James Patterson -- Jailhouse Rocker

An American book dealer friend (he calls himself a dealer but he simply uploads tons of book to Amazon) was rather dismissive about the typical readers of James Patterson's violent novels, describing them as 'mullets in muscle cars.' We got on to Patterson because he had had a book request from his son who is doing a spell in jail for drug offences. The lad needed as many Patterson paperbacks as his dad could muster. Apparently in prison they are a sort of currency. With a Fang or Angel or Virgin or anything featuring Patterson's hero Alex Cross you can buy favours, goods and services in jail. Call me an elitist bastard, but I feel this does not bode well for the quality of the writing...


Patterson appears to be by far the best selling author in America and he and a small team of writers under the Patterson franchise put out nearly a book a month. One in every 17 books bought in America is by the great man. He is also the most downloaded of all writers. He outsells Stephen King in the way that the Beatles used to outsell the Moody Blues. King, by the way, called him a "terrible writer" of "dopey thrillers." Patterson is laughing all the way to the proverbial bank and is said by some to tell a better yarn.

Certainly when it comes to collectability KIng is way ahead of him. A complete collection of King in first and limited edition could cost you more than a couple of new Cadillacs but you can buy a fine first edition of Patterson's rarest book (his first book The Thomas Berryman Number) for under $500, although the usual crowd of overchargers want $1000 or so for it. Most of his other work is readily accessible for paltry sums, although you will see fine first editions of his Jericho Commandment at over $100. Also signed copies are good-- when a writer makes a ton of money he tends to be less accessible.

In Britain Martina Cole seems to be the favourite reading of the imprisoned. In an article in the Times on new book theft (Feb 2009) Murah Ahmed notes:

'... According to PLR records, James Patterson...is the most borrowed author from libraries. And books about crime are also frequently stolen - hence the works of Martina Cole, a prolific crime writer, appear high on the list. Her books are also among those most read in prisons, and she claims to be perfectly happy to be a target for thieves: “I think it's great, personally. If people want my books badly enough to go and steal them it's a compliment, really.” '

A word to the wise--if visiting a friend or relation who has fallen foul of the law do not take them some sort of improving literature-- try a tote bag full of Patterson (or Martina Cole) - behind bars they are better than money.

Ian Fleming. Rebel without a cause...2

Further extracts from a fascinating letter from Fleming's first biographer John Pearson discovered in a copy of the book. It was to a friend, probably a dealer in art. It presents an interesting take on the great man. Even as a book collector Fleming seems to have been ambiguous in his commitment. He described his collection as 'one of the foremost collections of scientific and political thought in the world...' but later lost interest in it except as an investment and hedge against inflation. When after the war an American dealer (I like to think it was the formidable El Dieff) asked him what he would take for it he mentioned a sum of £100,000, a gigantic and unrealistic sum at the time. Pearson writes:

"He took up with various intellectuals who could be charmed by his looks and by his manners, but without ever doing anything as infra-dig as to become an intellectual himself . The intellect was brother Peter's territory. And however much he muttered on about the dreary old City and its weary old bankers, he was shrewd enough to keep in with his own little group of bankers and stock-brokers and to draw his ₤3,000 a year from his firm at Lloyds until the end of the war… when he charmed his way into Kemsley Newspapers...Even with his appalling mother he never quite had the courage to tell the old witch where she got off. Her hold over him through Papa's will was far to strong for that. Socially he always pretended, in his off-hand way , to be far more O.K. than he was...

I'm saying all this...not because I want to be snide about him but because I think that this is the answer to your query about his rebelliousness .It's also the key to a considerable area of his personality and to much of the success of his books.

For he is one of the finest examples ...of the rebel snob. He was the child who won't eat his ice-cream because Nanny won't give him enough of it. And it was this that made him the perfect go-between between the old English snob world of the Bond books and the new status-conscious masses who became his favourite audience. He was really mocking something he loved, exposing something he valued. This was where his rebelliousness led him...the end was very sad and very ironic , as it usually is ...for such ambivalent creatures, although he did die where he wanted to [at a golf club] the Royal St. George's with a clubhouse full of thoroughly nice upper-class Englishmen to mourn his memory. I often wonder what would have happened to him in the French Revolution. Somehow I don't think he'd have lost his head.

I think this is more or less fair. Maybe not. "

That concludes the letter but in the course of researching this I found much about Fleming as a book collector and also as a poet who self published a book at the age of twenty. He appears to have destroyed every copy. This black tulip was called The Black Daffodil. If a copy surfaced it would be worth a fortune...Will post something on this with speculation on where a copy might be found and also deal with Fleming's encounters with the Great Beast (Crowley) said to be the basis of the villain Le Chiffre in Casino Royale. [Pic above is of Fleming as a student at Eton College.]

Collecting early bibles in English 1.

Current Selling Prices
£20 - £200,000


Four centuries after the King James version of the Bible appeared, we are taking a look at collecting early bibles. First, forgive me for stating the obvious, but you can forget your average family bible from the Victorian period—bound in black gilt- tooled leather, with brass clasps and weighing in at half a ton. Frankly, for all their ancestral inscriptions, often in barely decipherable hands and complete with blots and mathematical calculations ( what’s that all about ?), they’re invariably boring and uninspiring, with or without illustrations. And although it’s undoubtedly true that some of the eighteenth century bibles were beautifully printed by masters like Baskerville, they are essentially pedestrian, though plain and elegant as a Georgian box pew.

It seems to me that unless you’re turned on by association copies, anyone going in for bibles must be interested in the printed contents, rather than the look or the age of the volume. After all, a King James Bible printed in, say, 1638, isn’t that interesting as a text, for all its age and quirky spelling. Apart from misprints, this text remained essentially unchanged since 1611, when the first King James version was published. As a teenager I was thrilled to acquire from Dylan Thomas expert Jeff Towns for £1, a lovely large quarto copy dated 1629 in its original binding, A year before, I had secured in Hay on Wye a tiny pocket bible from the 1640s, only to regret the purchase ( it was about £2 ) because the miniscule type was murder on the eyes. Not long afterwards I sold it for £10 to an American evangelist ( he may have been a Mormon ) who knocked on our door. I later discovered that throughout most of the 17th century the bible was reprinted every year. Which means there must be hundreds of thousands of 17th century bibles around. And although the ‘ wicked ‘ bible ( 1632 King James version which omit the word ‘ not ‘ in ‘Thou shall not commit adultery ‘) is an amusing rarity, I can’t see that it is worth paying so much extra for a copy of this curiosity.

American bible dealers have the right scholarly attitude and much information may be gained from their websites, if you can tolerate the quasi-evangelistic tone and the hard sell. Although most seem to live in the deep south and probably have dubious attitudes towards homosexuality and the environment, they know their bible history and what’s worth buying. Some of them even have Ph Ds in theology.

Do you need to be well healed to buy early bibles ? Well, yes and no. Just over a year ago I was lucky to secure for a measly £20 a fine copy, dated 1611, of a Geneva Bible—the text familiar to Shakespeare—and the one on which the King James version was heavily dependent. I later found out that publication of this earlier text continued long after the King James had appeared—such was the continued demand for it. But again, it must be stressed that later issues of the Geneva Bible are nearly as thick on the ground as most seventeenth century issues of the King James---and for the same reason. Each family above a certain level would have owned a bible and bibles were not thrown away.



