by John Dunning
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Contents
Book 1
Then and Now
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Book 2
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
About John Dunning
'Two O'Clock, Eastern Wartime' Excerpt
To Warwick Downing,
who got me started again,
and
to the Denver antiquarian book trade:
the good, the bad, and the ugly
Then and Now
Booked to Die was published by Scribner on January 23, 1992. It was my first novel in ten years, after a checkered career that produced five books at four publishing houses, with long periods of rejection between them. The initial printing was smallish, 6,500 hardbound copies, and I figured it would go like all the others—a flurry of local activity on and around pub day: perhaps, if the gods were smiling, an even smaller second printing; then the slow fade, the gradual trickle-down into the out-of-print (OP) bookstores.
But this was okay. Hey, I was happy just to be alive again. It had been a very long time, and for a writer who’s not publishing, who for much of that decade isn’t even writing, there’s a hollow feeling under the breastbone that I can only call creative death.
At the time I owned an OP bookstore in East Denver. I was eight years into my new career as a dealer in used and rare books. This of course is not the literal truth: a dealer on the street will seldom, if ever, see a truly rare book. He may handle hundreds of pieces that can legitimately be called scarce, but he doesn’t hold his breath waiting for The Bay Psalm Book to walk in the front door. The notion persists because the dealer likes the sound of it. “Seller of Rare Books” sounds so much classier than the terms “secondhand,” “used,” or any of the derivatives that conjure up the images and smells of dust, frayed spines, broken hinges and, worst of all, mold.
So he lists himself as “rare” and hopes for a scarcity or two to brighten his week. He doesn’t deal in new books, or, if he does, he marks them down from their original cover prices and hopes to sell them at 50 percent off. I had no plans to sell my own book in the store: it was my wife who had the first hunch about Booked to Die.
“Let’s get twenty-five copies and sell them at full price,” she said. I could hardly believe my ears. “My God, we’ll still have half of them when Halley’s Comet comes around again,” I said. But she is not to be denied when she gets that way, so we ordered the twenty-five copies long before pub day and had them well displayed, to my own discomfort, when January 23 arrived.
They sold overnight, all of them gone as if by magic. But the big surprises were yet to come.
The next day I called Scribner to get fifty more but they were out of stock. The entire first printing had sold: the second printing would be off the press in a few weeks. Talk about mixed feelings! Yes, it was thrilling, gratifying, but here I was, allegedly a dealer in “used and rare books,” and I couldn’t get first editions of my own novel.
Soon I began hearing, through the bookseller’s grapevine, startling stories of dealer hoarding. Out-of-print booksellers had bought them by the case and were stashing them in a gamble that the price would go up. Six weeks after publication—just about the time the second printing was showing up in new bookstores—firsts were selling on the OP market for $50 and up. I began buying them at cover price: whenever I saw one that had slipped through the cracks and was still lingering on a B. Dalton shelf, I snatched it up and happily paid the $19.95 cover price. When I went to signings and there were firsts unbought, I bought them, greedily, voraciously, without shame.
Eight years later I see the first printings on the Internet for $500 to $850, and there is one brassy soul (there’s always one of these) who wants $1,250 for his. The book has gone through four hardcover and at least nineteen paperback printings, and has just been reissued in both hard and paper editions.
How did this happen? Let me count the ways.
In 1992 the book world was a far different animal than it is today. Booked to Die caught the trade at the edge of a revolutionary upheaval that is still going on. The Internet was then in its infancy: indeed, though pockets of wisdom and tradition can still be found, though crusty old-timers will tell you that a rare book can always be reliably sold for more money than you paid for it, in real life the Internet has turned the trade on its head.
A book search was a cumbersome process in 1992, with the venerable old trade journal AB/Bookman’s Weekly at its center. If you wanted a book that was long out of print, you first contacted your local bookseller. If he didn’t have it, he placed a one-line ad for it in the BOOKS WANTED section of the AB. This fat sheath of eye-straining type, sometimes dozens of pages long, was scanned by booksellers everywhere. If someone had the book, he might quote a price for it by postcard to your neighborhood bookseller, who then quoted it to you, with his profit built into the mix. But all this took weeks to run its course, and in the case of a really scarce book there might not be any response at all.
In 1992, there was still a strong thread of common sense in the book world. The world hypermodern had not yet been heard, except perhaps by a few intense collectors whose span of reference for the 500-year-old industry began in 1980. For those who have remained pure in spirit and still haven’t heard it, a hypermodern is a book that has a small first printing, goes immediately into later printings, is touted wildly by word of mouth, and becomes so hotly sought so quickly that people begin paying big money—sometimes insane money—for the first printings while the book itself is still selling well on the new-book market. Does this begin to sound familiar? More about this phenomenon in a moment.
