The Last Bookaneer (2 page)

“My poor legs rejoice for you, young Clover,” he said, his face wet and pink with effort. “I purchased this cart from a florist—that is why there are tulips painted on one side—and sometimes I think of what it would be like filled with bouquets. Nothing in the world—not a ton of bricks—feels as heavy as books being moved.” He pointed our way into a boardinghouse. It was a modest wooden structure near the slow, dark river that separated New York from New Jersey. Well-dressed and well-bred gentlemen boarders occupied the sitting room. Pushing the cart into Mr. Fergins's chambers on the ground floor, the umbrella tumbled from the top shelf.

As I retrieved it, I noticed it was misshapen, with the general form of a banana, and there was a stain on the striped fabric of the umbrella, a dark red, perhaps rust. The bookseller seemed embarrassed by its condition and tucked it back into the cart. “Always rolling off . . .” he apologized.

I was amazed by the sheer number of volumes of all kinds of bindings, colors, and sizes wherever my eyes traveled. Every conceivable space on any table or shelf and much of the floor was claimed by piles about the height of a tall man's knee, with a wobbly wooden ladder that could be wheeled around. Mr. Fergins, his energy restored, mounted this with an athletic step that propelled him to the tops of the highest peaks. There were strong fumes of oil, too, though not nearly enough light to read the titles of the books without putting your face against them.

“Now I see how you can boast such a wide selection in your cart.”

“Oh, no. These are not books that I sell on the train cars or in the street, dear boy. I have a pair of storage rooms two streets away for inventory.”

“Oh?”

“These are books and folios I collected, starting long before I had my own stall in Hoxton Square in London. Much of it was purchased from the stock of bankrupt publishing firms, private libraries, auctions, sometimes junk dealers who were too ignorant about books to know what they had in front of them. Go on, do look around for yourself. These books have witnessed life and death.”

I laughed at the grave proclamation until I saw he was contemplative and serious. I made my way through the great maze of books, careful not to brush any binding with my coat. Interspersed with the familiar names of literary greats lurked mundane, interchangeable titles such as
Manual of Bibliography
,
Bibliographers' Manual
, and
American Bibliography
. There was a shelf of humorously titled books such as
Drowsy's Recollections of Nothing
and
History of the Middling Ages
that were not books at all, but rather imitation volumes Mr. Fergins had purchased from a public auction at the country home of the late Charles Dickens, who commissioned the false books to conceal a door in his library. I stopped to examine some books resting above these.

“Have you ever read it?”

I was looking at about half a dozen books with the same title: editions of Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein
.

“Read
Frankenstein
? No, sir. Reverend Millens would have barred it from coming near his library. I have never seen it with my own eyes, actually. Is it a proper book?”

“After Sir Walter Scott read it, he wept, for he knew that even
he
, the finest writer in the history of Scotland, could never write a romance as original as a twenty-one-year-old girl had done. Does that answer your question?”

I was not sure it had. “Scott I'd borrow from a friend and smuggle it inside my house. That and Stevenson.”

“There is nothing as lovely as a borrowed book. Those two Scottish geniuses' books share a particular quality—I mean Scott and Stevenson. When you begin to read them, you feel like a boy again, and when you close the book you've turned into a better man.” Mr. Fergins went on, smiling and extending his arms wide, as though to embrace the room: “Now that you have made a closer inspection, what do you think is the single most valuable book in here?”

I told him I could not guess.

“Try.” The warmth of the room made his forehead bead with sweat and his spectacles slip down the bridge to the pointy tip of his nose.

He seemed so pleased at the idea of me picking out a book. Not wanting my ignorance to shine through, I took my time to weigh my choices, then I selected a large volume bound in heavy black calf leather.

