Magical Moments With Richard Scarry & Francis Parkman

Every once in awhile a day offers up wonderful surprises. Yesterday, for me, was one of those rare days, as a series of interesting events made me an even more ardent believer in book magic than I’d been before. It all began with a phone call to the store from an elderly man wishing to sell “a lot of books”. After talking with him for awhile Eric determined that there would be nothing of interest to me in the collection so he would go see them on his own, which he immediately did. Though he ended up buying them for store stock, he could only get half in the back of our trusty PT Cruiser, affectionately known as Petey, so today he will be retrieving the rest.

“There’s nothing to get excited about,” he assured me on the phone after the first trip. “Honestly, you won’t like them.”

Ah, but I MIGHT. Or I might like one, or two. Or I might not like any. But it doesn’t matter because if there are books I am impelled to see them. Even if they were coated with coal dust from being stored in a basement next to a old cranky furnace I’d  have to see them, touch them, peruse them, commune with them, cover myself in their dust. I would just plain HAVE to. You’d think Eric would know this by now, but he apparently doesn’t, as I had to wheedle an agreement that he would leave them in the car and bring them home so I could  “end up rejecting them.” Actually, to be fair, he is a very good judge of what will please me and what will not, so in the aggregate I would say he made a pretty good call. The books were all older, but very commonplace. Even so, I did pull out a spiffy 1940’s title on making 40’s fashion accessories that sells for $35 and a nice copy of The Wall Chart of World History in facsimile which I’ve had before and which sells for around $40.

Even if that had been the end of it, it still would have been worth unpacking and repacking the entire twelve boxes because the books were pretty well kept and fun to experience  in a funky 50’s/60’s sort of way. But then around about box six I opened what appeared to be an entire set of Childcraft. If you’ve seen one such set you’ve seen a dozen, so I started to close the lid  without looking further.

“Not so fast there, cookie!” a voice in my head demanded. Whoa! That was rather rude, I thought, and contentious too given the serenity of my mood. Clearly, there was nothing to do but pay attention to it, or pay later with regret.

One by one I removed the Childcraft volumes to reveal one final layer of books. Immediately, even face down, I recognized them -- Richard Scarry’s Look and Learn Library which I had been searching for since 1999! Even with all four volumes, they’re not worthy of the dancing and screaming which ensued, so  to understand the dancing and screaming you have to know that for twelve years I  have also been holding something that changes everything – the rare and super-cute  slipcase in which they were originally housed. When I bought the case at a sale  I thought I could easily find the books – Scarry was a popular guy in his day – but I thought wrong. Over the years I’d spy one volume here, one there, but always scribbled, crayoned, torn, and in one instance, taped up with unsightly yellowing tape. But  now, seemingly out of the blue, four resplendent volumes lay on my family room floor waiting for their own snug house. The set in its charming box sells in the $145-150 range.

What makes this story even more fascinating is the fact that it was preceded by a magical moment in the afternoon. A customer made an offer on a complete set of Francis Parkman, which I subsequently countered with a considerably higher price.  He accepted and then called with his credit card number. Immediately, we not only “clicked”, but zoomed off on a tanget about our mutual love for the physical book. He then told me that  he hadn’t even been looking for the set until he found it on page five of his Google search about Parkman and also had never heard of the site to which Google led him. So when my counter-offer exactly matched the number he’d pulled out of the air as his top price it had felt like kismet.

Oddly, while we had been negotiating, unbeknownst to him, a second guy approached me via email about buying them too. I could have gone either way at that point, but something told me to stick with the first guy even though it was an offer rather than a straight sale. As it turned out, buyer two was willing, but wished  the former owner’s name and the date 1897 had not been written inside. Like me, buyer one considered  the  signature the gilding on the tome.

“You know, I’m not much of a believer in magic,” he said as we were about to hang up. “But the exception is books. With books magic really does seem to happen.”

  

Yes, Virginia, it does. And yesterday it DID when two unlikely souls, Francis Parkman and Richard Scarry, converged to make it happen.