Customers, collectors, clients – whatever one calls the people whose random acts of kindness and conspicuous consumption keep me in business – they come and go. But friends who attend to and appreciate what I do, in all its quixotic, self-defeating folly – they are rare, inspiring, and irreplaceable. And another one of them – and the best of them – is now gone.

Just before the New York Antiquarian Book fair, Charlie Vallely emailed me to ask if I wouldn’t mind proof-reading his latest poem before he submitted it to a literary journal – and to wish me luck at the fair. I told him that I’d be happy to proof his poem – a thoroughly enjoyable task he’d asked me to do numerous times over the past few years, his spelling being perfectly atrocious – and I asked him if it could wait until after the fair, to which, of course, he agreed. It was not urgent.

As to the fair, I told him that I was not optimistic about my prospects, explaining, or complaining, that if selling first editions of The Great Gatsby and other great works of American fiction was what it takes to be a successful bookseller today, then I, whose stock-in-trade consists mainly of poetry, was in for four days of disappointment and disillusionment.

Charlie responded reassuringly, generously stretching an analogy for my benefit. He reminded me that “Money – which, as you know, I’m very fond of – isn’t everything. Ian Fleming pulled in a lot more cash than T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and Marianne Moore combined. A lot more. They had the satisfaction of being what they were.” Needless to say, Eliot, Stevens and Moore were Charlie’s favorite American poets.

It is no small kindness to be reminded of one’s own worth, however unpopular and unprofitable it may be, however inconsequential it may appear, or however hidden it may be from one’s own consciousness. The satisfaction of being what we are, or who we are, is often tenuous – at least for the less self-aggrandizing or self-delusional among us. But to understand and accept ourselves as we are, and to make the best of it, is just about the best we can hope to do, and hardly an ignominious achievement.

Many of us labor under our own internalized sense of failure, our real or imagined inadequacies – as if there were any effective difference – our lack of accomplishment. Some adjust or compensate; some turn to drink or drugs; some to sex and gambling. Most of us find some way, sudden or gradual, to take away the pain of self-criticism and self-punishment. Most of us fall short of our own expectations, one way or another, at one time or another – but whether we feel we have failed ourselves, or our fathers and mothers, or our families and friends, I suspect we all find ourselves sooner or later in the same place as many of our more successful colleagues, who may, after all, be no more fortunate, and no less unhappy, than the great Jay Gatsby.

Charlie was a poet and a scholar, and I suspect at times even a gentleman. He loved ballerinas, and classical ballet, and he could play the gallant’uomo – no doubt even more gallantly when he was young and a tall, dark and handsome Irish bull. I don’t know what the Irish would have called him. I suspect the Italians would have called him un grand’uomo. He could be magnificent. He used to call himself the American Pushkin – an appellation that had more currency and resonance in Russia than in America, where we have no national poets like the great classical civilizations, or the best modern cultures. Greece had Homer; Rome – Virgil; Italy – Dante; England – Shakespeare; and Russia – Pushkin. Of course, America has its own myth-makers: Hawthorne and Melville, to name only the very greatest – but they are all novelists except Whitman – who of course aspired to be a national poet, and had he written a novel instead of a very long and protean poem, he might have made it.

Charlie had a profound and prodigious knowledge of literature, especially poetry, and a prodigious memory to sustain it. So far as I could tell, there was little in the world of poetry, or throughout the enormous range of world poetry, that Charlie didn’t know. There was nothing parochial or provincial about his love of poetry, and unlike most of us, the range of his knowledge far surpassed his own particular favorites. He could quote poem after poem by poets whom he readily pronounced inferior, second-rate, hardly worth remembering – not infrequently poets for whom I expressed admiration. And then Charlie would quickly apologize for having hurt my feelings, for having offended my peculiar and inexplicable preferences, occasionally admitting that he himself harbored a secret fondness, an unmentionable admiration, even a certain jealousy, for the very same poets.

Charlie was a book collector; or rather, he had a large and diverse scholarly library, much of which he regretted being forced by straitened circumstances to keep in storage. He vehemently disassociated himself from collectors for whom books were merely objects of status rather than knowledge or scholarship. At the same time, Charlie could be intensely jealous of certain rare and valuable books, particularly association copies of important works of poetry, to which he felt entitled – not in the facile and foolish sense of the word entitlement today, but in a more profound, and legitimate, sense. There were books whose true worth, one felt, he believed he appreciated more than anyone else – and probably did – books whose words he knew by heart, by poets whose lives he knew intimately, and with whom he felt a sympathetic kinship and identity.

Charlie was also a keen observer, and an acute critic, of the rare book trade. As a long-time denizen of the Boston used and rare book world, Charlie had seen his own financial fortunes fall at the same time as he saw the prices of rare books rise far beyond his means. Whereas at one time he had been able to buy many of the books he wanted, he realized that increasingly rare books – or even scarce used books – were being priced not for book-lovers like him, but for the Hollywood and Wall Street collectors Charlie felt certain could not properly appreciate what they alone could afford to buy, and therefore did not deserve to own such splendid artifacts. Not entirely out of jealousy or envy, Charlie would inveigh against the absurdity – or simply the impracticability, the futility – of the astronomical prices he saw dominating the rare book world. Increasingly, Charlie felt disenfranchised by, and alienated, from a world – a community – that he had grown up in, and which he had inhabited as a favored and prodigal son.

Within the book trade, Charlie is known – at least professionally – primarily as the author of introductions to a number of distinguished catalogues from Lame Duck Books, and several other catalogues issued jointly by Lame Duck Books and myself. A great admirer of John Ashbery’s poetry, Charlie also wrote a wonderful introduction to Far From the Rappahannock, a catalogue devoted to the work of the New York School of Poets that I published in conjunction with Locus Solus Rare Books – a catalogue that Charlie incidentally christened.