“Excellent. That is one of the first folios of Shakespeare, but it is sadly incomplete. You see?” He brought it to a desk—where there was just enough free space between stacks of books to open the big volume—and showed me that pages were missing before pointing out other imperfections that remained invisible to me after he described them. “I purchased this for just two hundred shillings from the estate of a deceased lawyer in London some four years ago, and it is worth at least three hundred and fifty. Can you believe that? More remarkable than any original edition of Shakespeare is the fact that today for a shilling you can buy a fantastic modern edition of Shakespeare's greatest plays. No, this is not one of my gems, but it is a clever guess, Mr. Clover. Now, hand me that one, if you please—yes, the second shelf down, two-thirds of the way across, the one that looks like a scared kitten who has been dragged from a river by its scruff.”

It was a small, worm-eaten thing. He waited for my assessment.

“It appears to me to be a collection of poems,” I said. “It is in tatters, I'm sorry to report, Mr. Fergins. It is missing a title page, which I suppose ruins the ability to resell it. And on top of that, it has been defaced—there is writing in pencil on many of the pages.” Words had been circled, underlined, drawn over with arrows into the margins, where there were illegible markings.

“Good, good. That is a volume of John Donne's poetry. It is not a first edition, nor a rare one, and the thing presents no particular features of bibliographical interest. Yet, in my estimation, that would be worth in today's market more than a thousand dollars.”

“Why?”

“Because this copy belonged to Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Those marks you noticed written in pencil are the notes Coleridge made on Donne's poems. Imagine! It is the real power of a book—not what is on the page, but what happens when a reader takes the pages in, makes it part of himself. That is the definition of literature. It reminds one of the quote from Francis Bacon about books.”

I did not know the quote, never having read Bacon. But I was too timid to ask that or much else as he paraded me through the rest of his temple of books and excitedly showed me his favorites. He taught me what “signatures” could be used to identify a first edition, and how to most efficiently compare editions of the same books for changes and imperfections. He showed me books that other collectors or sellers had tried to repair only to further injure the edges of the papers, a problem, he explained, that booksellers referred to colorfully by saying the book had been “bled.” He discussed prices of the books, contrasting what he paid with the actual or current value. I was flattered because his tone suggested I, too, could learn a trade in books if I desired. But it was disorienting to hear these names—Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Scott, my own sacred Milton—coupled with the crude sounds of numbers. “Now, if you remember only two things from my lessons, promise me it will be these: do not follow the latest fashions of Parisian collectors, and never pass up the chance to buy a book of English poetry dated before 1700.”

“I promise, Mr. Fergins.”

Through all of this, a small but persistent clicking sound could be heard, then another simultaneous clicking over the first. The bookseller let out one of his sudden laughs. Imagine an old wolf howling for the last time before lying down to die, and there you have his memorable style of laugh. “You are looking around for a clock, I take it. No, there are many things that have become dearer to me since the day I left London, young Mr. Clover, but time is not among them. In fact, I have no use for it outside the timetable for your railroad. The sound you are hearing comes from inside there.”

He led me to a large glass case and pried open its iron cover. The floor of the case was filled with pine and buttonwood leaves. On top of this soft bedding were elaborately constructed compartments with strips and squares of various materials—leather, cloth, paper. There were two ventilation windows on the sides of the case, and a petroleum lamp burning hot, with a saucer of water over it that created a mist you had to squint through. I stepped back, startled by an unexpected movement. The case was filled with an assortment of translucent worms. He told me a professor of one of the city colleges had loaned him all of it in order to observe the creatures inside. Then he handed me a magnifying glass to look through.

“What are they?”