But again, copies of the first edition of the King James are very rare for the obvious reason that like the first edition of any book, the publishers are never sure how many copies to print, especially as the Geneva bible was still the one that every family owned. Hence the 1611 edition of the King James is very, very expensive. Be prepared to shell out over £100,000 for a copy. Later editions, as I say, can be bought for much less, though quite a few knowledgeable dealers, playing on the public’s ignorance, seem to think it’s quite OK to charge big bucks for a perfectly ordinary seventeenth century King James version.
[R. M. Healey.]

Thanks Robin. Weighty words indeed. Bibles are asked for all day long and I have to buy them mostly from a pal in the sticks who scours the local auctions and antique shops. They are not so common in the Godless city. Sorry Robin they are mostly the 1800 AD + family bibles, fat and in full leather with golden clasps. I recall once having bought an enormous black bible that I had to walk with it under my arm all the way down Felixstowe High Street -some kids shouted 'make way for Dumbledore' (the big beard I was sporting at the time might not have helped.) These fat bibles used to be bought by American tourists but in London there are now quite a few buyers of any decent condition bible that is not grossly overpriced. They tend to be very heavy and may be unwieldy on the tube or bus. Of course you could read the word in more portable form on an Iphone (or a tablet) but it is not quite the same...

Ian Fleming. Rebel without a cause...

After I saw a signed first edition of Marx's Das Kapital on sale at $500,000 at the San Francisco Book Fair I was thinking of the irony that only a seriously successful capitalist could afford this epoch making, game changing work. It could be claimed that the whole vogue for collecting landmark books was started by Old Etonian Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond. He had his own copy of a first edition Kapital and many other key works which in the 1950s were highly undervalued. He was the principal contributor to the important international exhibition — Printing and the Mind of Man.

When I got home I pulled out my copy of John Pearson's Life of Ian Fleming to read the stuff on Fleming as a book collector and was surprised to find a letter from Pearson tucked in the back. A very good long typed signed letter to a close friend about a theory that Fleming was 'a sort of rebel.' It is worth quoting from. For copyright purposes I won't quote it all but will stick to some interesting and germane excerpts. Pearson was a friend of Fleming and had been his assistant at the Sunday Times. The tone is friendly and urbane but very frank; it is important to record here that John Pearson adds this postscript 'He did have a great sense of humour about himself which made it all tolerable...'' Fleming's life was full of paradox, and the rebellious style was very much of its day. Had Fleming been born 50 years later he would probably have been a punk-- albeit a very posh punk. Pearson writes:

"I have been thinking about what you said about Flem[ing] being sort of a rebel. You're right up to a point. He would certainly have agreed with you...As a pseudo-Marxist I would say he was at best -or worst - a phony rebel. Whatever rebellion or rebelliousness he went in for began as a reaction against his money grubbing family , his intolerable mother, his unbeatable brother and the memory of his impeccable father.

What is interesting about him is that the rebelliousness this produced never channelled into any political form at all although his teens coincided with the 1930s...He was far too narcissistic , too self-absorbed,too lonely to indulge in politics. There was also an extraordinary vein of caution or cowardice in him. He was not the man to kick against the system in any serious sense ... He wanted money , social position , worldly success ; and his rebelliousness came from the feeling that these social goodies were being unjustly denied him - not that they were wrong in themselves...

Ergo , his rebelliousness took an odd and usually ambivalent form. It could be sexual. At one stage he was screwing himself silly but always with 'nice' girls, or else with foreign ones. He always pretended to make fun of the establishment , but took good care to wear his O.E. tie. (Until he became successful enough in his own right to change to the bow-tie of the Bond image photographs.)" [To be continued.]

Geoffrey Household. Rogue Male, 1939

Geoffrey Household. ROGUE MALE. Chatto & Windus, London 1939.
Current Selling Prices
$3200-$6500 /£2000-£4000

A rare book as a first edition in jacket-- that is, the British edition. Even the US edition is quite hard to find. I have never handled a jacketed copy of the 1939 Chatto first. I had a copy sans jacket in the halcyon pre-internet days when jacketless copies of post 1930 novels were deemed worthless. In 30 years of dealing, 10,000 days of looking at books I have never seen a copy, except possibly as a lot in auction. Much have I travelled in the realms of gold etc.,...talking of gold it is likely that a fine, faultless copy could top $10000. A decentish copy (see photo) made $6420 in the Otto Penzler sale last year. I may be wrong, the book could now be vieux chapeau. Harrington describe their leatherbound first thus '...an increasingly forgotten tale of adventure in which a sporting tourist indulges in a spot of ill-advised envelope pushing.' However an examination of the 9 copies in auction since 1975 shows it ineluctably on the rise--from less than £500 in the 1980s to £4000+ in this century.

The plot is pure John Buchan although almost nothing in Buchan actually surpasses it, and it is more passionate than the dyspeptic Lord Tweedsmuir could manage and somewhat darker and more sinister. The plot goes thus:

The protagonist, an un-named British sportsman, sets out to see whether he can stalk and prepare to shoot a European dictator - obviously modelled on Adolf Hitler. Supposedly interested only in the hunt for its own sake, he convinces himself that he does not intend to pull the trigger.
He is caught by the dictator's goons and tortured. Left to fall from a cliff to an apparently accidentally death he cheats fate by landing in a bog. After making his way covertly back to England, he realizes that he is still being hunted and eventually he is forced literally to go underground. During the time he spends holed up in his "hide" he ponders on his predicament and confesses to himself that he would have "pulled the trigger" as punishment for the earlier execution of the love of his life by the fascist regime. He has to use all his wit and guile to turn the tables on his pursuers and escape from their clutches. The book (and movie) was an international sensation and many actually believed a British big game hunter was loose in Europe stalking the German dictator. It was no longer a novel or a film, it had become an urban legend.

The last part of this (culled from the net) about the Rogue Male legend may be fanciful. There is an unforgettable scene involving a friendly cat that would be criminal to divulge... It was filmed as Man Hunt starring Walter Pidgeon and George Sanders in 1941 and later for TV with Peter O'Toole, John Standing and Alistair Sim in 1976. It has been on radio several times and last year there was a great reading of it on BBC7 by Michael Jayston. Household wrote a lot of other stuff, some pretty good and several reprises of Rogue Male itself including a sequel Rogue Justice 43 years later. The big money is always going to be in Rogue Male (or Rouge Male as one ABE dealer calls it conjuring up a less macho hero...)

The handbook 100 Favorite Mysteries of the Century called it: "The best manhunt book in history, expertly paced, tightly plotted and far surpassing John Buchan's more famous 'The Thirty-Nine Steps'." It may surpass The Thirty - Nine Steps but Buchan's The Power House is its equal and may show greater imagination and vision. I am a fan. Rogue Male, for its sins, is said to have inspired David Morrell's creation Rambo and also more promisingly the great US TV series The Fugitive. It's influence on the excellent William Boyd novel Ordinary Thunderstorms has also been cited, although the manhunt there is in lowlife London of 2010. The author is not a household name (you're fired) but some of his other books are valued in the low hundreds including The Salvation of Pisco Gabar (1938) short stories with fantasy elements and his first adult novel The Third Hour (1937).

