One of the perks of being unemployed is the ability to travel at a moment's notice. Provided, of course, that one has generous friends in Helpful Places, and one is very good at batting one's eyelashes and looking impoverished. Luckily, for Bridget, looking impoverished is about as difficult as putting on a hat. And I, naturally, can bat my eyelashes with the best of them. Thus it was that we were able to finagle train travel and accommodations to enable us to travel to the New York Antiquarian Book Fair in the beginning of April.
Now, leave us to get one thing straight from the beginning. I like New York only slightly more than Bridget. And since nothing times anything is still nothing, you can perhaps figure out for yourself our mutual feelings for this modern-day Sodom and Gomorra. Upon alighting from the train (in Penn Station, which is like some kind of mid-eighties rabbit warren of grimy horror), we began wandering down (up?) Broadway, and were immediately nearly assaulted by a man who smelled like a septic system and another decked out in full Yankees regalia. We are still having tiffs as to which of the two was the more objectionable...
We had some time to kill before being rescued, so Bridget decided to go to a bookstore. Having lived, and walked, in London, it seemed as nothing to walk from 1500-something Broadway to 800-something Broadway. Child's play, says my Little Friend. What no one told us was that the 'city that doesn't sleep' takes a nap right along this route, and we ended up wandering down streets that had been shut up for hours already and that hadn't seen a decent street light since the Reagan area. Thankfully, a few blocks further, and we were in an hysterically-bright park with cars winging around every corner intent on ushering us into the great hereafter. Welcome to New York.
The Strand bookstore is lovely; with creaky wooden floors and floor-to-18-foot-ceiling bookshelves, and a staff that doesn't mind if you a) use the step-stools, chairs and/or ladders for your own book-hunting pleasure, or b) curl up on the floor and read everything within grabbing distance. Which is precisely what we proceeded to do. I settled Bridget (who was beginning to suffer some kind of New-York induced fever) on the floor, and, harnessing my inner Tensing Norgay, climbed to the shelf of her choosing and shoved books into her lap.
Luckily for our wallet, our Getaway Car arrived to carry all the books to New Jersey, where we were to rest for the evening (any references of pan into cooking fires will be given a proper welcome here).
Like any true Bostonian, Bridget had become deathly ill immediately upon her arrival into Gotham. She spent most of the night shivering, cursing the infernal heat, moaning, shivering and generally making a thorough nuisance of herself. Sometime in the wee small hours of the morning, her mysterious, six-hour fever broke, and we were both permitted a bit of rest, after agreeing that, if it weren't for the books, this would have been a colossally foolish enterprise.
The Good Lord, however, decided to take mercy on our impoverished, unemployed souls, and the next day dawned warm, breezy and bright and generally renewed our collective will to live. We caffeinated and made our way, via a needlessly comfy bus, to the Heart of Darkness itself. Manhattan. As the Book Fair didn't open until noon, we stopped first at Mood, having watched Project Runway since its inception.
The buttons, my God, the buttons! Not to mention the stacks of pleather, mohair and angora. This is the alpaca section, where, I swear to you, I could have lived and died in perfect, cozy contentment.
However, such things were not to be (think of Tim Gunn's face upon discovering a Garden Gnome in his lapel!), and we spent thirty minutes debating which cab to select of the billions living the streets. Having selected our cabman, we were soon ferried through a parade route, a protest rally, and the wilds of Park Avenue to the Armory, wherein lived The Books.
Not only were we (and by we, I mean Bridget, in whose pocket I cowered) the youngest person in the building by about twenty-eight years, we were also in such a low tax bracket that we may actually not have existed. But it didn't matter. Because there were Books.
I could tell you how we wandered the aisles of the showroom for four hours, scouring the titles and the bindings, cursed the glass doors on the display cabinets that denied us the visceral pleasure of petting the pretties and insisted on fogging up every time we pressed our noses too close to them. Why these silly people felt the need to keep the poor little books locked up surpasses our understanding. Unless they knew of my Friend's need to liberate them all...in which case, they are wiser than I preliminarily gave them credit for being.