After Charlie stopped drinking, he seems to have turned away from the raucous streets and bars and bookshops of Boston, and returned to his vocation, devoting himself more diligently – as it had been impossible to do before – to that solitary “craft and sullen art” which was always the heart and soul of his ambition. He had begun writing – or revising – a brilliant series of poems that he initially fancied publishing under the pseudonym of Felix Bratishenko, but then decided that his own poems should rightfully appear under his own name. He had readied for publication a long poem, “Carlo and Emilia”, which is about to appear in Fulcrum magazine; and another dialogue, “Royaume-Farfelu”, was almost ready – pending proofing – to be submitted to another literary magazine.

I want to believe that Charlie’s last days were happy, filled with a sense of pride – although inevitably a tentative and diffident sense of pride – at his long-anticipated but unaccustomed accomplishment. I suspect, however, that for Charlie, drunk or sober, happiness remained elusive to the end. But to have seen his poems in print, to have been able to share his success with his family and friends, both believers and unbelievers, would have cheered him up. Now that Charlie’s uncertainties and hesitations are sadly behind us, perhaps more of his poetry will be published, bringing cheer to those of us who have long awaited the opportunity to read it.

The last time Charlie wrote to me, on April 8th, he asked me how the book fair had gone, and added: “Last week was a difficult one for me, as I came down with a virulent flu; and this week I’m enduring modifications to my psychotropic drug regimen.” He died on Sunday morning April 13th of a heart attack. He was 54.

GALLOWAY: If my people understood.
Understood how the snow filled up the wards,
The plaster drifting as we walked the yard.

GOOLKASIAN: Those ceilings have collapsed, your Highness.
The corridors have long been emptied, the toilets
Drained. We mustn’t lose heart now. The mattresses
Are stacked and dried, the springs have rusted.
Trust me, Sire. The floral papers are peeling
Off the walls like skin.

- - - - - - - - -

GALLOWAY: Will it be cold in the tomb of porphyry, Joe?
Will I leak and splutter over everything,
Dripping in ignominy as I always did, tied
To that iron bedstead? Do you remember it?

GOOLKASIAN: We are away from there now.

 

[From the unpublished poem “Royaume-Farfelu” by Charles Vallely]

Jonathan Williams died a week ago, on Sunday, March 16th, in Highlands, North Carolina, just past his 79th birthday. Three score years and nearly twenty would be a sufficient span for most lives, and beyond the expectations of most people, but hardly enough for a man of Jonathan’s generous reach. As I’ve come to learn, however, the length of a life isn’t apportioned according to our virtues, or our vices, our accomplishments, or whatever remains of our capacity to make and create; or even our capacity to enjoy ourselves. Life is arbitrary, and it will take you out no matter how much head or heart you have left. Jonathan had both, and, amazingly, a healthy liver, and the odds were still in his favor.

I met Jonathan in the early 80s, not long after I started collecting the publications of the Jargon Society, which he began back in 1951, during that legendary Summer Institute at Black Mountain College, where, at the recommendation of Harry Callahan, he had gone to study photography. It was at Black Mountain that he met Creeley, and Dawson, and Duncan, and Olson, and Oppenheimer, to mention only a few of the poets whose books he would soon publish. Jonathan eventually tired of talking about Black Mountain, but it’s where he got his big push.

Jargon 1, Jonathan’s Garbage Litters the Iron Face of the Sun’s Child is dated June 25, 1951. Jargon 2, Joel Oppenheimer’s The Dancer, with a drawing by Robert Rauschenberg, was printed for a dance recital by Katherine Litz at the YMHA in New York on December 23, 1951, but by December 17th, Jonathan was mailing a copy from Highlands to his best friend from St. Albans, Stanley Willis. The Dancer notes that “JARGON is Proteus: experiment, collaboration: any media, for use now.” That was Jonathan, and Jonathan stuck to that creed his whole life, non-stop, until infirmity finally brought him down.

When Jonathan caught wind of my interest in him, he asked me to join the board of the Jargon Society, and before I knew what hit me I was driving down to Winston-Salem for the annual meeting. I don’t know what Jonathan was thinking; no doubt that I had money, and that I could be of use. Perhaps he thought I would become a patron, a benefactor, another generous soul who would support him and his good works, who would help him make all the things he wanted to make, just the way he wanted to make them, so that the rest of the world – or as many of them as had the propensity to find them – could discover them, too. Or maybe he was just curious, and wanted to meet a new collector who had taken such a keen interest in him and the Jargon Society.

At the time, I only knew Jonathan through his works, but to me, they were marvelous, every last one of them. I’d spread them out where you could see them, and they dazzled me. They were more varied than the publications of any other “private press”, and although each one was different – unique and curious in its own way, never uniform – they were all unmistakably the work of this one extraordinary man; and all of them were as personal and personable as he turned out to be. I wanted to meet Jonathan as much as I wanted to own all of the books he’d written or published. And it was spring, and spring is the best time to be on the road heading south.

Jonathan wasn’t a “fine printer”, and the Jargon Society wasn’t a fine press in the traditional sense. Jonathan wasn’t derivative or devotional; he wasn’t a disciple; and although a collector, he wasn’t interested in books no one reads. He didn’t aspire to be a craftsman; he didn’t print the books himself, and he certainly had no desire to set lead type on a hand-press all day. There was nothing hermetic about Jonathan; however rusticated he may have appeared at times. He wanted to make things happen.

The Jargon Society was a reflection of its publisher, its publications the prismatic refractions of his interests and enthusiasms. And yet it wasn’t all about Jonathan, the way so many private presses are all about their printers, whose publications are barely more than a pretext for yet another repetitive expression of their particular aesthetic. After all, Jonathan named it the Jargon “Society” not the Jargon “Press”. It wasn’t about putting his stamp, his signature, on everything. And as such the Jargon Society differed from other literary private presses in being radical and democratic, in giving each book its own identity, its own idiosyncratic form. Jonathan never sacrificed a book, or its author, to a single concept. He didn’t identify himself or his books with a favorite format or formula. Jonathan’s books don’t all look alike anymore than the poets he published looked alike. For all their affinities, the books Jonathan published were allowed to be as individual and independent as he was himself.

