Good for Its Age

Okay, I’m on a rant today, no question about it. But I absolutely have to go on record as saying that if one more person tells me that a book is “good for its age” I’m going to do a Sylvia Plath and stick my head in the oven! Age has no bearing on how the book looks! What impacts a book’s condition is how it has been handled and stored by its previous owners. A book from the 1600’s can be pristine and one from last week can look like it got run over by the mail truck. What got me so worked up about this is that last night Eric went to see the collection I mentioned in my last post. He’d talked to the owner on the phone previously and had been assured that everything was “good for its age” – a sure tip-off that what you find is not going to leave you reaching for your checkbook. Considering the fiasco of a few months ago when the “old” books turned out to be common novels from the 1980’s, I would have shut the whole thing down then and there. But Eric, God bless him, is the eternal optimist. He'd forgotten all about it.

As I write this, Frank Sinatra merrily sings High Hopes in my head because that’s what Eric had until one sweeping glance at the broken bindings, foxing, insect holes, and silverfishing sent his “high apple pie in the sky hopes” crashing to the ground with a mighty splat. The piece de resistance though was a cloudy plastic bag containing a lone volume. Evidently the owner thought this one must be even better than the rest seeing as how someone had taken the trouble to segregate it. All I can say is he should be eternally grateful that Eric didn’t open it or Stanley Steamer would have making a house call as we speak. The book was in rigor mortis – dead from a fatal case of red rot. I’m sure you’ve seen this – it’s a deterioration of leather bindings that produces a reddish brown powdery substance that stains your hands and anything you touch. You can’t reverse it, though I remember seeing a product in the Brodart catalog that contains and seals it. But for the book-in-a-bag a surface application would be about as useful as painting the ceiling to keep the rain out. Needless to say, seller and would-be buyer held two vastly different estimations of the collection’s value.

What’s interesting about this is that there actually WAS something Eric would have bought. The seller also had around forty-five Franklin Library volumes. I call them Easton Press wannabes, but my husband loves them -- LOVES them. Ask Andrea Klein from Bookseller in Akron. Every time we go to a NOBS meeting at her store he buys one and exalts its many charms all the way home. Turns out, the seller had invited a large Cleveland dealer, who will remain nameless, to have first dibs on the entire collection. But alas, said dealer took one look at the pretty decorated spines of the Franklins and declared them “worthless” which resulted in his forced exit from the premises. So now here’s the one person in all of northeastern Ohio who adores these books and is willing to make a fair offer for them -- and what happens? The seller wants an additional hundred dollars. I’m amazed.

I’m even more amazed that the one person in all of northeastern Ohio who's crazy about them walked! But I'm sure glad he did.

P.S. If you saw this before I changed it, the green book was actually a Signed First Editions Club. The brown book above is a Franklin Library.