Chekhov's Mistress
Why I Could Never Be a Rare Book Dealer
Listening to a conversation between buyer and seller at Bookleaves, a small, clean, rare-book store on West 4th Street in the Village, I hear buyer say to eager seller with much hemming and reluctant hawing, “the book itself is worthless, but the signature inside is not.”
Similarly, not long ago I was stymied from buying a collection of Sam Shepard’s short stories at (the excellent) Freebird Books in Redhook because someone there mistakenly thought an inscription from one friend to another one Christmas was an autograph by the man himself. Of course once the salesperson brought up said Hancockian noteriety, I knew that whatever price they wanted for the book was for an inch of ink and not the text inside. I left. The next time I went back the book was stacked in the corner with a $6 price tag.
But what I can say is I’ve recently grown fond of a little German restaurant in the Village called Lederhosen where the decor is as nice as you might imagine from the name and you can buy your Spaten lager by the litre, if you wish, and you can walk in any time of day and they’ll bake you a pretzel. It’ll take five or ten minutes to bake, just long enough for some fraction or another of one of those litres.
Now what does Lederhosen have to do with rare book dealing? Not much. But on a recent pretzel stop (the wurst is not bad either), I spilled mustard all over a page of Mati Unt’s Things in the Night. I was able to wipe most of the mustard off of the page, but now the damn book is just worthless.
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About this Post
- Posted by: Bud Parr
- Date: October 20, 2006
- Filed Under:
Wise Men Fish Here: Literature
- Comments:0
- Links to this Post: Technorati