Whether Jonathan found them, or they found Jonathan, one way or another, Jonathan knew more interesting people than anyone I ever met. Miraculously it seemed to me, he even knew “the deliciously named V. E. G. Ham”, one of the most brilliant and entertaining undergraduates at Sewanee while I was there. It turned out that Gene (Van Eugene Gatewood Ham) was a cousin of the wife of a friend of Jonathan’s in Kentucky. But it figured that Jonathan would have known Gene. Jonathan had a knack for knowing remarkable people. It seemed he could put his ear to the ground, or cock his head to the wind, or just open the morning’s mail and something original would come to hand. Jonathan had a nose, a sharp eye, and he paid attention; he discerned and distinguished the ordinary from the extraordinary; and unselfishly, he spread the word.

Jonathan always had more ideas than he could realize, and he never seemed to run out. There were plenty of books that should have been done, but couldn’t be done without big grants or generous contributions from friends, most of whom realized that their contributions were supporting him as well as underwriting the costs of the books. Some books were simply too expensive for him to produce himself – like the monograph on the photographs of Art Sinsabaugh that Jonathan had envisioned and hoped to publish nearly forty years ago, but that was finally published by someone else in 2004 , and I suspect, not as well as Jonathan would have done it.

There are more than a few libraries around the country waiting for books that Jonathan announced a long time ago but was never able to publish, wonderful books that would have enriched our lives, if only Jonathan had been able to find the money. Books like The Selected Poems of Bob Brown, designated Jargon 34; or The Selected Poems of Mason Jordan Mason (Judson Crews), slated to be Jargon 54; or Eyes in Leaves: A Tribute to Guy Davenport, which was planned – in the 70s! – as Jargon 90. The problem was – the problem always is – that most people with money want to use their money to make more money; they don’t want to make beautiful things that don’t make money – like books. Jonathan took a loss on almost every book he published, but it didn’t stop him.

Jonathan cared about making good books and making them right; and he didn’t much care whether they sold or not. He didn’t expect much from the public, and would have agreed with Oscar Wilde that “The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing.” Jonathan had his own vision, his own tastes, and his own standards, and he lived by them. He would seldom compromise, even if it meant that a book he dearly hoped to make wouldn’t be done, even when it was a book he himself had written, like his book on Southern outsider art – the book as he wanted it to be, not the book that was eventually published. When it came to books and life, Jonathan knew what he wanted to do, and how he wanted to do it. And he did it, obstinately, and beautifully, whenever possible.

Jonathan peddled his publications, too – in person – starting in the 50s after he returned from Germany where he had served as a conscientious objector. [On second thought, I have a black-letter poster for a reading he gave there, and I’d be willing to bet that he started selling books while he was in Germany.] Jonathan would drive his VW bug around the country, giving poetry readings and trying to sell those beautiful “classic” Jargon publications: Creeley’s The Immoral Proposition (1953) and All That Is Lovely In Men (1955); Duncan’s Letters (1954); Olson’s The Maximus Poems (1953-1956); Levertov’s Overland to the Islands (1958); McClure’s Passage (1956); Oppenheimer’s The Dutiful Son (1956); three books by Kenneth Patchen: Fables (1953), Hurrah for Anything (1957) and Poem-scapes (1958); Zukofsky’s Some Time (1956); and of course Mina Loy’s Lunar Baedeker and Time-Tables (1958).

I have a photograph of Jonathan sitting in his VW bug in the mid-1960s, with a copy of Sherwood Anderson’s Six Mid-American Chants (1964), illustrated with the panoramic mid-western photographs of Art Sinsabaugh on his lap. Jonathan was only 35 years old. Fifteen years later, a collection of photographs called JW, on the Road Selling that Old Orphic Snake-Oil in the Jargon-sized Bottles, 1951-1978 (Visual Press, 1979) was published to commemorate Jonathan’s 50th birthday. Jonathan was still at it, going strong, although by then he was driving a VW Rabbit – diesel.

The wonder is that Jonathan was able to accomplish so much as a publisher; the pity is that he wasn’t given the means to do more. Jargon’s publications are a perpetual testament to Jonathan’s desire to make things of worth, and to introduce worthy poets and artists to the world. Many of them are breath-taking examples of what Jonathan was able to do with modest means, determination, and self-sacrifice. Over the years, more than a few beloved books and photographs were sold – at disadvantageous terms – in order to subsidize the next Jargon publication, to make the next project possible, or just to pay the household bills.

What Jonathan did with what he was given was prodigious, and I’ve been talking only about Jonathan the publisher. Jonathan’s publications represented only a fraction of what he did and what he might have done had he been given the time and the money to realize his ideas. In addition to being a publisher, he was an endlessly inventive poet, a brilliant photographer, an early champion of some of the best modern photographers [Clarence John Laughlin, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Frederick Sommer], as well as one of the earliest, most prescient, and non-exploitative exponents of Southern outsider art. Jonathan also had a rich and full personal life – more than one when you consider that he lived half the year in Highlands, NC, and the other half in Cumbria, England. It was a wonderful life, carefully made more gracious and hospitable by the poet Thomas Meyer, Jonathan’s wise and irreplaceable partner of forty years. It was as enviable a life as one could imagine, and almost unimaginable in today’s cannibalistic world.

To put it plainly, Jonathan was the most civilized man I’ve known, notwithstanding his distaste for Bach; and the time I spent in his company, at his family home in Highlands or the cottage at Corn Close, have been among the most nourishing experiences of my life. And when it was time to leave, Jonathan always gave you a push in the right direction. My son will remember our ploughman’s lunch at the Shepherd’s Inn in Melmerby long after I’m gone, and he’ll always remember Jonathan, who told us the way.

When I heard that Jonathan had died, I wrote to Peter Howard at Serendipity Books in Berkeley. I thought he would want to know. Peter’s response was worthy of Peter, and worthy of Jonathan, whose obituaries for his own friends are the finest of their kind. I can’t imagine a more fitting tribute: “I met him only once, on the hustle for money for a book, but I knew all along his publications were the most remarkable of any in the USA in his lifetime. Early for the writer, always beautiful. Who can always be first and always beautiful?”