Before 1992 there was a strong belief, even by serious collectors of “modern first editions,” that a book needed at least some age before any kind of realistic value could be established. The rise of the so-called modern classic was slow but sure, maybe 10 percent a year after the book had truly gone out of print, maybe a blip on that chart when additional books confirmed the author’s stature, maybe another blip when the author died and his or her name was again in the new
s. After that it all depended on a new generation, and the next generation, and the one after that. But a strong writer could be depended on to grow in value, from one generation to the next, as his books became “classic” and the first editions became “rare.”
That was then: this is now.
Now the AB is gone, a casualty of the Internet.
Now anyone with a home computer can do his own book search—in seconds, not weeks. This is fine on the face of it, but it has led to a mentality of what-is-it-worth? above all else, the blind leading the blind, recalling Oscar Wilde’s acid-dipped comment about the people who know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Today, there is a feeling that if something sells quickly, it must’ve been underpriced. There is a tendency to go ever higher until that brick wall is hit and the book will no longer sell. Ironically, this then becomes fixed in a common mind-set as “the going rate.”
Now hypermoderns “go through the roof” almost before publication, and you hear of booksellers raving about titles that they have in quantity but have never read.
Today, books are said to be worth three-figure prices years before the remainders—often with firsts generously mixed in—hit the Barnes & Noble sale tables. Once there was a saying in the book business, that “today’s remainder is tomorrow’s collectible.” Forget that. Today’s collectible is now tomorrow’s remainder.
Now there are collectors building large home libraries of modern books, who will not collect a dead author.
There are flea markets and junk shop proprietors who look up books on the Internet and price them accordingly with no idea of what makes a book desirable or valuable (and what’s more, they have no idea if that bozo in Sheboygan, who was the source of that price, knows either). Then these people wonder why they can’t sell their ratty dog-eared copy for the same money that some dealer with twenty-five years’ experience is asking for a pristine first with a money-back guarantee if the customer is not satisfied.
Today there’s a consortium of multimillionaires making a mighty effort to corral the trade, buying up estates and books by the hundred-thousands, hoping to create a brand name of used books reminiscent of Wal-Mart.
Let’s face it, we have been swamped by impatience and greed. People want to go straight from the street to the top levels of the book world, with only (as that other Oscar—Levant—put it) a smattering of ignorance. I know booksellers who have been in the trade for eight years and they still can’t tell a first edition.
Do I sound bitter? Well, believe me, I’m not. I’m the last fellow on earth with any reason to be bitter about anything. I love what has happened to my book, and I know full well that it was the hypermodern collector who started that ball rolling. But I do get angry when I see a bookseller trying to get $200 for Jack Finney’s Time and Again, and I look and it’s the $6 book club edition, and the dealer is suspicious and resentful when I tell him.
I am annoyed, to use a polite word, when hypermodern tom-toms herald the arrival of a literary lion and I find his stuff unreadable. I remember sharing a laugh with Larry Moskowitz, a great bookseller who was then one of the principals in the well-respected Santa Barbara bookshop called Joseph the Provider. Larry came into my store just after the Booked to Die phenomenon got started and said, “This had to figure, didn’t it? You wrote a novel about the bum-of-the-month club….”
He was too much a gentleman to finish the thought, so I finished it for him: “Then I became the bum of the month.”
• • •
This long preamble seems necessary because Cliff Janeway, the hero of the little brew you are about to read, is a creature of that other time, that watershed era when the feeding frenzy had not yet reached its wailing peak. Janeway is a cop who happens to collect books (and before you ask, yes, there are cops who collect books, and yes, some of them did come into my store, though Janeway the man is probably a mix of my own attitudes and a few cops I knew long ago, when I was a reporter for The Denver Post). He collects books for all the right reasons. He buys what he loves and he loves seeing those fine first editions on his shelves. He’s enough of a capitalist to pick up bargains, but price is seldom his main motivation. He has a small unread collection of Faulkner, which will someday challenge him to read this difficult writer who defeated him years ago. At the turn of this century Janeway is probably ready for Faulkner and not so gushingly admiring of, say, Thomas Harris, as he was in 1992. I haven’t visited him in a while, but I imagine he’s angry, as I am, at what Harris did to Clarice Starling in that ill-conceived Hannibal. What a monumental screwup for an author who had given us the best female sleuth of our time. Starling had everything, and good looks were the least of it. She had brains, courage by the bucket, an unshakable sense of right and wrong. But her creator sold her down the river, violating everything she is and believes for a trumped-up effect in a cartoonish sequel.