I shall, however, keep my descriptions to the (somewhat) basics. There was the first edition of Dracula that Bridget nearly tackled a finely-tailored man to touch (a steal at only $13,500, since it couldn't be guaranteed that it was a second or third printing). There was the Wicked Bible ($90,000. Yes, I know). I thwapped Bridget good and hard with my valise until she returned to his counter to ask, at the risk of sounding Hopelessly Uneducated, why this priceless tome was entitled "The Wicked Bible".
And it was a good thing I did, as it turns out this good man had been waiting hours upon hours for one such as we to come forward and ask this self-same question. Essentially, the answer is this: In 1631, some printer got it into his head to print a Bible and, inadvertantly? perhaps?, left out a rather significant word. From the Fourth Commandment. The word is "not". Hence, in 1631, the Good Lord spake to the people and declared "Thou Shalt Commit Adultery". The Church, faced with a rather embarrassing paradox, declared all copies to be seized and burned. According to the Nice Man, only about 12 copies survived, this being one of them. Thus, our entire day having been made, we moved on.
Next we found ourselves in front of a seller whose shelves were full of Rider Haggard, Andrew Lang, Rudyard Kipling, and a veritable Rogue's Gallery of Great Imperialists. The books not in the display cases were really rather cheap. Not a one of them was more than $600.
"If you see any in the cases that you'd like to look at," said a charming British voice, "feel free to reach in and take them."
I cautioned Bridget that this was not meant literally. That this poor, young bookseller clearly did not know her and that she should not take his consideration as an enticement to grab whatever she could and run. So we stayed, pretended to be invisible, and oogled books like mad.
Suddenly, there was a presence beside us.
"I have a first edition of Jane Eyre," said a now-familiar voice. "You wanna see it?"
Talk about a bloody match made in Heaven.
Some time later, after a near-priceless Sherlock Holmes, three editions of Polidori's The Vampyre and a prolonged discussion about Yeat's The Order of the Golden Dawn, we turned to a first edition of Emma.
"I don't know why the other sellers lock these cases," Our New Best Friend observed. "I mean, the books were meant to be read, after all. They need some company."
Tragically, a man with money and a checkbook came forward to take a stack of books away. I offered Bridget up for adoption, or sale, but he was far more interested in Hemingway. Appalling.
We dragged ourselves away from the nice man and his rich client with difficulty, and made our way to a corner seller with more than his fair share of cases. Locked cases. The seller himself was in conversation with a paunchy, balding man in a dark suit.
"I use to collect early modern first editions." He drawled. "But the upkeep." A shake of the head. "The maintenance. Not to mention the difficulty of..." a hushed, nearly horrified voice, "other collectors."
Bridget might have been horrified, had it not been for the sight...of...(brace yourself)...a copy of Oscar Wilde's Poems from his own library.
For a few minutes, we could only stare. Only marvel. Then, we gathered our courage, and stepped around Chubby to the charcoal suit beyond.
"Would it be possible to see the Wilde book?" Bridget, I am proud to say, managed to keep her voice level and steady.
"Of course," said the seller, whose haircut probably cost more than both our lives were worth.
He lifted the book from the shelf, carefully sliding the case closed with his free hand. Bridget reached out, and I counted my blessings that she didn't attempt to tackle him and escape.
Then, suddenly, he grabbed her hand and braced her wrist.
"No, no!" He said firmly, as if we had suddenly been returned to grade school. "You need to cradle it. Books are fragile, you must cradle it. Cradle it. Here."
I then began counting my blessings that Bridget didn't yell "Oscar likes me better, Loser!" and run away. Instead, she simply muttered, so low that only I could hear it.
"They were meant to be read. And you are an ass."
"Pardon?" Charcoal Suit queried.
"I said, it's beautiful." She said with regal grace, returning the book to his worrisomely smooth, never-to-be-careworn hands. Then, we managed to walk out and into the waning light of the day before bursting out laughing.
So all in all, we emerged from our adventure no less impoverished than we began, and considerably more enlightened. About the nature of books and the nature of bookmakers; the nature of readers and of collectors. And that it is an unspeakably good thing that the next book fair on our list...is in Boston.
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