As it turned out, during the nearly twenty-five years I’ve known Jonathan, I built my collection, I became Jonathan’s bibliographer and published a checklist of his work; I published his correspondence with Guy Davenport; I was of some use. All in all, I managed to do less than I might have done, or than Jonathan might have expected of me. Like so many others who knew Jonathan, I got far more than I ever gave. And for that I will always be grateful.

Amen. Huzza. Selah.

I’ve just been offered a book, a very good book, or rather, its intrinsic value aside, what was once a very good book; and I can’t help feeling a keen disappointment, for my own sake, and for the sake of the owner. The truth hurts, and in this case, the truth is going to hurt both of us. And the sad truth is that the book isn’t worth what it once was, and perhaps even more alarmingly, it’s virtually impossible to ascertain what it really is worth today.

Ordinarily, I would be interested in buying this book, not only because it’s a good book, but because many years ago it was a very valuable book, and I have very fond memories of it from those old glory days. And it still is, or ought to be, a desirable book. But that was then, and this is now; and now this book is only a problematic shadow of its former self. Although vaguely familiar, one doesn’t really know what to make of it now. It’s as if it had suffered a horrible accident, and isn’t altogether recognizable as the thing it was. And as it happens, it was in a horrible accident, a crippling pile-up on the internet.

Today, such accidents are as common in the book-world as discounts, and most booksellers have become adept at delivering condolences, if not obsequies over late-lamented books. Invariably when I’m offered books, I’m forced to decline them, not because the books aren’t good books, but because, within the context of the internet, the books are so problematic, or simply redundant, unnecessary, otiose. When you go online, you see that there are more copies of most books than anyone evidently needs, certainly more than enough to satisfy whatever demand exists, and adding another copy of the same book to the long list of copies that are for sale seems utterly futile. Moreover, adding another copy of the book to the virtual pile at a still further reduced price seems to me irresponsible, even suicidal, from a bookselling perspective.
If a collector is not going to be able to sell a book for what it ought to be worth, and I’m not going to be able to buy a book that I can sell, what is the point of our buying and selling?

Being offered a book these days is always a dilemma. Invariably, one has to tell the owner what the book is worth, or rather, how little the book is worth. In my present predicament, I have to tell the owner this: there are nine copies of this book online, if the online listings are accurate and up-to-date. The highest priced copy, which is identical to the lowest priced copy, is approximately $7500.00; actually $7760.50 – it’s priced in pounds sterling and converted into dollars. The lowest priced copy, which the description suggests is exactly the same as the most expensive copy – I realize I’m repeating myself – is priced $2399.99.

Now, what kind of price is that, you ask? Well, it’s the kind of price somebody would come up with who wants to undercut his competition, but who clearly doesn’t want to give too much away; someone who is basing his price not on what he paid for the book, nor on what the book is theoretically worth, but solely on beating the competition, no matter how ridiculously low, or how ridiculously absurd, the price he comes up with appears. For such a person, the objective would appear to be to have the least expensive copy of any book on the internet, even if that means undercutting his nearest competitor by a penny. And yes, I mean a penny, since the next highest/lowest price at which this book is being offered online is $2400.00 even.

Here, for the record, is the humiliating devolutionary spiral to which this poor book has been subjected: 1. $7760.50; 2. $4800.00; 3. $4120.00; 4. $3624.25; 5. $3000.00; 6. $2950.00; 7. $2500.00; 8. $2400.00; and 9. $2399.99. And for what it’s worth – and to show that globalization is a fact where books are concerned – these copies are available from booksellers in the following places: England, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Germany, New York City, New York (Long Island), California, California, and California, respectively.

Even if one throws out the highest and lowest prices as aberrations, the highest owing to the excessively high value of the English pound at present, and the lowest owing to the bloody-mindedness of the bookseller, one can still see very clearly that these books have been priced in relationship to the prices of the other copies online, and with little regard for the value of the book or the feelings of the other booksellers involved. A rugby scrum would be more dignified than this free-for-all.

As it turned out, however, I didn’t have to join the fray. I didn’t buy the book. I had an easy out: condition. The spine was faded, and it lacked the glassine dust jacket and slipcase. The idea of adding a tenth, and inferior, copy of the book to the already excessive supply online was more than I could bear, and I referred the owner to another bookseller. Whether I’m offering the book online, or someone else is, it won’t make any difference, except to the person who bought it.

I realize that economies work according to fluctuations of supply and demand, and that the more you have of one thing, the less it is going to be worth. That’s just the way it’s supposed to be: if diamonds were as plentiful and as readily available as some books, they wouldn’t be as expensive as they are. But I’m pretty sure that the average diamond merchant – or antiques dealer, or art dealer, or anyone else who makes their living selling precious artifacts – isn’t as indifferent to upholding the value of his product as the average internet bookseller seems to be.
In fact, I suspect most internet booksellers aren’t interested in value at all; they’re just interested in selling off their books as quickly as possible, at the lowest price they can tolerate. Within the context of the internet, value has become a self-indulgent fiction, a sentimental vestige of days gone by. Today, the only reality is price, and the only realistic price is the most competitive price, the last best price at which some book might find a buyer.

But is this good for bookselling; for book-collecting? Isn’t it, in fact, self-defeating? A book, particularly a good book, or a good set of books, either has a certain value or it doesn’t. But the internet is telling people that there is no consistent, intrinsic value to any book, and that the prices of books on the internet reflect little more than the particular preferences of the booksellers, or the frantic pursuit of the bottom line; that the prices of books are, in effect, just one more of the relativistic absurdities of modern life. Or, as the example I’ve given above implies, the only value lies in the context, in the opportunistic relationship of one copy of a book to another copy of the same book. Within that context, value cannot help but appear random and arbitrary.

It’s a curious thing, at least to me, that it’s possible today to sell generic books – ordinary or even inferior copies of good books – at high prices in certain places, or by certain means, but extremely difficult to sell good copies of good books on the internet at reasonable prices. I assume that the audiences in each case are different, and that the people buying generic books off-line aren’t the same people who are buying good books online. If the former were aware of the internet, or used the internet to look for books, they would discover that they could buy better copies for less on the internet. Context is everything; or as the realtors say, location, location, location. But what does this say, then, about the internet as a place for rare books; or as a means of determining the value of rare books?

