Love, Death & Rare Books

by Robert Hellenga

  I could have slept in the second bedroom, which Grandpa Chaz had always used, but I slept in the loft bed in the living room, as I’d done since I was a boy. I was reading one of the books that Grandpa Chaz had left at the Loft years ago, and which I’d read many times—Historical Atlas of the Great Lakes—when Dad came out of the bathroom in his pajamas.

  “I’m sorry about what I said,” he said.

  “What you said? About Olivia?”

  He nodded.

  “You mean…?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. But of course it wasn’t okay, and I was suddenly overwhelmed, carried out into deep water by a riptide. I knew I had to swim sideways, get out of the current, but I just let myself drift.

  What are these feelings anyway? What do our feelings feel like? Do they change over time? I mean, over historical time? Does each emotion have its own history? Do they travel in packs? Do they link us to the ancient people who once gathered around this great inland sea ten or eleven thousand years ago? Who left their points and pottery, their projectile points, scrapers? Who ate mammoth and mastodon and caribou? The ancestors of the Pokagon people who were building a casino outside St. Anne?

  When I imagined Olivia lying in the narrow bed next to me, I got one kind of feeling, a disturbance in my lower body, a humming like an electric motor. And when I imagined her lying next to David in a big queen-size bed in Ann Arbor, I got a very different feeling, a disturbance in my upper body, as if my chest were tightening around my heart. And when I remembered Mamma running around naked in the snow outside our big house on Blackstone and Dad throwing his arms around her when she burst back into the kitchen, my body seemed to levitate; and when I remembered her coming to my elementary school and telling me she found herself in difficoltà, my body seemed to sink to the bottom of Lake Michigan. And then after Mamma went away, lying in my loft bed—listening to Grandpa Chaz and Clare Duval and Dad talk as they pored over one of Grandpa Chaz’s Indian books, or tried to figure out where things had gone wrong, spinning out alternative histories—What if the French and Indians had won the French and Indian War? What if the Federalists had prevented Jefferson from making the illegal Louisiana Purchase?—waiting for them to lower their voices and say something about Mamma, or talk about Father Isaac Jogues and Father Jean de Brébeuf, who were tortured by the Iroquois, or by the Mohawks, or about the young men of the Mandan tribe, who were initiated into manhood by being starved for several days and then suspended from the roof of the medicine lodge by stakes driven through their chests and shoulders—my mouth would go dry.

  These stories stayed more or less the same till I was old enough to sit at the table with the men, sipping a small glass of whiskey and asking questions: Why did they starve them? How did they drive the stakes through their chests and shoulders?

  But now, in July 1995, I wasn’t thinking about Grandpa Chaz and Clare Duval, who were both dead. I was thinking about Dad, sleeping alone downstairs, wondering what he was thinking about as he went to sleep. Was he thinking about Mamma and her Italian lover? Or maybe about Shirley, or Darlene, who came after Shirley? Or about dancing at the Trianon and at other places that didn’t exist anymore? Or about swimming naked off the Point, treading water till the police went away? And I experienced a very different disturbance, one that I couldn’t locate in my body. I wanted to climb down the ladder and sit on the edge of the bed, tell Dad that everything was okay.

  All these thoughts flowed together in me, like the great Arctic currents that had scoured out the Great Lakes basin, scouring out a great sadness. And then all of a sudden I could see clearly, could see the battered VW camper we’d passed as we were getting on the Skyway: sometimes I go around feeling sorry for myself, and all the while i’m being carried by great winds across the sky.

  I lay on my back and let myself feel the great winds holding me up, let them carry me across the sky, taking me wherever I needed to go.

  VIII. THE 19th BOSTON INTERNATIONAL ANTIQUARIAN BOOK FAIR

  (November 1995)

  The great winds that had been carrying me across the sky had ceased to blow by the time I drove out to Boston in November 1995 for the 19th Boston International Antiquarian Book Fair. I hadn’t fully recovered from Olivia’s sudden departure from my life, and Dad thought it would be good for me to handle the fair on my own, though he didn’t put it this way.

