A dull, dreary garage sale in East Toronto. Amongst the broken power tools and soiled dinner set is a pile of pallid books. An upwardly mobile couple approach, and begin to sort through the motley collection of dusty volumes.
“My God, darling,” from the thrilled and hopeful husband. “This is an Imsberg Bible! Must be worth, what, $50,000. Keep very quiet.”
The ecstatic yuppie approaches the apparently credulous manager of the roadside bizarre.
“Doing much business?” from the optimist.
“Not really,” from the amateur merchant. “Just a clear-out. I don’t really mind, though.”
“Let’s see. I’ll take the Barbie doll set, the toasting forks, and that book thing on the broken sofabed.”
“Okay. Right, that’s a buck for the doll, two dollars for the forks, and the Imsberg Bible . . . let’s say $50,000. D’you want a paper bag?”
The buying and selling of books is not what it was. If, indeed, it ever was what it was. Church jumbles and the United Way annual sale are systematically ravaged by professional dealers, and the more astute of goodwill store managers ask obliging experts to price their wares; for every hundred Dick Francises and Jackie Collinses there just may be an Evelyn Waugh first edition. Which leaves the second-hand bookstores, with their exclusive nomenclature and bearded, pipe-smoking owners. Professionalism has fundamentally altered the way books are bought and sold. Nationally distributed journals inform buyers and sellers of how much a first edition, a limited printing, a signed second, a dust-jacket inclusive should reach. Those who seek a three-dollar profit on their goods rather than the possible 200 percent markup are no longer perceived as altruists, but as simpletons.
In a 1973 essay on antiquarian bookstores, Graham Greene explained the delightful quintessence of the bibliophile:
The value of a collection to a collector lies less in its importance, surely, than in the excitement of the hunt, and the strange places to which the hunt sometimes leads…. I prefer the badly organized bookshops where Topography is mixed up with Astronomy and Theology with Geology and stacks of unidentified books litter the staircase to a room marked Travel, which may well contain some of my favorite Conan Doyles.
I decided long ago that the dictates of my income and commitments prevented me from pursuing my initial choice of collection—I would dearly love every Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton first edition, most of them signed; followed by a similar C.S. Lewis assortment—and instead opted for a more viable and reasonable obsession. Authors are the victims of fashion, and suffer in popularity according to the whims and ways of the generations. The dictatorship of the living. I breathe therefore I am. Once enormously popular and respected writers wilt away on the rear shelves of bookstores, refereed to by severe pundits as “dogs.” John Galsworthy won the Nobel Prize for Literature, influenced a generation with his elegant and exemplary Forsyte Saga, but can now be purchased for under $10 a volume. My Galsworthy collection is, consequently, comprehensive.
Arnold Bennett is another Edwardian English writer whose current status, though higher than that of Galsworthy, is at a wretched and undeserved level. Bennett was better than Wells, as good as Conrad, yet is cast aside with John Buchan where the dust of indifference is at its thickest. How many literate people have heard of James Hilton? Very few, I believe. Hilton wrote over a dozen books, half of them bestsellers, including Goodbye Mr. Chips and Lost Horizon; he left Britain for Hollywood, where he was a highly demanded screenwriter. Today he is invariably unread, unwanted, uncollected. The devil within me shouts, “Thank goodness.” I have seldom paid more than $4 for a James Hilton.
H.V. Morton’s travel writing made him a genre doyen of his day. His themes were Britain and the Holy Land, and he was printed in tens of thousands. Hence, he is readily available. His lack of following since the 1960s, like Hilton’s, lowers his price. I shall never forget the sensation of seeing one of the last three Morton books I needed to complete my collection, lying in a United Way sale, priced at fifty cents. I opened the cover to check the condition of the frontispiece, and there was Morton’s diminutive, but to me numinous, signature. As Greene said, the excitement of the hunt.
Of course, book collecting is about more than excitement. In this disposable age, symbols of permanence are feared, loathed, misunderstood. The good and great Christopher Dawson once said that “Only a dying civilization neglects its dead.” The modernist fallacy has permeated the book world. The fiction, the biography, the historical writing of the current decade is, with few exceptions, inevitably and irrefutably superior to that of times past, they proclaim. Similarly, that of the nineteenth century was superior to that which preceded it. This is arrant nonsense. This is also conventional wisdom. Why read Galsworthy, when one may read a Julian Barnes? Why bother with Bennett, when Norman Mailer is available? What use a Hesketh Pearson biography, when Michael Holroyd is still living?
One thinks of a man on the bank of a small river. He wishes to cross to the other side, quickly. There are three large stones in the river. If he treads carefully from one to the other, he will reach his destination. Instead, he leaps from the first stone to the third, loses his balance, and falls into the water. He had no secure base, nowhere from which to spring. Moving forward is not a bad thing; moving forward without
appreciating or understanding what is behind is a terrible thing indeed. To say we follow the age because it is the age is like saying we follow the political regime because it is the political regime. Governments are sometimes bad. Ages are sometimes wrong. The book is a glorious gift. The book gave us the word of God down the ages, and the book reminds us of the continuing link with the past and its wisdom. The bibliophile, the person who loves books, makes a statement, strengthens a cause: that the new is not the mature, developed father of the old, but merely its infant, growing child.