Burroughs / Writers on Heroin

"Junk is the ideal product...the ultimate merchandize. No sales talk necessary. The client will crawl through a sewer and beg to buy... The junk merchant does not sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product." [William Burroughs intro to Naked Lunch]

“Apparently the main problem with heroin is…. it’s very moreish…” (Harry Hill)

We received a very fine catalogue from Sclanders/ Beatbooks devoted mostly to William Burroughs. Prices seem to be holding steady with £75 being the lowest price for anything signed by him. For £5500 there is an intriguing archive of letters and manuscripts detailing his involvement with L.Ron Hubbard and Scientology and taking issue with Hubbard's predisposition towards the rich, his homophobia and the secrecy surrounding the movement ('Why don't you open the sluice gates and flood the world with Scientology?') Of course it's now airhead celebs that they are interested in but WSB was ahead of his time there.



WSB's D.O.C. was of course heroin. This lead me to thinking of other opiate friendly writers. There are not that many distinguished candidates, alcoholic writers, on the other hand, are ten a penny. There are probably a greater number of alcoholic Nobel prize winning writers. Here is a partial list - Will Self, Roberto Bolano, Anna Kavan, Aleister Crowley, Jim Carroll, Mary Butts**, Elizabeth Strong, Irvine Welsh. Some observers are not sure Bolano was much of a user.

Keith Richard has recently joined the ranks of writers but his book was ghosted by the distinguished and presumably sober author James Fox ('White Mischief') but the hepcat tone is all Keith. Also on the subject of rock stars one might include Lou Reed whose poetry has been published and is well rated. Must not forget Alexander Trocchi a gargantuan drug imbiber and one time book dealer. I can remember going through tea chests of books with him at CSK, he also used the same tandoori as us in Kensington. Happy days. I am probably missing a few...

**Mary Butts, modernist writer(1880 - 1937) friend of Crowley and latterly fond of cocaine and heroin- now almost famous for being 'neglected' but her books are much sort after and some are expensive. An example of her prose -- "A week later the dust film gathered. Under the bed the sloven's fur piled in gray whorls. In the cupboard a dish of crusts turned blue." Sounds familiar.

Overheard in the bookshop (2)

‘ I’ve stopped reading H. P. Lovecraft, so have you got any Heidegger ?’

‘ Have you anything on sixteenth-century oak coffee-tables? ‘

‘ I’d like to order a brand new copy of this out of print book …’

‘ Where do you keep the books you don’t stock ? ‘

Scruffy man, bearing box of books:
‘ I was just on my way to the tip with these ‘ ere books when I saw your shop. I thought you’d like to buy them ‘
How kind ! Mmm. They’re a bit rough, but I’ll offer you two pounds.
‘ Two quid ! I might as well throw them away for that !’
(And he did ).

Would you take 75p for this post card ? After all, you’re not going to sell it !’

‘We’ve got so many books at home, we’ve no room for any more ! We’ve got one shelf on the landing and another under the stairs !’

‘ How do you make a living out of this lot of old rubbish? ‘

‘ Oh Plates ! These are rather like the ones I tore out of a book in Sheffield University Library ‘

‘ Hey, this is a good book. I’ll buy it in Burnley !’

‘ Can you keep it on order and I’ll try and get it elsewhere !’

Two men looking at the Bible:
‘ The man who wrote that must be fair raking it in ‘

‘ I have a credit for £25 ‘
Yes, that’s right
‘Can you show me where the £25 books are please ?’.

‘Have you got any of the Narnia novels by C.S. Lewis ? My daughter wants one’
Yes, I think I’ve got them all. Which one do you want ?
‘I want Lionel Richie and the Wardrobe…’


‘I don’t what it’s called and I don’t know who wrote it, but the girl on television had long dark hair ‘

‘My son would like to know if you’ve got a copy of The Rubber Yacht of Victor Kiam ‘
‘ Have you a copy of James Joyce is useless?’

‘ Have you got that knitting book by Yasser Arafat ? ‘

‘ Do you have a copy of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the Dormobiles ? ‘

‘ I’m looking for a book ( or maybe books ) written by this chap Ibid…’

‘ Do you sell frozen chickens ? ‘

‘ Look, I know you’re a bookshop, but do you by any chance sell resuscitation dummies for first-aid classes ? ‘

‘ Where can I find teddy bears’ sunglasses ? ‘

‘ Do you have any books ( note plural ) on Florence Nightingale’s walking stick ?’

Hard to believe that, post-Python, some of these customers weren’t having a larf. I recall that hilarious pre-Python bookshop skit by the late lamented Marty Feldman and John Cleese from At Last the 1948 Show (1967)

Customer Good morning. Can you help me ? Do you have a copy of ‘Thirty Days in the Samarkand Desert with a Spoon’ by A.E.J. Elliott ?
Assistant. Um…well, we haven’t got it in stock, sir.
Customer. Never mind. How about ‘ A Hundred and One Ways to Start a Monsoon ?
Assistant ….By….?
Customer. An Indian gentleman whose name eludes me for the moment
Assistant. I’m sorry, I don’t know the book, sir.
Customer. Not to worry, not to worry. Can you help me with ‘David Copperfield ‘ ?
Assistant. Ah, yes. Dickens…
Customer. No
Assistant…I beg you pardon ?
Customer. No, Edmund Wells.
Assistant. …I’ll think you’ll find Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield, sir.
Customer. No, Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield with two ‘ p’s’. This is David Coperfield with one ‘ p’ by Edmund Wells.
Assistant (a little sharply). Well in that case we don’t have it.
Customer. Funny, you’ve got a lot of books here.
Assistant. We do have quite a lot of books here, yes, but we don’t have David Coperfield with one ‘p’ by Edmund Wells. We only have David Copperfield with two ‘p’s ‘ by Charles Dickens.…..

Customer. How about ‘Grate Expectations’?
Assistant. Ah, yes, we have that…
Customer. ….That’s G - r-a -t -e Expectations, also by Edmund Wells.
Assistant. I see. In that case we don’t have it. We don’t have anything by Edmund Wells, actually, he’s not very popular.
Customer. Not Knickerless Nickleby ? That’s K-n-i-c-k-e-r-…
Assistant. No!
Customer. Or ‘Quristmas Quarol with a Q ?
Assistant. No, definitely… not !
Customer. Sorry to trouble you.
Assistant. Not at all…

Once again, thanks to Shaun Tyas for permission to republish extracts from his More Bookwork Droppings (1990) and also to Methuen for extracts from The Golden Skits of Muriel Volestrangler, FRHS & Bar (1984).

[R.M.Healey]

Many thanks Robin. Hard to top Shaun's collection. Of the many malapropisms and misheard titles that have perplexed our staff I can only recall one at this moment - someone asking for 'The Seven Pillars of Neasden' and that may have been a wind-up. We did have an opulent looking woman who said she had been looking for twenty years for a copy of East Lynne by Mrs Henry Wood. We found a copy for her in the basement for £2 which she said was a ridiculous price and left (as Driff would say) "in a chauffeur driven huff." We once had some partygoers wanting masks of President Mitterand and were able to direct them to a shop 3 doors away that sold them (Stephanides.) All in a day's work.