  Business was good, but the Internet was starting to cast its shadow over the rare book trade. I saw my first website on my way to the fair—in Helen Barstow’s old barn, just outside Erie, Pennsylvania. Dad wanted me to look at a copy of the Gettysburg Address that she’d put on the cover of her latest catalog. I found Helen sitting in front of a computer on a trestle table. The black box next to the computer, Helen explained, was a modem that converted the analog signal of the telephone line to digital data on the computer. The computer and the modem hadn’t been there the year before when Dad and I stopped by. Helen and I looked at her website on a computer monitor. You couldn’t order books on the site, but you could see what Helen had in stock and give her a call, or fax her, or write her a letter. I bought the Gettysburg Address, and then Helen and I sat up late talking, about books and about the way Grandpa Chaz and Dad used to load up the van or truck with books to sell at the fair. I spent the night and left early in the morning. As I was leaving, I stopped the van at the end of the long driveway and looked back at Helen’s old barn. Helen was waving, and I thought I was looking into the past and into the future at the same time.

  And I was.

  I’d been in low spirits and was glad to be sharing a booth with Marcus Cohn, my oldest friend. Marcus and I had taken classes together at Chicago, shared our notes, studied together in the shop, drunk beers at Jimmy’s, eaten pizza at the Medici, attended classes together at the Rare Book School when it was still at Columbia University. Like Chas. Johnson & Son in Chicago, Cohn & Son in New York was one of the last three-generation bookshops in the country. Our grandfathers had done business together, our fathers too. Marcus and I were going to be interviewed as the youngest members of the AABA—the American Antiquarian Booksellers Association.

  As Marcus was helping me set out my two hundred books, I experienced the same sensation I’d experienced at Helen’s: that I was looking into the past and into the future at the same time. The fair itself was the unchanging, immutable past: dealers displaying antiquarian books and buying fresh stock from each other; book binders demonstrating their craft; collectors wandering up and down the aisles, searching for treasure; book conservators offering solutions to common problems (mildew, red rot, acid migration); expert appraisers on hand for visitors who wanted to put a price on their old books. Grandpa Chaz had once been part of the immutable past too. Dealers from every quarter of the country stopped by during the course of the fair to reminisce about him and ask about Dad, and to see if I needed anything.

  But something was different this year. Superimposed on an image of the immutable past was an image of a radically mutable future. I could see it in the computers sprouting up here and there, like daffodils sprouting up during a warm spell in late winter, and I could hear it in the shop talk at the end of the day—talk about websites and databases, about Telnet and Gopher and Veronica, about Amazon—which had sold its first book over the Internet on July 16, during the heatwave—and about paperless e-books that could be transmitted over the air to a computer screen. I could hear it in the jokes at the annual poker game, and in the questions posed by the reporter for the Boston Globe who interviewed Marcus and me on the last afternoon of the fair, and who wanted us to peer into the future: Would we live in houses with no bookshelves? In cities with no bookstores? Would we have robots doing our reading for us?

  I’d had a good fair: I’d made my nut on the morning of the second day; I’d sold the three books of hours from the Cardinal Newman cache to the Morgan Library; I’d unloaded
several other high-end items that had been sitting on our shelves for too long; I’d bought some new stock. But I was uneasy, ready for the closing bell to sound so I could pack up my books and head home. The glimpse into the bookless future imagined by the young woman who interviewed us for the Boston Globe was implausible but disturbing, and half an hour before the end of the fair, I had a glimpse into the “immutable” past that was even more disturbing. Two old grandpas in baggy suits with nests of hair springing out of the sides of their heads came to blows over our signed copy of Faulkner’s Marble Faun. Marcus and I had to pull them apart. My asking price suddenly skyrocketed, and ten minutes later I sold the book for an outrageous price. Fifteen minutes later it was resold at an even higher price. The fight left a bad taste in my mouth. I looked around at the frantic scene in front of me with new eyes and shook my head as a professional croupier might shake his head at gamblers throwing their chips down on the roulette table. Or as a nonsmoker might shake his head at a beautiful woman lighting up a cigarette, or a nondrinker at the stupidity of a man hoisting up a tot of whiskey. “We’re no better than commodity traders,” I said to Marcus. “‘Getting and spending we lay waste our powers.’”