The primary difference between online and off-line bookselling and book-collecting seems to be that online there is an immediate context for comparing prices, whereas there is no context for comparing prices in other venues. That is more or less the way it used to be in the days before the internet, when collectors bought books in bookshops or at auction or out of catalogues. Book-collecting in those halcyon days was done in real time, in the moment, the living moment. You had to be there to do it at all. Bookselling on the internet, by comparison, is done in virtual time, as a virtual experience, one that is more than a little abstract, even a little unreal, a bit more like life lived in absentia.

At the same time, there’s a degree of transparency in the online market-place that doesn’t exist elsewhere. You aren’t as likely to be sold a bill of goods. All you have to do is scroll up or down to determine whether the book you’re considering is more or less expensive than other comparable copies. You can’t do that at auction, and at auction, it seems there are still plenty of people prepared to pay two or three times what they might pay elsewhere for a similar book. Although at auction, the number of lots that are being bought-in, despite promises to the contrary, probably rival the unsold items on the internet.

Despite the relative transparency of online bookselling, and the ease of comparison shopping, however, my hunch is that people prefer buying books in more traditional venues, and are becoming disillusioned with online book-collecting. I suspect that collectors looking for good books on the internet are increasingly defeated by the confusion they find there – the plethora of copies, many of which appear to be indistinguishable from each other, and all of which are offered at seemingly random prices. The impression that a typical book search gives is that there is no rhyme or reason to the prices that people are charging for their books on the internet; or that the prices exist solely in relationship to other copies online, and have no basis in any real system of value. And faced with so much confusion, one can easily imagine someone simply saying, “Who wants it?!”

No one wants to pay more than necessary for something; and certainly no one wants to pay the highest price for anything. Everyone wants to believe they’re getting a fair deal, if not a bargain, although more often than not it seems as though people want a bargain or nothing. And the inexorable logic of the internet book search engine caters to precisely this instinct, and inevitably contributes to a devaluation of the books. One has only to notice the fact that the default order for all book searches descends from the lowest price to the highest price; that is, from the cheapest, and probably worst, copy of a book, to the most expensive, and perhaps best, copy of a book. Only by reversing the predetermined order can one find a really good copy of a book. In other words, the order of books on the internet turns the natural order of book-collecting on its head, with the worst coming first, and best coming last.

As things stand, the competitive nature of online search engines will never serve to increase or enhance the value of books, or inspire confidence in the book-collectors who might consider buying them. The online search engines will always drive prices down, by default. And in the mad, desperate dash to the bottom line, booksellers who feel compelled to under-price their books in an effort to break the queue, to get to the head – or tail – of the line, only shoot themselves in the foot, and risk driving themselves out of business.

At the Salon International du Livre Ancien in Paris this year, I couldn’t help remembering the opening lines of Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey: “They order,” said I, “this matter better in France.” And nearly two hundred and fifty years later, they still do.

In years past, the Paris foire was held at the end of May, in the basement of the Maison de la Mutualité in the Latin Quarter. It was a cramped little affair, a book fair in a boutique, with a lot of jostling and Je m’excuse-ing among the visitors trying to get a closer look into the vitrines. There was something sweet about it, like your first teenage amours, with all their frenzied fumbling in the dark. But this year it was April in Paris, and at the Grand Palais on the Right Bank, right across the Seine from Les Invalides, the grand hospital that Napoleon built for his soldiers but which is now the Emperor’s tomb.

The Grand Palais resembles nothing so much as a gigantic greenhouse, and this April, the unseasonably warm weather only reinforced the analogy. So did the landscaping. Either I was so intent on looking at books, or the incongruity of running into a replica of Monet’s garden bridge at Giverny in the middle of a book fair rendered it temporarily invisible to me, but I didn’t notice the petites mises en scènes for a couple of days. Besides the little arched foot-bridge, there was a sandy beach with statuesque rocks and evergreens, and at another intersection, an oasis of flowering trees and shrubs, with park benches where the weary could rest from their bibliographical ardours.

Of course, it didn’t hurt to have – or pretend to have – the patronage of the President of France or the Mairie de Paris, who had a large stand with an exhibition of books from Les Bibliothèques Patrimoniales de la Ville de Paris in the very heart of the fair. I realize that New York is not the capital of the United States, at least not to anyone who’s not a New Yorker, but one has only to imagine George W. Bush as a patron of the New York Book Fair to realize how radically different the French and Americans are in their attitudes toward rare books. Compared with the Paris book fair at the Grand Palais, the New York book fair at the Armory resembled a Long Island garage sale.

For about eight years now, I’ve exhibited at the annual Paris fair, and every year I’m disturbed by my reactions to it. Sometimes, walking around the book fair, I’m overcome by a peculiar malaise, a cloying sense of luxury and elegance. Perhaps it’s a kind of existential bibliographical alienation; or just that congenital American sense of provincial inferiority in the face of Old World culture and refinement.

Dazzled by so much maroquin rouge, I’m embarrassed by the invidious comparison between such luxury and the almost puritanical severity of my own colorless display. Can “original cloth in dust jacket” possibly compete with “reliure de l’époque?” I can’t help trying to translate the French culture of rare books into an American idiom, in hopes of one day selling English and American books the way the French sell French books; but as soon as I try, I feel defeated, frustrated, and even a little angry. It just can’t be done. Try as I might, I just can’t see any real equivalence between American books or English books and French books, or between the culture of the book in France and the culture of the book in America. Or is it just that there isn’t much of a culture of rare books in America? Appearances can be deceiving, but the culture of the book in France certainly has the appearance of superiority.

The first year I attended the Paris Salon, I felt as though I’d walked into the Gérard Mulot of book fairs, with books as appetizing as the chocolates and pastilles that I used to buy for my children at the St. Germain patisserie. I saw dozens of books I wanted to buy – important books; historical, even legendary books; and almost all of them beautiful. I had no sense of their values; no sense of what distinguished one copy of a certain book from another, other than its comparative beauty. I was seduced, enthralled, and, inevitably, deflated. Post coitus tristes est.