“Bookworms. Well, that name itself has always been wrong. There is no
actual
species called a bookworm. We who have an interest in books imagine these pests all fit into one type of category because it grants them unified purpose. We prefer a villain we can't see to at least have a name. They are not even worms, actually, but the larvae that become certain types of insects. There are types of moth and death-watch beetle, for instance, that feed in the larval stage on all the materials used to make a book—glue, cloth, paper, leather. Take
Anobium bibliothecarum
. They produce the clicking you heard. These little creatures range from one twenty-fifth to one quarter of an inch and bore holes from cover to cover. Once they grow into adults, they have no use for these sorts of food. Think of it. They are raised on our books, then must leave them behind forever. The mouths of these little fellows are the most terrible things you've ever seen—all teeth and muscle. Observe for yourself through the lens. But make sure none get out—imagine the Judgment Day that could come of that, in this little room of all places on earth.”

He showed me sketches he had made of each type of larva and indicated which ones the book hunter should most fear.

 • • • 

R
AIN WOKE THE CITY
after a cool and still night the one other time I chanced to meet the bookseller in the streets. Walking through City Hall Park, I noticed my friend among the sea of faces. I had to look twice, because he was without his book cart, because he held up that poor umbrella of his, and lastly because he was partially blocked from view by a man in a heavy wool coat and a beaver hat. I had previously supposed Mr. Fergins was fifty-odd years old, as a sort of average of his saggy eyelids, his elastic mouth, his delicate porcelain skin, his sturdy head and limp body, each of which, on its own, suggested a slightly different age. This time, his posture seemed more bent than I had noticed before, and as the raindrops rolled off the warped wings of the umbrella, onto his shoulders and hat, and filled his lenses with drops of water, he grew older before my eyes. The two men were standing midway up the white marble steps to the magnificent courthouse.

I hailed my acquaintance once he was alone but he did not hear; as he climbed toward the massive columns I called again. He turned to look for the source. For a moment, an uncharacteristic sternness came over him.

“Mr. Clover,” he said to me, his customary cheer creeping in. The other man had just departed, marching down the steps. I wondered if he could have been a lawyer discussing some sort of trouble. Even with his easy smile in place, the bookseller seemed pensive.

“I could help push your cart today. I needn't report to the station for hours.”

He tucked the umbrella under his arm and was rubbing his gloved hands together for warmth. “Believe it or not, I've left my cart behind in my rooms today. I must look like a mermaid absent her fish tail without it. I fear I must excuse myself, for I need to go in the courthouse. Pray come if you like, Mr. Clover.”

I knew the invitation was probably made out of politeness, but having only ever seen the outside of the building, I accepted anyway.

We walked through the gallery in front and down the corridor, where there was some commotion at the entrance to one of the rooms. A throng of people jostled each other and talked loudly, reminding me of the time I had visited the horse races outside the city between trains. The big double doors to the room had just been opened and the crowd flowed inside.

“What's going on in there?” I asked.

Mr. Fergins peered up at the clock above the end of the hall. “Ten minutes to spare. Very well. Let us enter the madness.”

The room was filling with men and some brave women, most in fine clothes and holding expensive hats in their hands or under their arms, away from the crush of bodies. The bookseller's hands and umbrella were more effective tools for clearing a path than I could have guessed. The room suddenly seemed to hold its breath, then exhaled with even greater excitement. I positioned myself at a height to see the source. A prisoner had just been brought in at the front of the chamber. He had irons around his wrists and a bailiff steered him toward the front table. There was a man near us, evidently a physiognomist, who stood on a bench and dictated observations to an assistant: “Head and brow, showing an excess of animal passions . . . Jaw and high cheeks, a force of nature . . . In profile, a fearful intellectual capacity is revealed in the front lobes—have you gotten that down?”

Turning away, I suddenly felt a hand on my head.

“Nice, quite nice,” I heard.

“Pardon me!” I cried out, brushing the intruding fingers off.

The physiognomist pulled back. “Very sorry there, boy.” Then, to his assistant, he said in a quieter voice, “take this down. As previously observed in my notes of their race, the present mulatto contains features of the Caucasian in the cerebral area, explaining the greater capacity for intellectual growth over the common Negro.”

“See here—” Fergins began, getting between us, but the eager scientist had already pranced away to try to get closer to the prisoner.