  But then, just as the closing bell was about to sound—I’d already started to pack my books—something prompted me to leave Marcus at the booth and take a last look at a copy of Montaigne’s Essais that I’d seen earlier in Arnold Perlberg’s double booth—Perlberg Rare Books, Toronto.

  Perlberg was starting to pack up his books, but the Montaigne was still open in a display case on the table: Les Essais de Michel Seigneur de Montaigne. Cinquiesme edition, augmentée d’un troisiesme livre et de six cens additions aux deux premiers. It was the last edition published during Montaigne’s lifetime and included Montaigne’s address to the reader and the detailed long preface by Mlle. de Gournay—Montaigne’s fille d’alliance—who had made corrections in her own hand on the printed sheets before they’d been bound.

  I looked at Angelier’s large woodcut device within an ornate border on the title page and at the woodcut initials and ornaments. “Some yellowing and marginal repairs to final leaf,” Perlberg said, but that didn’t bother me. Some books want you as much as you want them, and that was the case with this copy of Les Essais. It had spoken to me earlier, and now it called to me over the tumult of the closing minutes of the fair, summoned me. Marcus and I had read the Essays in Jock Winetraub’s class on autobiography, and I knew I had to have it, and suddenly everything became clear, all the crazy activity going around me—the rabid collectors, the wheeling and dealing, the getting and spending.

  “Does your dad know what you’re doing?” Perlberg asked, and laughed. I knew better than to try to haggle with him, and he let me have the book for eighteen thousand.

  “Your grandfather,” he said, closing the book in its clamshell case, “would have asked for the dealer discount. You didn’t ask, but I’m going to give it to you anyway. Ten percent.”

  IX. DAD ORDERS HIS TOMB

  (2003–2009)

  I came back from the fair with a renewed sense of my vocation and a clearer sense of my purpose in life, which was to step into Grandpa Chaz’s shoes. I put my oars in the water and rowed hard, buying aggressively at estate sales and auctions, horse trading at book fairs, cultivating our contacts and the collectors who relied on us. I continued to row hard for several years, and our rare book department prospered in spite of the dot-com bubble, but by 2003, the year Olivia moved back to Hyde Park, our two hundred thousand secondhand books on floors one, three, and four had become the proverbial drug on the market. The cavernous old inner-city bookshop was rapidly becoming a thing of the past, as were the old barns full of books, like Helen’s, that used to dot the countryside. These old shops, which had once been cultural centers where many collectors got their start, had been undermined by Google. Readers could find what they were looking for on the Internet without rummaging through an old bookshop. Cheaper too. I didn’t blame them. A couple of the behemoths would survive, like dinosaurs in a science fiction movie—the Strand in New York, John King in Detroit, Powell's in Portland—but Laudermilk’s in Philadelphia was long gone; Goodspeed’s in Boston was long gone; Holmes in Oakland had just closed. And they weren’t coming back. Shorey’s in Seattle was struggling. We couldn’t blame all our problems on the Internet, of course. Inner-city rents were skyrocketing; the city was nickel and diming us to death with new regulations, new codes, new taxes. Parking had become impossible. Foot traffic was down. Our profitable rare book business could not continue to support a large secondhand book operation.

  I kept on rowing, but I was rowing against the current, and every year I had to row harder and harder to keep the current from carrying Chas. Johnson & Son, Ltd., down to the sea. I kept the Montaigne on my desk at the shop and dipped into it from time to time, not looking for profound truths, just hoping for moments of clarity, stays against confusion.

  Olivia came back to Hyde Park at the end of 2003 to manage the new Borders store on Fifty-Third Street. She’d been working at Borders headquarters in Ann Arbor for several years, reinventing herself as a tech person, and when she was offered the chance to manage her own store, she took it.

  Her return did not upset our apple carts. We told ourselves that we were both too busy to think of romance; or maybe we were just afraid to revisit the past; or maybe we just weren’t the same people we’d been ten years earlier. We’d lived through the dot-com bubble, the subprime mortgage crisis, through 9/11 and the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, through the invasion of Iraq and the increasingly dominant role of the Internet in the book trade. We’d lived through death and loss: Grandpa Chaz’s death had left a big hole in our lives that Dad and I had to step around every morning when we opened the door to the shop, and every evening, too, as we sat down at Mamma’s old butcher’s table to eat our supper. Aunt Fern’s death had left a similar hole in Olivia’s life; a messy divorce from David had left her unsettled; a daughter who didn’t want to move to Hyde Park and who refused to live in Ann Arbor with her father and his new wife had made her life complicated.