Hannibal made Harris a rich man, but I don’t think it did much for his reputation. There was a flurry of interest in his earlier books—after all, Hannibal was launched with a shriek by his publisher, and it had been eleven years since Starling made her unforgettable debut in that crime masterpiece, The Silence of the Lambs—but this quickly calmed down and the interest waned. Granted, Silence had a huge first printing and copies are plentiful, but I see no great surge of activity in Red Dragon (another near-masterpiece) or in his first novel, Black Sunday. It’s probably too early to tell, but I suspect Hannibal diminished the earlier works, did actual damage to the two Hannibal Lecters that preceded it. Prices for Silence remain at $50–$65, for Red Dragon at $85–$100, and for Black Sunday at $150–$200, and at this point the interest is lukewarm.
I come here not to dump on Tom Harris. The point is that money drives the OP trade as never before. Prices double overnight, but sometimes they take equally sudden reversals, like the stock market on a bad day. Booked to Die, I hope, gives a true picture of its time. But as my friend and fellow bookseller Jim Pepper said recently, “Those prices you cited in that novel are really beginning to look quaint.”
What would you get today for that copy of Grapes of Wrath with the ribald Steinbeck inscription that Rita sells to Janeway for $1,200? That seems like pocket change now, when unsigned copies are selling for $5,000, and dealers are buying back high spots at the same prices they sold them for only a year ago. A fine first of Chandler’s Lady in the Lake? Janeway thinks of it as a $1,000 book, but today you couldn’t touch it for less than $5,000, and it might go to $10,000 by the time the ink is dry on these pages.
The prices of the great copies of the great books are soaring. This has contributed to the hypermodern nonsense, for here are “valuable” books that can still be “found,” often inexpensively, sometimes on sale tables in huge quantities. I use the word “nonsense” reluctantly; many people I know and like are in the hypermodern field. But it is nonsense when you sell The Bridges of Madison County for $500 at the peak of its heat, or ask $3,500 for John Grisham’s A Time to Kill when the author has yet to prove that he can last beyond his first decade as a collected writer. If you think this is not nonsense, check current prices on those titles. Madison County now languishes at $100, and a dealer I know recently had five copies of the Grisham that had taken him two years to sell at $1,500.
They may go lower yet. Suddenly, I realize how different this new world is. The computer has shown us that even some classic titles of the thirties are not rare, they’re just expensive, and hypermoderns are salable only as long as the heat is on the book. The collector value of a new author is always one bad book from eclipse, and a brilliant start will only ensure that his subsequent works are going to be scrutinized as he’d never have believed possible. Surely some of the hypermoderns will stick and become classics of the future. But many more, perhaps most, will fade slowly and disappear. Eventually the authors will die. And what will happen to those books when they reach a new generation of collectors who will not buy a dead author?
I suspect that the
best of them will survive despite the odds. They will transcend human silliness, touching future generations with their magic. With all its recent annoyances this is still the greatest game. The thrill of the hunt, the lure that drew Janeway into the book world, remains as rich and strong today as it was when I first felt it more than twenty years ago. I know that even in the worst of times the trade is too vast to be harmed much by silliness, or to be harnessed by millionaires with Wal-Mart ambitions.
I am a born bookscout, I might as well admit it. My workshops are my playgrounds, scattered across Denver in dusty corners and bookstores, in out-of-the-way fishing holes where sometimes a big one lies in wait. I get that rush as I hit the front door: my heart beats faster with the thought that, today, among all the junk, a truly killer book might lurk. It still happens, in spite of the nonsense. “Books can be found anywhere,” Pepper reminds me when I sink into cynicism. And just the other day I found one: The Water Is Wide, by Pat Conroy, a near-fine bright copy, an $800 book, stuck in a thrift store for two bucks. And I think, what a country, and again all’s right with the world.
John Dunning
Denver, Colorado
May, 2000
Bobby the bookscout was killed at midnight on June 13, 1986. This was the first strange fact, leading to the question, What was he doing out that late at night? To Bobby, midnight was the witching hour and Friday the thirteenth was a day to be spent in bed. He was found in an alley under one of those pulldown iron ladders that give access to a fire escape—another odd thing. In life, Bobby would never walk under a ladder, so it would seem ironic to some people in the Denver book trade when they heard in the morning that he had died there.
You should know something about bookscouts and the world they go around in. This is an age when almost everyone scouts for books. Doctors and lawyers with six-figure incomes prowl the thrift stores and garage sales, hoping to pick up a treasure for pennies on the dollar. But the real bookscout, the pro, has changed very little in the last thirty years. He’s a guy who can’t make it in the real world. He operates out of the trunk of a car, if he’s lucky enough to have a car, out of a knapsack or a bike bag if he isn’t. He’s an outcast, a fighter, or a man who’s been driven out of every other line of work. He can be quiet and humble or aggressive and intimidating. Some are renegades and, yes, there are a few psychos. The one thing the best of them have in common is an eye for books. It’s almost spooky, a pessimistic book dealer once said—the nearest thing you can think of to prove the existence of God. How these guys, largely uneducated, many unread, gravitate toward books and inevitably choose the good ones is a prime mystery of human nature.
