Sarah's Books - Used & Rare

Eight years ago I wrote a brief elegy for bookseller Barbara Falk.  I bought some wonderful books from her when she kept shop on the Castine road, and when I wrote that elegy, I couldn't find one of the very books I most wanted to describe.  All I could remember about the purchase was her voice, clearly saying, when I bought it, "No self-respecting antiquarian bookseller would ever be without it!"  (She had many strong opinions such as this and I loved her for it.)  Well, some time ago, probably during one of the last rearrangements of the book room, I found it.  Or rather, them, since it is a set.  I wanted to write about them before now, but today is the day, because I took them off the shelf as I worked my way along, deciding which books to put bookplates in and which not.  This is the section I am in right now - poetry - and I put bookplates in a few volumes by or about Keats, then came to the Ls:


Why the cover cloth is so very teal in this picture I do not know, all I know is that I could not get the camera to read the dark forest green that it truly is.  Anyway.  There they are.  In all their glory, the Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow edited by Samuel Longfellow (Ticknor and Company). Volumes I and II are the second edition from 1886 and Final Memorials (ibid) is a first edition from 1887.  Longfellow's translation of The Divine Comedy is a reprint (Houghton, Mifflin 1895) and the Library of America edition (2000) of his Poems and Other Writings is faintly waterstained along its bottom edge but otherwise decent and readably compact, for all its 850 pages.  But back to Barbara Falk, Bookseller.  FINALLY, after eight years (I said back then that someday, there the book would be, in my hand, and lo it has come to pass), here is her notation inside the cover of Volume I:


The blue grease pencil is the old price from Leary's, in Philadelphia.  Barbara made a note of it, in pencil.  Out of the picture, on the opposite endpaper, she also wrote, with another arrow, "note price mark" - and I wrote, with my own arrow pointing at that, "written by Castine bookseller Barbara Falk" - and now, the crucial question.  Since I still have the set, after all these years, and I still have Barbara's voice ringing in ears (am I a "self-respecting antiquarian bookseller" now? was I once? have I ever been?).  Should I put my bookplate in this set?  And if yes, where?  The endpapers are already carrying a heavy information load.  Besides all the notes, I also see my own price code (inside the back cover, on the free endpaper), and my actual retail price too (inside the front cover, on the free endpaper), because I attempted to sell this set in my shop, pretty much the entire time I had a shop.  I also see some erasures - notes Barbara either made or erased herself, from some previous bookseller unbeknowst to me.  I must say I do like this line of succession:  Leary's, for $4.00; then Barbara Falk, and I see from my price code that she charged me $22.50 for the set, in 2001; then I had it for sale for $80.00 in my shop (no wonder no one would buy it!).  Since the internet scythed used book prices down to bare stubble many years ago, I wonder what I would price it at now, if I were ever to offer it for sale again.  Off the top of my head, I would say $40.00, or perhaps $35.00, but I still don't think it would sell, at that price.  Not for a few years, anyway.  However, that price does strike me as cheap but fair, and the set is in very good condition overall, with just a bit of edgewear and bumping to the cloth covers and light foxing to the endpapers.  But.  This is all a moot point, because now and possibly forever, it's NFS.

I didn't know when Leary's closed, so I looked it up on the google and quickly found out this most interesting fact:  the library at Temple University owns the Leary's archive.  The papers look fascinating in their minutae - correspondence, contracts of employment (with names! yay bookstore clerks! otherwise lost in the mists of time!), book orders, sales records, catalogues, posters, prints, photographs, glass negatives, ledgers, and on and on.  My, my.  The library at Temple employed my father, and he also attended art school in Philadelphia, and surely went to Leary's.  He read books like other people do something so common that it would make a great simile if only I could think of one that was apt without sounding trite.  In short, he was a reader.  Leary's closed in 1969, when I was still a baby, so I never made it there myself, as far as I know.  I wish I had.  I'll ask my mother, since she too was in art school in Philadelphia.  I love that blue grease pencil mark.  Someone in receiving - one of those clerks - unpacked the boxes from Ticknor and Company, checked the books against the invoice, and priced the books accordingly.  I am a little embarrassed to mention that many of the pages in this set are still uncut.  Shall I actually cut all the pages and read it someday?  I wonder.  I think I shall, since I just made a discovery.  I always thought Final Memorials was a tribute volume, with copious other people's funerary remarks and memories of Longfellow.  But opening it now, I see otherwise.  It is actually Longfellow's journals and selected correspondence, from 1829 through 1882!  And they look marvellous!  New diaries to read, I cannot wait.  Spotted at random, and seems fitting, even though the sun is shining at this moment - from early May, 1872 (p.185):

"5th.  A dreary day.  Paced up and down the veranda..."

One more note of discovery - I now also see that the set had at least one other owner, besides me, Barbara Falk, and Leary's, because there is a name written on the title page, and a date of 1894, and inside the back cover of just the Final Memorials volume, another small bookseller's mark in pencil, stating the price at $3.00 and the initials or abbreviation "hby" all in lower case.  A price or inventory or date code?  That clerk?  A location within the store?  I suppose I'll never know.

If there is still any question by now, then yes, I will add my bookplate to all these layers of occupation.  And I'll be sure to pick a good spot for it and leave lots of room, because I hope the next owners of the set will add their names too, in whatever manner suits them best.

At this point I hope it's easy to see why the putting in of the bookplates is, um, taking some time.  Good thing this is an ongoing, open-ended project, with no deadlines or even expectations.  Because at the rate I am working at it, in and around all the other things of life, not to mention stopping to read all the time, I foresee weeks and months of more of the same.  Almost every book I pick up seems to have some story that goes along with it, so I'll be sure to share more such discoveries along the way.