Learning From Las Vegas. 1972

Current Selling Prices
$650-$3000 /£400-£2000

Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour. LEARNING FROM LAS VEGAS. Cambridge, Mass. & London: The M.I.T. Press, 1972

ARCHITECTURE
Cult classic -architecture / urbanism...a revolutionary case study that opened the world's eyes to vernacular architecture and iconography-the "ugly and ordinary" structures and signage born to satisfy the needs of regular people, not architects. It shows the considerable influence of pop art which some art critics say has, in its turn, influenced contemporary art. Venturi Scott Brown are now an important architectural firm with buildings at Harvard, Michigan, Yale and Tsinghua University Beijing. Robert Venturi is often referred to as the "father of Post Modernism."

The book is a large quarto of 188 pages and can turn up in a translucent glassene printed jacket that adds considerably to its value. In a 2007 interview by Melissa Urcan with the two surviving authors we get a look at the work 35 years on:

"Melissa Urcan: I would first like to ask you about the weight of Learning from Las Vegas, now almost 35 years old. Do you feel tied to the association of your work to this book, or is it something you continue to draw from?

Robert Venturi: Since
then we have written an essay called "Las Vegas After Its Classic Age," which emphasizes that Learning from Las Vegas in the context of now is completely historical. If you had written a book on the Renaissance in Florence, it would have taken maybe 100 years to say, "Oh that's historical." Now you can say 35 years have gone by very fast. But Learning from Las Vegas is still relevant in many ways, such as in its recognition of the relevance and significance of iconography and signage more than of space. Las Vegas got us in a lot of trouble, but we learned a lot from it.

MU: The Strip in Las Vegas appears to be where you spent the most research time. In this book you had the premonition of the building and sign eventually merging. Did you have any idea how big the entire city would become?

Denise Scott Brown: We did concentrate on the Strip, but not only on the Strip. We studied patterns of land use throughout Las Vegas. And we mapped all the strips of Las Vegas, not just the famous Strip...

VALUE? The book has been reprinted and can be picked up for $30 but the 1972 first is now of some value. When I featured this book 3 years ago there were 4 copies on ABE at between $1800 and $4500, there are now 14 with a decent enough copy sans jacket for $600 and a few in jacket from $1400 to $3500 and a one signed by Venturi with a drawing at $5000 in chipped jacket. Some copies listed may have jackets, the ever helpful Powells of Oregon merely describe their $1950 copy as 'standard' - a brutal price without jacket, but fairly decent with. The odds are it has no jacket and is a sad and tired example. If a copy is nice, dealers tend to say so. The jacket being printed acetate/ glassene is almost always less than fine and a perfect jacket could see a fast sale at $3000 otherwise it has become a slightly slow book to sell, although architecture is still a good subject and more reliable, say, than photobooks...For the person 'holding folding' there is also 'An Archive of Manuscript Materials Relating to the Publication of Learning from Las Vegas' at $35000 - considerably less than you could lose in 10 minutes play at the Bellagio.



OUTLOOK? Something of a sleeper, it can be picked up occasionally at library sales, boot sales and flea markets or even from web-savvy dealers who see online prices and assume the sellers are 'having a laugh.' Possibly a good hold over a decade or two, there seems to be considerable interest in the book and a plethora of critical works about it. I suspect in years to come Las Vegas will be seen as a suburb of hell and will be regarded in the way that we now think of Atlantic City or Blackpool. Only the Gods really know-- it mayl be better to sell now before more copies come to roost. My last copy took about a year to sell in 2008 at $1400 ('All lettering on front and back of jacket intact, loss of LE of 'Learning' at head of spine- an impressive example...')


For $50 or less you can buy I Am a Monument: On Learning from Las Vegas on Learning from Las Vegas by one Aron 'Balsamic' Vinegar. This 'provocative rereading of an iconic text' compares the text of the 1972 version and the 1977 'stripped down' edition. Vinegar is concerned lest we '... miss the underlying dialectic between skepticism and the ordinary, expression and the deadpan, that runs through the text.' Post post-modernism and beyond.

The retrospective inscription...

I don’t know how many writers would ( or have ) contributed retrospective inscriptions to books. I suspect only those with a subversive sense of humour or just a basic sense of fun might have a go. Too many writers ( or indeed celebrity figures as a whole ) tend to be pompous and po-faced on the issue of inscriptions. I’m not sure if many of the sixty or more writers I have interviewed would have obliged if I’d asked them to. Certainly none would have done so off their own bat. The idea is a little left field, after all, and it only works with books published many years before the time of asking. I’ve never interviewed Will Self, but he might have a go, surely, as perhaps would Iain Sinclair, whom I have interviewed. The late J. G. Ballard was another possible candidate, but he said no to an interview, so I’ll never know now.

The notion of subverting the whole notion of ‘ association copy ‘, particularly if a fake event or meeting is roped in, has its attractiveness to an imaginative iconoclast. I have often fantasised about asking a writer to provide an elaborate or even outrageous retrospective inscription but have only had the bottle to ask one writer, though I left it to him to supply the context, as it were. The man in question was Brian Aldiss, but he is an amiable man , totally without pomposity, has a twinkle in his eye, and having read his hilarious debut volume The Brightfount Diaries prior to interviewing him in 2002, I plucked up the courage to ask him to put back the date a few years, and without a murmur of protest, he duly obliged. Witty inscription too. Great bloke !

In fact it was so easy and quibble-free that looking back I wish I had asked previous interviewees to do the same. There is a terrific amount of scope here for the imaginative writer. It would have been fun, for instance, to have got a raunchy retrospective inscription from Germaine Greer ( who merely signed the book she gave me ) or David Gascoyne, who was full of anecdotes as we dined on shepherd’s pie at his home on the Isle of Wight. I could have brought along my copy of his Poems and he may have mischievously referred ( in fountain pen, of course ) to a chance meeting in Paris. Or I could have travelled a few miles south in the same week in 1994 and asked the 93 year old Edward Upward to date our meeting to 1966 when he and Auden may have by chance have met an adolescent me in Oxford or Austria.

In 1993 or so I met our greatest living poet, Geoffrey Hill, over tea at a mutual friend’s home in Hertfordshire, but was warned in advance that the great man probably wouldn’t sign my copy of Mercian Hymns. So I didn’t bring it along. Would Hill have been another Masefield or a Heinlen. I would like to think that he might have been won over by the idea of a backdated inscription. There’s still a chance of persuading him, I suppose . In the same house a couple of years later ( again over tea ) I met the gorgeous Rachel Weisz (her mother came from my village ), who was just out of sixth form and on her way to Cambridge and future Hollywood stardom. If I ever see her again ( some chance !) at some launch of her autobiography in LA would I have the chutzpah to ask her to recall the event in Herts? Not quite a retrospective inscription, but still…

Ideally, I suppose, any books containing scandalous or merely intriguing retrospective inscriptions from big name writers would need to be ‘ released ‘ into the world of modern firsts to exert the maximum effect, but how many owners of such books would be willing to sell their copies ? I imagine that the selling price would have to be sufficiently tempting, unless of course the fun of seeing the effect on people was considered more important. In the world of Gekoski, where an intriguing inscription can triple the asking price for a bog standard first edition, I don’t think I am overestimating the interest that such inscriptions arouse ?