The Olympia Book Fair immediately followed the Paris fair that year, and I took the Eurostar to London. I remember how the brilliant blue sky above France disappeared by the time we emerged from the Chunnel into the bleak seasonal-affective-disorder drizzle of England. But what I remember most vividly was the trauma of attending the book fair at the Russell Hotel in Bloomsbury that afternoon. Walking into the main room of the fair, I felt suddenly utterly depressed. In the dismal half-light of a seedy room, all I could see was a shambles of random brown books, books so unappealing and indifferent in appearance that I thought I’d stumbled into a church white elephant sale. The contrast with the glamorous books I’d seen in Paris was painful. And even if the cost of everything in London hadn’t been three times what it had been in France, I desperately wanted to return to Paris tout de suite.

In Paris, beautiful books were everywhere; even the appearance of beautiful books. In the lobby of the hotel, there were ledgers bound in faux leather bindings, masquerading as the grand 16th and 17th century folios of engravings that I had seen at the fair. Why I wondered? My first guess was that it is important for the French to be surrounded by objet d’arts, beautiful things, even beautiful empty things – perhaps especially beautiful empty things, when those things are inherently empty. My second thought was that it was simply de rigueur that anything and everything must be decorative in France. More than comme il faut, it was a matter of national pride.

There’s no question that appearance means a lot in France, and that there are those, not only Frenchmen, for whom the binding is far more important than the contents of a book. There is, in fact, a cult of the binding in Europe, which doesn’t exist in America, perhaps because the state of book binding here is so ordinary. If condition is everything to the fastidious American collector, the binding is everything to the French connoisseur. Le beau livre seems to be what it’s all about, unless of course you’re one of those intellectual French booksellers who prefer to handle exclusively Dada, Surrealist, and Situationist literature. Their wares are so ephemeral as to be beyond the reach of the binders. In Europe, the book-binder and the binding can completely upstage the book itself, but even that notion implies that the book itself is more than its appearance, and that would not be considered a logical corollary for a book collector in France. There are just too many beautiful inconsequential books gracing the stands of the booksellers at the Salon in Paris to suggest otherwise. Substance is not essential.

To an American book collector with Puritan ancestry, such excessive preoccupation with the appearance of a book borders on idolatry. But of course, when the image of a rare book represents something in decay, something that has been used, even ill-used, as it seems to for many Americans – for example, an old book printed on wood-pulp paper in a dilapidated brown calf binding – such luxury must seem unseemly, even obscene. But then, Americans have always imagined the French to be obscene.

Despite the preponderance of red Jansenist bindings at any Paris book fair, most rare booksellers in France offer an eclectic variety of books, a variety that seems to reflect the interests and tastes of the French in general. Looking at the books at the Grand Palais, one can’t help being struck by how formulaic, how invariably categorical they are – the same categories of books that I imagine fill the cabinets of discriminating collectors all over France: the classics in red morocco bindings; the delightful and indiscreet examples of 16th and 17th century curiosa; the livres d’artistes and 19th or 20th century literary masterpieces in fantastic designer bindings and elegant slipcases; the odd assortment of Dadaist or Surrealist ephemera; and of course, the pièce de résistance, the coveted edition de tête on grand papier; and, of course, all French. To my eye, these are the kinds of books every self-respecting French person aspires to own, not necessarily for themselves, but perhaps for the cache they bring to their owners.

At a typical Paris book fair, the first thing that strikes you is the condition of the books. They’re almost all immaculate, in parfait état, or at least they are represented as such – the passion for perfection among French booksellers and collectors, and indeed among French women, often entails hiding any blemishes. Skin – la peau – any kind of skin, must be flawless, free of wrinkles, cracks or tears, and the French believe it’s only natural to resort to the occasional nip and tuck at the hands of an expert to achieve the desired appearance.

The old adage, “Condition isn’t everything; it’s the only thing” epitomizes the French attitude toward books far more than it does the American, even though the American book collector has a reputation as a fetishist par excellence. But most American book collectors have never been to France, or to the Salon International du Livre Ancien, where they could certainly learn a lesson or two about fetishism. Or perhaps it’s just that French fetishes are more beautiful and seductive than their American counterparts.

Certainly one can’t help feeling the allure of the rare and beautiful book within the culture of France. Attendance at the fair is invariably impressive; and the people who come to the Salon are drawn from all classes, and from all age groups. In America, book collecting is beyond the reach of most people’s discretionary income, as it must be in France, too. But in America, the average book collector seems to be approaching retirement, whereas in France, one sees young people, even teenagers, looking at books – old books, rare books, beautiful books – not just photo books or modern first editions – and talking to booksellers in an easy sophisticated way. Books, antiquarian books, do not feel foreign to the French; they don’t seem to be some peculiar, even psychologically suspect, penchant of a minority of internalized people.

In fact, the art of the book is subsidized in France, not just because it’s a book or a commodity, but because it’s a thing of beauty, and beauty is the thing the French value the most. Look at the bibliophilic magazine Art & Métiers du Livre. There is no English or American equivalent. Leaving aside the English and American scholarly journals devoted to rare books – The Book Collector and Rare Books and Manuscripts – Art & Métier is a celebration of a national sensibility, or at least of one aspect of France’s devotion to beauty and style. There is nothing parochial or closeted about its presentation or contents; if Elle produced a magazine for bibliophiles, this would be it.

It isn’t simply that the French admire beautiful things; everyone admires beautiful things. But unlike most Americans, who in general don’t own beautiful things, and don’t seem to feel the need to own them, least of all when it comes to books, the French feel it is their civic duty to be surrounded by beautiful things, including books. In France, it feels as if people have treasured and preserved their heritage of beautiful books for centuries, and that they believe those books will continue be treasured and preserved by their children and their children’s children for generations to come.