  But we had plenty to talk about in the present without trying to revisit the past. On the one hand, Borders was flourishing—about 1500 stores nationwide, five in the Chicago area. The aisles in the store on Fifty-Third Street were crowded, and Starbucks was selling lattes and cappuccinos and macchiatos at a coffee bar on the second floor. Olivia was flourishing too. She was the captain of a brand-spanking-new ship with a first-rate, well-disciplined crew. You could walk through the new store and get a good sense of what was going on in the world. You could ask any staff member a question and get an answer.

  On the other hand, at Chas. Johnson & Son, Ltd., writing had appeared on the wall: “Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin.” Book of Daniel 5:25–26: “God hath numbered the days of your reign and brought it to an end.” We didn’t need a Daniel to interpret it, we needed an accountant, and we had one. Mr. Patterson, CPA. Every year he issued the same warning, but we continued to ignore him till our old landlord died in January 2009, and the new owner wanted us out.

  Mr. Patterson was sitting in Dad’s reading chair in Dad’s bedroom. His large battered briefcase was on the floor between his feet, like a faithful dog—Italian leather. He had stopped on his way home from his office on Woodlawn.

  We knew what Mr. Patterson was going to say, but this year we had to pay attention to him because we no longer had a choice. What we needed to do, he said, was ship our used books out to our warehouse on the South Side and let Delilah set up an online site, and then set up a rare book shop on Michigan Avenue or, better, in the Monadnock Building. He happened to know there was space available. “Then you have to start selling your rare books online, like everybody else.”

  Dad was in bed. He was eighty-two and had suffered a TIA—a transitory ischemic attack. He was “able to sit up and take nourishment,” but he was having trouble with
initial fricatives, as in pfucking Internet or pfucking Amazon. He wanted to get some things sorted out before he croaked (his word). “Pfuck it anyway,” he said. “We’ve got another year on the lease.”

  “And then what? The new owners have offered to pay for the move if you agree to be out by Christmas. Take them up on it.”

  We sipped some Balvenie 10 in silence. There were no papers to sign, no dramatic moment, that afternoon, at which property or money changed hands, at which a firm decision was reached. The lease would expire, and one way or another, that would be it. Grandpa Chaz was dead. Helen Barstow was dead. Estelle Sullivan, who’d worked the cash register for forty years, was dead. Olivia’s Aunt Fern was dead; and now our old landlord, Tommy Mariakakis, who’d actually read books, was dead, and his sons had sold the building to a holding company in St. Louis.

  “I don’t know how to think about these things,” Dad said.

  “I just told you how to think about them,” Mr. Patterson said.

  After Mr. Patterson left, Dad started to rant.

  “Dad,” I said. “Things change, but we’ll be okay. The rare book market is solid. Hakluyt’s Voyages sold last year at Christie’s, at the Streeter sale, for over four hundred fifty thousand dollars. A first edition of Lewis and Clark brought almost three hundred thousand. Grandpa Chaz’s copies of both those books are upstairs. Good copies too, with all the maps.”

  “Pfuck Christie’s,” he said. “Pfuck Sotheby’s. “Pfuck Bonham’s too. Those pfuckers just want to cut out the dealers anyway and go right to the new dot-com millionaires, the new billionaires, so they can jack up the prices. They’ve got to muscle in everywhere. Pfuckers. They’re like Wall Street. They don’t give a pfuck about books. No lots under pfive thousand dollars. High spots only. People will pay anything for high spots, not because they care about books but because books are trophies, or investments—hard assets that don’t go up and down with the stock market or the bond market. Pfuck. That’s no way to collect books. That’s the Wall Street model. Make a buck. The rare book trade depends on knowledgeable collectors and institutions—and fellow dealers—to drive sales, not dot-com millionaires who want some trophy books to go along with their trophy wives. Like that guy who bought the little Audubon from you last week, sent his secretary all the way from California to pick it up, and then she didn’t even want to look at it. They’re dumbing down the rare book market.”