All of which leads one to the inevitable question. How many of these personal inscriptions are genuine ? Surely it can’t be too difficult to forge a hand. Are we assuming that the only collectors who might buy a signed Waugh or Joyce are those familiar with their handwriting ?

Literary forgery is an ancient practice. From, say, 1870 onwards there would be thousands of readers who could imitate Dickens’ signature simply by copying the gilt scribble on the cover of the ‘Uniform Edition’ or the black ink ditto on the half-title. So all that might be needed is some old ink and a pre 1870 copy of Dickens to fool some punter. So the moral is—if you are going for personalised copies, buy those signed by minor writers. OK, they’re not so glamorous, but safer. Better still, forget inscribed books anyway and instead buy holograph letters with embossed headed addresses. [R.M.Healey]

Thanks Robin. Interesting and amusing and even seditious. As a fully paid up members of various trade organisations that, to paraphrase Shakespeare, have "fix'd their canons 'gainst such knavery..." I could not ask an author to backdate an inscription lest I be cast into outer darkness...The problem is that they affect the price quite considerably. For example - a 'Midnight's Children' inscribed at the time of publication is quite a prize, but nowadays Rushdie will sign anything he ever wrote, so later or undated inscriptions add much less value. I have heard of various fun-loving authors who will write inscriptions to any named person--e.g. I have seen Michael Moorcock presentations to Jimi Hendrix that the supreme guitarist could never have owned, also to Marc Bolan and Brian Jones. These are more like 'tribute' presentations.

One wonders if anyone has ever asked Henning Mankell to inscribe a pre 2005 book to Stieg Larsson or innocently got J.K. Rowling to inscribe a Harry Potter to Daniel Handler (real name Lemony Snicket). As for authenticity, it's really down to where you find the books-- if you buy them from big players like the Harringtons or Jonkers they are going to be right but from a low scoring Ebayer they may well turn out to be 'Sexton Blakes' (i.e. fakes.) Beware the signature that it is too much like the printed signature of the author--- I once saw a very good Hemingway signature that was proved a forgery because it was the exact copy (and exact size) of the printed signature on the cover of the book.

Graham Greene. Brighton Rock, 1938.

Graham Greene, BRIGHTON ROCK. Heinemann, London & Viking, NY 1938.

Current Selling Prices (in jacket) £10,000 - £60,000/ $16,000+- $100,000

MODERN FIRST EDITION
Greene's most famous and most valuable book. A note of caution, the value lies almost entirely in the jacket of the British (Heinemann) edition, not wearing jacket £500 is the maximum. The US edition is worth a fraction of the UK edition but has a more striking jacket. The artwork is by the revered graphic designer George Salter who was known for his multi dimensional images. The rarissimo British d/w is pinkish - mimicking the colour of the British candy known as 'rock.' Wiki defines it as '...a tubular boiled sweet commonly sold at tourist (usually seaside) resorts in the UK...with a pattern embedded throughout the length, which is often the name of the resort where the rock is sold.' It is not unknown in Australia and even the Danish resorts of Løkken and Ebeltoft have their own rock.

A recent theory is that Greene got the idea for the book from watching the Jean Gabin movie Pepe le Moko which he had reviewed in early 1937. Greene wrote - 'I cannot remember a picture which has succeeded so admirably in raising the thriller to a poetic level.' Similarities include smiling villains and the trivialisation of murder and betrayal. The Brighton trunk murders of 1934 and the crimes of the racecourse gangs who created havoc in Brighton during the 1930s are said to have been an input, also he had stayed in Brighton and responded to its seedy and violent undercurrents; in the novel he was exposing what he called 'the shabby secret behind the bright corsage.' Brighton ('London by the Sea') still has a louche and sordid side to it, although possibly less palpable than in GG's day. Keith Waterhouse, a former resident, said that ‘Brighton has the air of a town that is perpetually helping the police with their enquiries.’ A re-make of the film has just appeared starring Sam Riley, Andrea Riseborough & Helen Mirren. It is set in the moddish 1960s, plays up the religious elements and is said to be pretty good.


The first of Greene's overtly Catholic novels. Orwell said that they put forward 'the idea…floating around since Baudelaire, that there is something rather distingué in being damned; Hell is a sort of high-class night club, entry to which is reserved for Catholics only, since the others, the non-Catholics, are too ignorant to be held guilty.…'

The 1948 movie has cult status. Richard Attenborough, the original lovey, is unforgettable as the baby faced psychopath.



VALUE? About 4 years back there was a pretty nice jacketed copy of the 1938 UK first that went from book fair to book fair at £50K. It seems to have eventually sold. An unpleasant ex library copy in jacket sold on October 2009 at £11,000 (Dominic Winter.) The US first in a great jacket with wraparound band has made $3000 but decent examples can be had for less. At the Sotheby's sale of the library of an anonymous but obviously well heeled 'bibliophile' in October 2010 a copy made a staggering £70,850 ($110,000). It was described thus: '... original red cloth stamped in gilt, original pink dust-jacket, cloth folding box, some slight spotting along edges, short tears to edges of jacket (one at head of lower cover with some slight loss), neat repairs to lower hinge of jacket...very good condition.' A fine copy is unlikely to show but on this form could make £100K. It represents the greatest disparity in a modern first edition of value with and without jacket. In the recent Sotheby's case it works out the book is worth 140 times more with jacket. The only other 20th century book I can think of that is close to this sort of disparity is The Hound of the Baskervilles, possibly The Maltese Falcon.

PROOFS? Someone emailed about proof values. They can vary alot. In the late 1980s there was a vogue for them and prices surged but the market quickly ran out of steam. Proofs were then looked upon by dealers with mild disdain except in the case of major works or controversial books and banned items. Typically they are plain and uninteresting in appearance. Ebay has slighly revived their fortunes but they are tricky and don't tend to hold to consistent patterns of value.



I sold a proof of Brighton Rock about 10 years ago for circa $4000, not in wonderful condition. They are not impossibly scarce. At first I was excited by it, but found there are almost no changes with the proof and the hardback first- Greene's period anti-semitic tone is retained (passages like '...he had been a Jew once, but a hairdresser and a surgeon had altered that...' and references to Jewish women as 'little bitches') although it was later expunged. The only difference is that Brighton is spelled Brihton on page 77 and one letter of damaged type has been repaired on page 13. Substantial differences would have made a substantial difference to the price- a good rule with proofs. Rock on.

Qualities needed by Booksellers

As a jobbing bookseller I am sometimes asked what it takes to succeed in this trade. Success in book selling is elusive, these days merely to survive is to succeed. However I have jotted down some qualities that may be needed by a used book seller/ dealer. To have all of them would lead to canonisation but it is crucial to have a few.


Memory-- ideally a Funes-like memory (Borges) for every book ever seen, useful for determining rarity and especially for discarding the common and worthless. The Web has made this quality less essential but without it the seller can waste much time checking out useless and quotidian dogs. It is also helpful to have seen a lot of books, sellers should start young...

Mathematical skills-- the ability to do quick sums in the head is almost essential. Without it you need other qualities in abundance (or a trust fund.)