In America, innovation and obsolescence is the expectation. It is assumed that everything will fall apart – indeed, that everything should fall apart in order to make way for something new and better. Rare books are assumed to be old and decrepit, no less the victims of age and decay than their indifferent owners. It is one reason so many American collectors seem to content themselves with poor copies of books; it fits their idea of what a rare book is supposed to be – worn and torn. To expect something else would be to think differently, and to think differently about the things with which we live in the world; in fact, it would require that we think differently altogether. But if we did think differently about these things, we might have to think a bit more like the French.

Someone said that Paris is the world’s mistress. She is certainly the closest I’ve ever come to having a mistress, a mistress who never ages, and who always knows how to charm you, to lift your spirits and renew your affections. And every time I leave Paris after the fair, it fills me with a sense of loss bordering on despair. I’ve spoiled myself and I’ve been spoiled for a week. Everyone has been unfailingly, lyrically polite. They have all chirped and chimed their bonjours and bonne journées, and made me feel as if I were, or could be, equally charming. It’s true, it’s completely superficial, the friendly formalities of a polite society, delightful at the moment, but like a beautiful woman’s smile, not to be taken personally.

What I feel I’m losing whenever I leave Paris is a more civilized – and civil – way of life than we’re accustomed to, or even capable of, in America. It may be that the French haven’t contributed much to the world lately; they may not be the most inventive or innovative nation; but they have made an art of living, of living well within limits, limits that at times may feel a bit too tight, too constraining, like a fashionable pair of jeans, jeans that accentuate the figure at the risk of immobility. For those of us who don’t have to wear those jeans, perhaps it looks better than it feels, better than it really is. But I suspect that’s just the way it is with beauty.

By the time I get to the Aéroport Charles-de-Gaulle, check in, pass through security, and reach the gate, Paris seems far away, a thing of the past. The words coming over the public announcement system seem strange, disorienting: “You are invited to proceed urgently to Gate 74.” Comment!?!? Are you talkin’ to me?? I’m flustered, delighted to be invited. I want to stop and savor the civility before proceeding a toute urgence to the gate – until I realize that Gate 74 is not where I’m going.

As I wait for the call to board, sitting there among all the business travelers and tourists, the fat and unfashionable, anxious and harried, les gens wearing shorts and T-shirts, life begins to feel normal again. Or course, I still feel a bit like a displaced or misplaced person, but no more out of place here than any where else; or maybe only equally lost. The people around me look like they could come from anywhere in the world, anywhere, that is, except Paris. And most of them look at least a little American. Even before the plane takes off, the enchantment of beauty and style and taste that has buoyed me up for the past week has begun to release me from its spell, and I’ve begun to feel as though I’m almost home.

Several years ago, I visited a book collector who had decided to sell her books and who was consigning them to me. As I was going over the books, she asked me if I’d like to use her computer to go online and see what the books were worth. I told her that I’d do that later, but that I hoped she understood that finding other copies of her books online wasn’t necessarily a good thing; in fact, it would probably be a bad thing.

If I couldn’t find another copy of one of her books online, we would be free to price her copy what we believed it to be worth, based on our experience and on reliable dealers’ and auction records. But if I found another copy online, we would be forced to price her copy in relation to that copy. The probability, however, was that I’d be able to find more than one other copy online, and in that case, the value of her book as we saw it – what she thought it was worth, and what I thought it was worth – would become moot. We would be compelled to price her copy according to the prices on the internet, and probably less in order to give us the best chance of selling it.

In other words, turning to the internet, we were less likely to find out how much her books were worth as we were to find out how little they were worth; that is, how common they were; and, judging by the number of copies available online, how little interest there seemed to be in them, and how difficult they might be to sell. Whether she or I felt worse about this grim state of affairs, I don’t know, but it was then she told me that she had stopped collecting books because the internet had taken the fun out of it. And I had to admit that it had also taken some of the fun out of bookselling, too.

There is no question that the internet is extremely useful as a source of information – although admittedly much of the information is misinformation – but so far as bookselling and book-collecting are concerned, the internet search can be an extremely discouraging experience. The internet often exposes the fallacies that have supported bookselling for so long: primarily assumptions about rarity or scarcity that were plausible as long as the world of books was colonized. Once it was possible to concentrate innumerable books from all over the world in one virtual bookshop, however, most collectible books were found to be readily available, and at increasingly competitive prices.

As it turned out, there are simply too many copies of most books on the market, and if you’re a bookseller, there is little likelihood that you’ll be able to sell your copy, including the copy you’re considering buying, no matter what you pay for it, or what you price it. The internet will tell you that your copy is not merely worth less than you’d imagined; for all practical purposes, it’s worthless.

If you’re a collector, you’ll learn that the book you have isn’t worth nearly as much as you thought it was, and by the same token, the book you wanted isn’t as desirable as you imagined it to be. Again, there are just too many other copies available, some superior to yours and, so far as one can see, all of them remain unsold. Going online to look for books is like wandering into a vast warehouse and seeing row after row of the very thing you thought was so rare and valuable. With its seemingly inexhaustible inventory, the internet has compromised, even cheapened, the world of book-collecting, and threatens to deflate not only the value of most books, but also the enthusiasm with which collectors pursue them. At a click, rare books become used books, and used books become what used books have so often become, the books that no one wants. It can take the heart out of bookselling and book-collecting alike.

In the shadow of the internet, book collecting has become less a form of play, an inspired, creative activity, than a crisis of conscience and confidence. No one wants to buy a book, no matter how long they may have searched for it, only to discover that it could have been bought for less, if only they’d looked it up on the internet first. Collectors seem unable to buy books by themselves anymore. The internet compels us to monitor ourselves as if we were unruly and wayward children who might get into trouble if left unsupervised. We’ve become dependent on the information it provides, and we can’t seem to make decisions without it. We’ve acquired knowledge – or rather, information – at the expense of our autonomy, our freedom, our will. No matter where we turn, we live in fear of paying too much for the things we want.

