Rick Gekoski: Tolkien's Gown and other stories of great authors and rare books

[Shade]

I was hugely impressed with this book I bought on Friday. I devoured it in bed over a night and a morning: twenty twelve-page essays on famous twentieth-century books, with stories of how they came to be published.

More interesting, however, are the stories which include episodes of Gekoski's own involvement in the titles: as a rare book dealer, he's had more Lolitas through his hands than Roman Polanski. This could be terribly self-involved and showy, a parade of my literary mates, but Gekoski's humorous and ebullient persona (don't let the fact that the back cover flap tells us he "has been described as the Bill Bryson of the book world"* put you off) let him get away with it. As does his disrespect for some of the big names he has had dealings with: I loved in particular the chapter on Lord of the Flies, where William Golding takes Gekoski (who was working on a full Golding bibliography with the man's half-hearted co-operation) to the local bank vault to see the manuscript of Lord of the Flies. Golding, it turns out, even in his post-Nobel old age, was crippled with financial anxiety, and had a mad paranoia about being jailed for tax evasion (solely on the basis that, in 1961, he had cashed a $100 cheque for an American lecture without declaring it), and viewed his manuscript of his famous first novel as a little nest egg:

"If you can find a nice rich American or Japanese," he said, with an attempt at worldly offhandedness utterly foreign to his nature, "I would take a million for it."

"A million what?" I asked, maybe a little puckishly.

"Pounds, of course!" (As if I had insulted the Queen.)

"But Bill," I said, as reasonably as I could, "the only twentieth century manuscript to have fetched anything remotely like that sort of figure is Kafka's The Trial."

He nodded his head, as if this confirmed his view.

"Anyway," I said, "there is no buyer out there at that sort of price."

"Surely there's got to be some super-rich collector who would be dying to have it!"

"In my experience you don't get to be super-rich by not caring what you pay for things. Value for money is the only way the rich can protect themselves."

He glared at me. Clearly I was a rotten dealer.

"Get me a million," he said, "and you can have 5 per cent."

(I wonder if Golding was distantly related to the proprietor of Plymbooks, the online bookstore which thinks it might get a cool quarter of a mill for the manuscript of the pisspoor Shadowmancer? He was certainly a distant relative of Alan Partridge, flailing around with alternative titles for his original name for Lord of the Flies when his publishers expressed doubts, each worse than the previous: "A Cry of Children? Nightmare Island? To Find an Island?" Monkey Tennis? How did he ever win the Nobel??) Similarly, he tells us of his dealings with Graham Greene ("Dear Mr Gekoski, If your copy of Lolita, which isn't even the true first edition, is worth £3,250, how much is the original Paris edition inscribed to me worth? Yours sincerely, Graham Greene"), Salman Rushdie (he was technically included in the fatwa of 1989) and J.D. Salinger (he was included in Salinger's own fatwa of threatened litigation, one of the many). Even when he doesn't have any personal dealings with the author, or has never dealt in the book, he has plenty of interesting stuff to tell us: for example did you know that Beatrix Potter only wrote books until she was married, then stopped forever to be a wife?

He is not uncritical of the book-collecting and trading world, or of some of its favoured titles. He doesn't think much of T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom, despite the fact that its first edition is one of the most 'sumptuous' twentieth century books ever produced, bibliophilically speaking:

In twenty years of dealing rare modern books, I have never owned a copy of the 1926 Seven Pillars. It's one of my blind spots. Not only Seven Pillars, but Lawrence generally. I'm usually pretty attentive about the details of bibliographies and values, but virtually nothing of Lawrence's will stick in my mind. I'm just not interested.

This is not an uncommon condition, according to Lawrence's biographer Jeremy Wilson, who observes that "the public no longer knows what should be believed and what should be denied and, as a result, many serious-minded people have come to regard the subject of T.E. Lawrence with caution, if not distaste." The only adequate remedy for this, by implication, is to read his 1,188 biography of Lawrence.

I have the same problem with the work of Winston Churchill, though I did recently read Roy Jenkins' biography, which left me with immense admiration for Churchill, about whom I had been reprehensibly ignorant. But I still don't want to stock his books: he may be surpassingly admirable, but I don't feel comfortable with the sort of people who collect his works. I feel the same way about Lawrence (except for the admiration).

Collectors are an odd lot, both obsessional and compulsive, secretive and retentive. Usually they collect the books of authors whom they enjoy reading, and value them accordingly, and harmlessly. But Lawrence and Churchill collectors are different, there is something edgy and personal about their project, something (as Dame Edna might say) spooky. I don't believe that, in their dreams, they are swanning about on camels, or directing the Second World War. Rather, that their sense of self is fuelled by their association with a hero through whom they feel enlarged. (Jung calls this identification with an archetype 'psychic inflation'.)

"Now old Winston," you can imagine such collectors musing, "he was my sort of man!" Who are the major collectors of Churchill? The Sultan of Brunei, newspaper magnate ["at time of writing" - Shade] Conrad Black, American Presidential candidate Steve Forbes. Show me a book-collecting captain-of-industry type, and I'll bet you he collects Churchill, or Roosevelt, or (God help us) Napoleon.

Similarly he shows a healthy scepticism for the "Midas touch" which J.K. Rowling has applied to everything she touches.

The Harry Potter books are wildly popular. But this does not necessarily mean they are any good. Are the books, [her critics] argue urgently, literature in the honorific sense of the term? I don't want to argue here about what literature is, because an ostensive definition will do. The Hobbit is literature, and The Famous Five is not. Enid Blyton is part of our cultural heritage, not our literary one.

And where would one place J.K. Rowling? (And: does it matter?) I do not believe that such decisions are merely matters of taste. If you like Enid Blyton better than Tolkien, that's fine with me; if you think she is a better writer than Tolkien, you're either a very unsophisticated child, or an idiot.

You learn to make such discriminations, I think, by reading a lot, and by placing one thing beside another. I have, for instance, changed my view of the Harry Potter books since reading Philip Pullman's surpassingly brilliant trilogy, His Dark Materials. The Pullman series, like that of Rowling, has at its centre the question of the fate of the universe. The battle between good and evil is, in both books, ultimately to be decided through the strength and faith of child protagonists. But if you put the two authors side by side, there is no doubt that Pullman is better, deeper, richer and more demanding. His Dark Materials is a classic of our literature, and the Harry Potter series, I suspect, is not.

Cheers cheers. Now, if only I can find a copy of Rowling's signature to forge onto a copy of Philosopher's Stone (I have the inscription: "To Philip Pullman: il miglior fabbro. Jo Rowling"), then I might have a use for this Gekoski clown...

---

* although surely, since Bill Bryson's only renown is for writing lots of books, that makes Bill Bryson the Bill Bryson of the book world?

 

[Rogue]

Sounds fabulous!

 

[Rogue]

I just looked it up at amazon and it has a lovely place on my wishlist now.
Thx for the great excerpt!

 

[Shade]

You're welcome. American readers please note that for some reason in the US it's called Nabokov's Butterfly and not Tolkien's Gown.

Just realised maybe this should have been posted in Bookshelves > Non-fiction. If a mod wants to move it, please do.