Intuition / Perceptiveness /Clairvoyance - the ability to sum people up, especially sellers of collections. Useful for sorting out time-wasters, those on fishing expeditions and persons with unreasonable levels of expectation. Qualities sometimes possessed in large doses by booksellers with no great knowledge of books themselves, and leading to great financial success. Such booksellers are sometimes also able to 'divine' that certain books are of great value.The fictional antique dealer Lovejoy (a 'divvy') had this quality and it is by no means imaginary.

Knowledege. A vast. but necessarily shallow, knowledge of almost everything + the ability to spell and use correct grammar less they be persecuted by Lynne Truss and her cohorts (now a sizeable army).

Tech Skills. Techno knowledge, or at least a cheap and willing friend who is an unashamed geek. Typing skills are also pretty useful but few can spare Mavis Beacon the 30 hours it takes to acquire real speed.

Patience, stoicism, the ability to endure extended periods of great hardship and tedium (and also sudden good fortune).

Physical hardiness, strength in the arms, indefatigability, a good walking speed...

A Buddha-like implacability-- a bookseller will have many reversals of fortune, gluts and busts, ones that got away, disdained colleagues who suddenly hit the jackpot etc., Also he or she must never get carried away at auctions or start buying books indiscriminately after a coup.

Sobriety-- some resistance to the temptations of good living, the tendency of bookinistas to celebrate every victory and medicate every reversal...

Chastity-- the ability to resist the blandishments of customers of either sex attracted to the quaintness and sheer coolness of bookselling.

Loyalty--the ability to be nice to customers who were once great spenders but are now either broke or have got everything they need (you might even get their books one day).

Generosity - the most valuable quality a bookseller can have. Generous with his or her knowledge (often to the point of boredom) and time, a generous buyer and a generous pricer. More money can be made by buying well and pricing low as opposed to the common practice of paying very little and charging a lot. The latter bookseller can sometimes prosper (but is never liked, his name usually spoken with a vile curse) but more often he becomes so broke that he has to get a real job. It is no coincidence that the most generous man on the planet is also the wealthiest. Step forward Bill Gates, philanthropist (and book collector.)

Humility-a rare quality -no longer necessary, except in the unlikely case of incredible financial success.

Books by Murderers 4

Theodore Kaczynski ( b.1942 )

Theodore Kaczynski. The Unabomber Manifesto : Industrial Society and its Future. Berkeley, Jolly Roger Press,1995. $25.

A child genius with an IQ of 167, Chicagoan ‘ Ted ‘ Kaczynski entered Harvard at 16 and breezed to a brilliant degree in maths. He subsequently earned his Ph. D by solving a problem so difficult that even his professor was floored by it. After an unhappy two years as a maths professor at Berkeley he dropped out of academia and took to the hills of Montana, where he built himself a tiny log cabin in the forest outside Lincoln. Here he lived alone and was regarded merely as a harmless eccentric until, following a long bombing campaign that left three dead and 23 injured, he was identified as the ‘Unabomber’, captured, convicted and in 1996 sentenced to life with no chance of parole. While at large Dr Kaczynski had divided his time between addressing mail bombs to despised figures, mainly in the IT community, and writing quasi-anarchistic tracts against industrialisation and the rise of technology, and it is these writings that form the core of his published works today.

Up to a point, the career of Kaczynski eerily mirrors that of William Sidis ( see earlier blog ), even down to the symptoms of autism which Kaczynski seems to have shown from an early age. Like many on the autistic spectrum, Kaczynski takes his obsession with one or more issues of a particular kind to an extreme. In his albeit deranged view, a campaign of violence against legitimate targets should necessarily be backed up by reasoned polemic. Today, if we reject the violence, we shouldn’t automatically reject the arguments, and reading his work, particularly some of his perceptive ideas on ‘ leftism ‘ and ‘ oversocialization’, one cannot help but be impressed.
In the States Dr Kaczynski is taken seriously as a thinker -and his writings are freely available on ABE, Amazon etc.,

George M. Zinkhan ( 1952 – 2009)

Richard Watson, Leyland Pitt, George Zinkhan and Pierre Berthon. Electronic Commerce. Harcourt College Publications, 1999. $1
George Zinkhan. Advertising Research. American Marketing Association, 2000. $20.
Eric Arnould, Linda Price and George M Zinkhan. Consumers. McGraw-Hill Series in Marketing ,2001. $45 – $395.


Professor of marketing George Zinkhan seems to have belonged to the category of little men who suddenly lose their marbles —as in ‘ I’m mad as hell and I’m not to take it any more ‘, out of the film ‘Network’, or more recently such rabid UK killers on the run as Derek ‘Birdy’ Bird and Raoul Moat. However, unlike Dr Zinkhan, neither of the two Englishmen published books. However, it is unlikely that any of his academic works might suggest why a seemingly mild mannered college professor would suddenly slaughter his wife and two others at a nice party put on for the local theatre group in Athens, Georgia on 25 April 2009, although his alleged poetry, which the American Marketing Association published on its website, reveals a disturbed mind with a potential for violence. Zinkhan also wins a different kind of notoriety for the truly bizarre circumstances of his own suicide while on the run. Apparently, within a week of the murders he dug a grave for himself in woodland, lay down in it and pulled a pallet covered with dirt and debris over the hole. He then shot himself in the head.
Incidentally, there’s nothing on any of this extraordinary behaviour in the entries for the professor’s books on ABE. Missed a trick there—those booksellers. [R.M. Healey]

Dr Zinkhan's suicide was certainly a belt and braces job, I have heard theories that Lord Lucan may have left this world in the same manner. Thanks Robin for a gripping series and a potential new collecting area. Quite restricted, especially if you stick to those who wrote books before they became killers. A friend who collects books by deaf writers has amassed an enormous collection. The problem is that if a writer lives long enough there is a good chance he will become deaf. Deaf murderers might restrict a collection too much however.

I recall buying a box of jacketed novels and looking without success for some sort of persistent theme. A customer who saw me pricing them noticed that every single jacket had a woman on it wearing earrings. Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!

Overheard in the Bookshop

The things they say...

1) Second- hand booksellers

If the hilarious Book Worm Droppings is any indication, the astonishing things that are overheard in second-hand bookshops must rival, if exceed, anything that the TV scriptwriters of the much missed Black Books came up with. Perhaps the book inspired them. Who knows ? In any case, for sheer laugh out loud hilarity the compilation that bookseller and publisher Shaun Tyas brought out in 1988 using material from his own encounters with customers and fellow dealers, as well as examples sent to him by booksellers throughout the world, has become a minor classic of its kind and well worthy of standing alongside the better known Bizarre Books.

In this first blog I will be including some extracts from Droppings that focus primarily on the remarks of booksellers, but first here are a few of the ruder remarks I have had to endure over a long career as a collector. They are in no particular chronological or thematic order .

‘ I’ve heard that there’s a good public library just up the road ‘
Said to me sometime in the late eighties by the irascible wife of a well-known book dealer in Selly Oak, Birmingham, recently retired. I had been perusing for ten minutes or so some of the more choice volumes in the shop, including William Hone’s very scarce History of Lotteries. Taken aback, I could only reply that ‘ Unfortunately, those library books aren’t for sale ‘ before I exited the shop in a flustered state. I’ve never been back.

‘ You can’t afford that ‘
Delivered within a few minutes of my arrival. I had been carefully examining an impressive stock of quality antiquarian books presided over by a bustling, pompous little man in his sixties (I was just twenty) in Moseley village, Birmingham. Admittedly, my hair was long and I didn’t dress like the sort of man who might have the money to buy a first of Fielding’s Pamela, or whatever it was. The shop closed not long afterwards.