Some years ago, at a small book fair in Boston, the sponsor allowed one of the book search engines to set up a stand, much to the consternation of many of the exhibiting booksellers. Complaints were loud and vehement; it was unfair, outrageous, an infringement of the rights of the booksellers. A book search engine, they contended, was not a bookseller, and its presence was an inappropriate and unacceptable hindrance to the dealers who were exhibiting at the fair.

What mainly disturbed the booksellers, of course, was the fact that the mere presence of the computers at the fair called into question the booksellers’ authority and expertise. The booksellers were suddenly being monitored – no pun intended; their prices were implicitly suspect and needed to be verified. The booksellers naturally feared that if someone found another copy of a book online at a lower price, it would prevent them from buying a copy at the fair; or they might return to the bookseller’s booth to complain about a high price, or to bargain for a lower price.

It was an excellent object lesson for everyone, but instinctively, the booksellers reacted with aversion. It was not hard to see their point and to feel their pain; but as time passed, it became obvious that the influence of the internet was inescapable, regardless of how baleful it might prove to be. The book search engine would indeed become the biggest used book-store in the world, and no bookseller, however professional or prominent, would be able to compete with it; or, in fact, compete without it.

Under the circumstances, it seemed to me that it would be far better to accept the inevitable and allow computers at every book fair. In this way, collectors could consult them whenever they pleased. They could resolve any doubts they might have about the books they were considering, and make up their minds on the spot, if not exactly in the heat of the moment. It seemed to me to be the epitome of fair trade, even though it brought the somewhat dubious virtual book world into conflict with the real and immediate world of books that many of us still prefer.

Without the kind of reassurance that computers could provide, these fearful collectors would be lost; they would be condemned to tergiversate over any and every potential purchase; and my hunch was that once they left the fair, there was little likelihood that they would come back. Context, after all, is everything. Once they were away from the book fair, the books they had considered buying would begin to seem less compelling, less palpable, and finally unnecessary. Once they were home, they might convince themselves that the books they wanted had been sold; they might find a better copy online; or, faced with numerous copies of a particular book online, they might conclude that they could always find another copy on the internet, whenever they wanted it; they didn’t really need to buy it now, and therefore they didn’t need to go back to the fair. Indeed, they might conclude that it was unnecessary to go to book fairs at all.

Of course, we now live in the age of the eternal return, when everyone believes they have a right to return or exchange anything they’ve bought, for any reason, no matter how capricious. Indeed, there are those who feel no compunction about returning books they’ve purchased at a book fair and returning them without explanation weeks later. Presumably it’s because they discovered that they could purchase the same books for somewhat less on the internet. And there is no point in arguing with them about etiquette and fairness; no matter what you say, these customers, however wrong, will always be convinced they are right. C’est la vie.

A propos, at the Paris Book Fair last month, not far from the area set aside for the chamber ensemble and its audience, there was a stand with two chairs and two tables with two laptop computers, both logged onto the internet. Above the stand was a sign with the invitation: Cherchez un livre sur l’internet. I didn’t see very many people taking advantage of the connection, but I used it myself. And it was a good thing I did.

The internet offers limitless possibilities for the book-buyer, but often frustration and disappointment for the serious collector. The breadth and depth of the internet give the illusion that anything and everything can be found within its infinite web, instantaneously and 24/7. You just have to know what you’re looking for, and how to look for it, and where to look for it; and then you have to know whether you can trust the person from whom you’re buying the thing that you think is the thing that you really want. The same way you did before, in the days before the internet, in the old days of the bookshop, when, in fact, it was the same: much mining for little gold; or just fool’s gold – except that in the old days, you could actually see the book, and if you ordered it from a bookseller’s catalogue, you could return it if it didn’t meet your expectations. And if you had a particular bookseller, or a number of booksellers, whom you trusted and who would offer you books that they knew might interest you, you could rest assured that if something you wanted came on the market there was a good chance that you could buy it. That was the old-fashioned, time-honored way; and at its best, the rare book trade continues to do business that way, in spite of the internet.

At first it seemed that the internet would provide a wonderful venue for selling rare books, particularly in light of the diminishing world of bookshops. In the early years of the major book search engines, most of the books were supplied by reputable booksellers, booksellers with experience and expertise and a professional regard for their customers, booksellers who were trained in the art of bibliographical description and comparative pricing, and who conscientiously plied their trade. But now most of the booksellers on the internet aren’t booksellers; they’re just regular people without either the experience or the resources to distinguish or evaluate first editions, people who are just looking to sell; and the major book search engines are flooded with books that aren’t what they’re represented to be; in fact, in some cases they aren’t even books. And the peculiarities of the search engines’ data fields themselves render problematic any possibility of accuracy, with the result that searches turn up more and more irrelevant, confused, garbled, and specious entries.

It’s true that the internet, in making so many books available, has exposed the fallacy of scarcity. But while it has shown that many books that were once considered scarce are now quite common, it has also fostered the illusion that books that have always been rare are also readily available and available at a bargain price; and this is perhaps an even worse fallacy. You can’t always get what you want; rare books aren’t a source of instant gratification; and no matter how much money you may have, there are books that you simply won’t be able to buy. While this is not to say that one can’t find wonderful and rare books on the internet, you can’t find them there everyday, or whenever you decide you’re ready to buy them, and in all probability you won’t find them at all.

The reason for this is not that rare books are scarce in some quantitative way. It’s because rare books are precious, and not just in a financial sense; they’re precious because they are among the finest artifacts of our history, the most profound expressions of our culture. They represent the best that man has accomplished, and as collectibles, they’re disappearing. Collectors buy them, and then libraries buy them, or receive them as bequests, and what remains on the market are often the inferior trophies of speculative collectors rather than the numinous rarities that one can only find today in the great libraries of the world.

There’s no question that you can find ordinary books at good prices on the internet, particularly useful books, although even that is becoming an increasingly tedious chore. But when it comes to collecting, the internet is all too often for dummies, a virtual flea market of people who don’t know what they’re selling and people who don’t know what they’re buying. It’s a free-for-all, and the only rules that seem to apply are caveat emptor, followed hard and fast by “all sales are final.”

That’s not the way it used to be, and that’s not the way it is today, if you know your bookseller.