daffy, but there’s really some sense to it. How can you be involved in the big picture, the act of creation, the entire artistic impulse and still pin yourself down to the minutiae of collecting, the identification of obscure first edition points, the glorification of the unopened, unread volume? I told her to ask Larry McMurtry. He’s a better example of it than me.

  He is a dealer, and I, assume, a collector, as well, since the two go together. I had visited his shop in Georgetown, Booked Up, and spent a very pleasant afternoon there, talking about books we collect. I bought a couple of modern fiction works and then, and I expected him to groan at this, but he didn’t … he was a complete gentleman … brought out a few of his old ones to inscribe: Horseman, Pass By; Leaving Cheyenne; The Last Picture Show.

  I used to enjoy covering the Cowboys’ training camp in Wichita Falls, Texas, because it was only 25 miles away from Archer City, the town depicted in The Last Picture Show and the new locale of McMurtry’s Booked Ups, four of them, each with a different theme. I thought Linda would enjoy going down there, and we did a few times, but enjoy? Well, there’s this thing called heat, and she knows all about it, having grown up in Phoenix.

  The first Archer City Booked Up trip we made was on a day in which the thermometer in the center of town registered 116 degrees. None of the stores had air conditioning. They had fans, which were like dropping ice cubes into a furnace. In the first store, a poor old mongrel dog lay stretched out by the front counter, panting desperately. He had been bitten by a rattlesnake the day before. A few days later, we called up and found out that he made it, just barely. I got a tremendous kick out of watching Linda and Larry McMurtry, puzzling over the price of a book … is that a three or a five there? But it was a pretty tough day all around. The next two trips were better.

  As for my combined authorship (seven books, all ab
out football) and collecting … well, the two actually did come into some sort of congruence on one occasion. I was in Miami in 1973, covering Jets-Dolphins. I was browsing a bookstore and I saw something I had to have. A slim volume, Debs and the Poets, a collection of writing from different sources, all expressing indignation about the jailing of Eugene V. Debs, the left-wing labor leader and a hero of mine, for anti-government statements. And laid in was a letter, written in prison, from Debs to a young follower. The price was $100, as well it should have been, because it was a choice item. But this was 1973, don’t forget.

  I tried to get the dealer to come down. He wouldn’t budge. I told him I was an author myself. He took the news calmly. I told him I had a book on the shelves at the time, my revised Thinking Man’s Guide to Football. He shrugged. Then I got a brilliant idea.

  In collecting circles there’s something known as an Association Copy, a book inscribed by the author to a well-known person, perhaps even more famous than the author; it’s the association between the two that gives the book added value. I told him I’d trade him, straight up, the Debs for 10 Thinking Man’s Guides; each one would be a “fascinating association copy,” as they say in the catalogues.

  “Like this,” I said. “‘To my pal, Fidel Castro. Remember that night in the Hotel Teresa, buddy?’ Or, ‘To Nikki Khruschchev. Still trying to hold your breath three minutes?’ Ten like that. Waddya say?”

  He actually thought it over for a good 30 seconds. I could hear the heavy chains of deep breathing. Finally he said, “That’s absolutely ridiculous,” but I did get the guy to give it some real thought. The story does not have a happy ending. He was a Dolphins fan. He was of the opinion that the eventual Super Bowl champs were going to blow the Jets out the next day. I thought New York would make it close. He gave me the Jets and 14, double or nothing on the Debs.

  Miami scored four times in the first half and coasted in. Final score, 30-3. So I had to scrape up two yards for the Debs. It took me almost six months to pay it off.