‘ Please don’t put them back in the wrong order ‘.
Or words to that effect. I wasn’t aware that the distinctly unprepossessing antiquarian volumes listing badly to the left on a shelf were in any meaningful order and said as much. Nevertheless, the shop owner fussed and flapped around, while I meekly left his interesting and pleasantly serendipitous North London store vowing never to return. I wrote him a facetious letter not long afterwards accusing him of obsessive behaviour and he replied almost immediately with some sort of explanation, which I still feel was suspiciously far too long at six pages , although thankfully it wasn’t written in green ink.

And here are some dealers’ remarks from Bookworm Droppings (1988)

I’m sorry, Sir, but without a title or an author I’m going to have difficulty finding it...

But why is it so expensive ?
Well, Sir, if you would like to sell us your house at its 1953 price, you could have the book with our compliments…

I expect you remember me !
No, Sir, Who are you ?

That comes to £342 and fifteen pence. Tell you what, forget the fifteen pence.

If you’re not going to buy a book, then get out of my shop!

No, I don’t think we can serve you at the moment, we’re doing a stock-take.

Have you got a copy of the Glastonbury Festival Handbook ?
We don’t stock that sort of thing here , sir.
( a reply from Heffer’s, Cambridge )

It’s the dirty shoes I’m looking at. Do you mind not coming in when it’s raining?

We no longer bother putting the opening times on the door---then it doesn’t matter if we’re not here !

Thanks to Shaun Tyas, compiler of Book-Worm Droppings, which is available, together with its sequel, More Book Worm Droppings, from him at Shaun Tyas/Paul Watkins Publishing , 1, High Street, Donington, Lincolnshire PE11 4TA. Google for more information.

[R.M.Healey]

Many thanks indeed Robin. I am reminded of Driffield's preferred answer to the bookshop question 'Are you looking for anything in particular?'. The bicycle- clipped Driff would respond (truthfully) 'I am looking for a £1000 book priced at less than a £100.' Sometimes he would reel out a bunch of weird subjects on which he was currently pursuing books 'Suicide, mourning, scatology, stuttering and golfing apparel...' That usually shut them up.

I recall one customer laboriously taking 6 books out of our window and presenting £5 for about £90 worth of books. He explained that the notice in the window said Books £5 for 6. We explained this referred to the books on the stall outside. Wacky baccy may have been ingested. Another asked if we sold Sunday papers, one lost soul wanted scratch cards...

Books by Murderers 3

J. J. Jameson ( real name Norman A. Porter Jr ) b. 1939.

J. J. Jameson, Lady Rutherfurd’s Cauliflower, Puddin’head Press 1999 . New edition 2005.

While in jail between 1961 and 1985 for two separate murders (in 1960 and 1961) Porter earned an undergraduate degree at Boston University, started a prison newspaper, published poetry and founded a prison radio station. In 1985, while being held in a pre-release centre he signed himself out for a walk and disappeared. While at large Porter was arrested for theft in 1993, but was not recognised as a fugitive and was set free to pursue his career as a performance poet and MC at poetry jams in the Chicago region. In September 1999 he published a poetry chapbook, Lady Rutherfurd’s Cauliflower, which was generally well received, and in March 2005 he was named Poet of the Month by the prestigious Chicago Poetry magazine.

It was seeing his picture on the Chicago Poetry website that sent a sharp-eyed police officer to compare the prints taken at Porter’s arrest for theft in 1993 with those on a police databank. The poet was arrested, duly convicted of escaping from jail and in October 2005 sentenced to three years imprisonment. However, for showing ‘limited remorse‘ he was denied parole in January 2010 and is still in jail, where presumably he still writes poetry. Porter was the subject of Susan Gray’s biopic Killer Poet (2008).

A critic reviewing Lady Rutherford’s Cauliflower after Porter’s arrest complained of the poet’s necessary evasions, sexual obsessions and the prosaic quality of his poems. It is hard to disagree, though it must be stressed that like the work of other performance poets, it probably works better read out aloud. A second edition of Cauliflower was brought out in 2005 to cash in on Porter’s notoriety. This edition can be found on Amazon for $20 but the 1999 original is hard to find and may be of value.

Roberto Solis (b.1945)

PanchoAguila, Hijacked. Berkeley, Twowindows Press, 1976. $60
Pancho Aguila, 11 Poems, San Jose, Mango Press, 1977. $60
Pancho Aguila, Anti-gravity. Berkeley, Aldebaran Review 1977. $50
Pancho Aguila, Dark Smoke: Poems, San Francisco, Second Coming Press 1977. Inscribed by author $137
Pancho Aguila, The Therapeutist and the 3rd Day Hunger Poem. Berkeley, Autaud’s Elbow, 1978. Folded sheet. $60.
Pancho Aguila, Clash. San Francisco and Berkeley, Poetry for the People 1980. Stapled pamphlet $75.

At the age of 24 Solis held up an armoured car and shot a security guard in the back. For this murder he spent 24 years in Folsom Prison, where he led the Writer’s Programme and published at least four volumes of poetry and some pamphlets under the pseudonym Pancho Aguila. In 1992 Solis was released on parole and began calling himself Julius Sauve. In 1993 he and his girlfriend, one Heather Tallchief (pic left), robbed an armoured car in Las Vegas of $3m and the couple went on to live as Bonny and Clyde style fugitives. In 2005, after 10 years on the run Tallchief surrendered and was subsequently sentenced to 5 years in jail, but Solis remains on the Most Wanted list. He has probably mellowed by now, so if you ever meet him buy him a drink and he might sign some of his books for you. Judging from the prices they fetch, it might be worth the risk !! [R.M. Healey]

Thanks Robin. The penultimate of a killer series (I'm fired). Heather Tallchief was something of a beauty (if you can look good in a mug shot surely you're a star) , -- in the Wiki entry on Solis it mentions 'Tallchief drove off with an armoured vehicle containing $2.5 million..' - there might be a movie there. Last murderers to be dealt with will be the Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski and Professor George M. Zinkhan - 'a little man who lost his marbles.'

Neil Gaiman. Duran Duran 1984

Neil Gaiman. DURAN DURAN. THE FIRST FOUR YEARS OF THE FAB FIVE. Proteus, London 1984.

Current Selling Prices
$1000/£650 (hardback) $60/£40 (paperback)


ROCK/ POP / CURIOSITY

Neil Gaiman's first book. Not common as a paperback but decidedly rare in hardback and dust jacket. The book itself is a small quarto art book size glossy job, slightly trashy in appearance falling into the sleeper category of 'a book that looks like nothing.' Gaiman refers to it as his 'dark secret' and would probably like to see it obliterated and consigned to pulp oblivion. The publisher Proteus went bust shortly after releasing it. In hardback it is probably his most valuable book and he looks a decent enough guy to sign a copy if one was proffered. See pic below of him and his new bride Dresden Dolls singer Amanda Palmer - they were married Jan 2 this year in Berserkley, California with Michael Chabon and Lemony Snicket in attendance. Snicket (real name Daniel Handler) played accordion as the duo walked down the aisle. 100 years ago it would have been James Branch Cabell, Baron Corvo, H.G. Wells (possibly with his teenage lover Rebecca West) and Edward Elgar on the harmonium.

