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June 22, 2004
OGIC: Lost world
Last fall I pulled Mary McCarthy's Intellectual Memoirs off the shelf for the first time in years and found two fifty-dollar bills tucked inside. Nice, but alarming enough that I can now confidently say--after an evening of on-the-ground investigation--that there is not another red cent hidden in any book in my apartment. This is not my usual notion of a savings account--my money didn't earn a lot of interest there, needless to say--and I'm going to be very careful next time I take a box of books to the local bookstore.A piece in today's Wall Street Journal (subscription required) catalogs some of the amazing items discovered in used books at New York's Strand and a few other bookstores. These items include an activist's rap sheet; sketches by Bosch, Michelangelo, and the unidentified; birth certificates; dirty pictures; and, natch, love letters. Some of the gaudier finds:
The Strand did buy a $15 doodled-over book of drawings by the Renaissance artist Ucello. The doodler was Salvador Dali. Fred Bass, the Strand's owner, once opened a book titled "The Bill of Rights" to find it was hollowed out. The bottom of the inside was signed, "Boo! Abbie Hoffman." Mr. Bass says he learned later from Mr. Hoffman that he had hidden a tape recorder in there during the Chicago Seven trial.
Mining the dusty stacks, browsers can strike gold too: a signed photo of Bette Davis; a dried four-leaf clover; a ripped-out flyleaf from a first edition with a poem scrawled on it: "A plague upon / and to perdition / the Hun who mars / a first edition..."
Harvey Frank wasn't pleased, though, to learn that a personal note he wrote had landed in a customer's hands at the Strand. Mr. Frank had slipped it into a copy of his own self-published book of poetry, "My Reservoir of Dreams," before sending it to WOR Radio host Joan Hamburg. "I thought I would bring her into my life," says Mr. Frank, who is 80. Ms. Hamburg remembers the book, vaguely. "I was sort of touched," she says. "I put it on my desk. Or somewhere." She says she has no idea how it ended up in a used-book bin.
Ouch, and déjà vu. I live in a university neighborhood where everyone is constantly publishing books and giving them to their friends, neighbors, and colleagues. You might think that if you lived in such a place you would have the tact to sell your books out of state, or at least in a different part of town. But it's relatively common to turn up a volume at Powell's by a local author that has been warmly inscribed to someone residing in the same eight-by-eight-block area who apparently thanked the giver, turned around, walked up the street, and converted the book into cold, hard cash--or even (shudder) credit towards other books. This seems to me to take a really steely grade of shamelessness (with a dash, in some cases, of professional envy).
Probably the best bonus material I've ever found in a used book were an eloquent malcontent's extensive pencil annotations in a hardcover copy of Pauline Kael's Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang. The penciler didn't often agree with Kael but found her reviews provocative, to say the least. This wonderful artifact has since slipped away. I suspect I left it at an ex-boyfriend's. If I were him, I wouldn't have given it back either. But I am enjoying his sumptuous, blocklike 1939 Petit Larousse Illustré, so there. (Pseudonyms are so liberating.)
Too impatient for stumbling on this stuff? You can always check out the pre-found objects at Found Magazine. I've always liked the concept of this magazine, but I must admit that today I'm feeling newly protective of the flotsam they collect and publish. Not that the supply could ever be depleted, but the thought of anything like a central depository for it is, I suddenly see, actually very depressing.
Posted June 22, 2004 5:27 AM