If you pop Neil Gaiman into the ABE search system and ask for highest price the only Gaiman book worth more is Spares: The Special Edition with contributions by him and Michael Marshal Smith and Alan Clark - limited to 52 lettered copies in a wooden box is priced at at an unwieldy $1600. A special of McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales from 2003 signed twice by all 12 contributors who include Micheal Crichton, Elmore Leonard, Michael Chabon, Aimee Bender, Dave Eggers, Harlan Ellison and Laurie R. King commands a hopeful $2000. Signing twice is a newish practice and may become de rigueur in multi author signings... The Duran Duran book comes in at $1500 in hardback, although it can be had for $100 or less in paperback. The man charging $1500 is a reasonably sober citizen and not one of the usual 'dream on' over-pricers (Books Tell You Why, Bookbarn, Bad Books of Idaho etc.,) so this price may be just possible to achieve with discount, time to pay, swaps etc.,. Game on, Gaiman. Gaiman (pronounced Guyman?) is likely to get more famous, richer and more exalted so this book may be one to lay down. The only problem is that it is not a work of fantasy. Conceivably the book could also be bought by a fan of the 'fab five'...

Books published by murderers 2

Richard Dadd ( 1817 - 1886 )

S. C. Hall (ed), The Book of British Ballads. London Jeremiah Howe 1842. $318

In 1841 Dadd was still a student at the Royal Academy when S. C. Hall invited him to illustrate the text for ‘Robin Goodfellow ‘ for his forthcoming Book of Ballads. Two years after its publication Dadd was incarcerated in Bedlam for the frenzied murder of his father in 1843. The 1841 oil painting by Dadd of Puck sitting on a toadstool was later reproduced as a steel engraving by Lizars and as such became instantly popular when it was published in various editions of Shakespeare. Such is the trendiness of Dadd today that a plate removed from one such edition was estimated at a ridiculous £80 - £120 in the 2009 sale of the remaining stock of art dealer Peter Nahum. Much cheaper ‘ Pucks ‘ can be found if you search hard enough.


John White Webster ( 1793 – 1850)

John White Webster, A Description of the Island of St Michael 1821 $20 (reprint)
John White Webster, A Manual of Chemistry, on the basis of Professor Brande’s. Boston, 1826. £190+
Andrew Fyfe, Elements of Chemistry , with additions by John White Webster. 1827. $125

In late November 1849 John White Webster, a professor of chemistry at Harvard University , murdered the wealthy University benefactor Dr George Parkman in his laboratory. It seemed that the poorly paid Webster, had serious money problems and owed Parkman over $400. Parkman, anxious for the money, had made an evening appointment with the professor to discuss the debt. When Parkman arrived Webster was ready for him with a large club. After bludgeoning him to death, Webster dissected the body and hid the remains. Days later he was seen trying to dispose of these body parts in a furnace. The police were alerted, the lab was searched and among other remains, Parkman’s false teeth were recovered. As with the similar case below, Webster’s conviction depended on the uniqueness of a piece of evidence, in this case, a pair of choppers which had been custom-made to accommodate Parkman’s odd-shaped jaw. Professor Webster pleaded guilty to murder and was hanged in 1850.
Webster had a degree in medicine and his first book, an account of San Miguel Island in the Azores, was researched while he practised there in 1817- 18. This remains an elusive item. His second work, an otherwise unremarkable chemistry textbook, published when Webster was 33, has, due to its author’s notoriety, become a collector’s item, and at present there is only a single copy on ABE.

Nathan Leopold (1904 – 1971 )

Nathan F. Leopold Jr., Life Plus 99 Years. Doubleday 1958. $25+
N. F. Leopold, Checklist of Birds of Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. University of Puerto Rico, 1963. $8 - $80.

In 1924 wealthy Chicago super-brains and disciples of Nietzsche, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, thought they had committed the perfect crime when they murdered the naïve schoolboy Bobby Franks just for the thrill of it. But the discovery of Leopold’s spectacles, which had a peculiar hinge, at the scene of the crime quickly led to their arrest and when questioned separately their stories soon fell apart. At the trial the murderers pleaded guilty and their brilliant defence attorney, Clarence Darrow, managed to persuade the judge not to sentence them to capital punishment ( they were legal minors anyway ).Instead they were jailed for life plus 99 years. Loeb was himself murdered by an inmate in 1936, but Leopold proved a model prisoner, even volunteering to be infected with malaria as part of a study. He was released on parole in 1958 and in the same year his autobiography, Life Plus 99 Years, appeared. He emigrated to Puerto Rico not long afterwards, where he became a clinical worker, married, and obtained a master’s degree in social medicine. For many years he made an intense study of local bird-life and in 1963 his Checklist of Birds of Puerto Rico and The Virgin Islands was published. He died aged 66 in 1971.

Leopold’s autobiography is a good read, and there are several reasonably priced copies on ABE. Much rarer is his ornithological monograph—a slim booklet that appeared under the name ‘ N. F. Leopold ‘. It’s something to look out for among those dullish scientific pamphlets one finds on the Natural History shelves of second hand bookshops. Incidentally, what is it with murderers and birds (see below ) ?


Robert Stroud ( 1890 - 1963 )

Stroud’s Digest on the Diseases of Birds, 1943. £95- £160
Robert Stroud, The Diseases of Canaries, TFH, Jersey City, 1933. $28

‘Birdman of Alcatraz’ Robert Stroud ( in real life much nastier, apparently, than his portrayal on film would suggest )had plenty of time to study the canaries he bred in his cell at Leavenworth Prison, Kansas, while doing life for the murder of a guard there in 1916. In time he became a major authority on bird diseases and in 1933 published Diseases of Canaries. Ten years later, after he had just been transferred to Alcatraz, a much more substantial work, Stroud’s Digest on the Diseases of Birds appeared and his fame grew. He died a celebrity at the age of 73, having spent 54 years in prison.

Stroud’s Digest is now seen as a significant scientific treatise and since its appearance has gone through many editions, most of which sell for a few dollars. The first, however, remains a rarity.

Reginald Kray ( 1933 - 2000 )

Reginald Kray, Thoughts, Philosophy and Poems. Limited edition, 1991. £100.

If crossed, notorious hoodlum Reg Kray might have nailed your head to the floor like that gangster out of Monty Python, but like any good cockney boy he was devoted to his mother, as his alleged poems testify. No doubt Thoughts has become sought after among true crime followers and those gangsters who like to boast that they knew the Krays personally.

[R.M. Healey]

Thanks Robin for deep and fruitful research. Pic at the top is a Richard Dadd 'Come unto These Yellow Sands'. (1842). Upmarket dealers Peter Harrington have a splendid copy of the Kray book (with a signed letter) at a not unthinkable £375 inscribed thus "Dear - Lisa, God Bless, Friend, Reg Kray." The letter reads "You can get my latest book... if you phone Richard Driscoll at this number... I have yet to write a keep fit book." To my knowledge no Kray keep fit book has yet appeared, but it should---I'm thinking of the Elvis line from 'Jailhouse Rock' - '...if you can't find a partner / Use a wooden chair.'