The Last Bookaneer (4 page)

I could see that the volume given to me by the stranger was not an old one. There was a metal clasp, attached to a strong strip of leather, as was customary in bygone eras for large volumes of devotion. But the grain of the leather was recent. The book, in all ways, was a chimera. More than that, there was an implicit threat in the tone of the stranger's words to me, at least in my ears, forbidding me to open it.

Not long after all this transpired, my former employer Stemmes was forced by ill health to close his shop on the Strand and retire to the seaside. When a bookshop in a city of culture such as London stops its operations, it is viewed by the wider community as a failure of mankind—a sign that books are no longer being read, or only the wrong sort of books, that literature's finally dead, or in a temporary state of decay, that bookshops will one day disappear altogether and be replaced by mail order, that eventually books themselves would be finally and fully buried by that awful foe, so much cheaper and easier to carry: newspapers. But for those of us in the trade, it was about saying farewell to a friend.

A celebration for Stemmes was held at a lively, somewhat seedy tavern. In addition to the honoree's good friends, fellow collectors, and booksellers, there were some newspaper and magazine men as well as representatives of the less respectable publishing classes using the occasion as a stage for debauchery. A rotund young man, hardly sixteen, whose face was pocked and freckled, squeezed himself into a seat next to me. He already smelled strongly of alcohol and his manners betrayed a general vulgarity.

“Pardon my thick legs, sirs, pardon!”

Trapped by this creature, I looked to the other side of me, but the nearest person, an Irish illustrator of my acquaintance, was engaged in a rant with another man against the newest school of painters in London. I whistled a song to suggest I was content to be by myself with my pint, but hints were not this young man's forte. He told me he was a printer's devil—a fact I also might have guessed by the inky smears up and down his fingers, knuckles, and hands. The freckles I had noticed on his face were actually splatters of ink, maybe from that day, maybe from a year's worth of toil.

I moved again to change my orientation, but the devil nudged my ribs hard with his elbow. “Any great men here, fellow? I'd give a shilling to see Tennyson or Browning in person before they die.”

“I shall let you know if I see them.”

“Literary men must drink to write. Believe me, I know. Oh, I'd never write a word myself if I can help it. But I watch. Do I. You meet all kinds in the black arts—I mean printing. All kinds! From the meanest machine men who run the press, to the great bookaneers. The authors rarely venture down into the bowels of the presses, but I'm sent to them oftenly enough when I'm asked to collect proofs—you'd think I was the tax collector, you would, to see their faces fall when I show up at their doorsteps asking if they've finished their chapters—”

I stopped him. “You have actually met a bookaneer before?”

“Why, man, nearly the whole class of them have passed before my eyes one time or another since I started in this line as a mere boy of twelve. Even Belial, one time.”

“By heavens! What was he like?”

“The greatest one I ever seen,” he went on, ignoring the question and enjoying the fact he had hooked his fish, “the chief of them, is a fellow named Whiskey Bill. You've heard of him?”

I said I had.

“It's said he near invented the profession single-handedly. Surely he's too humble to admit it. He is not to be crossed, or quarreled with—of course that goes without saying when it comes to those hardened book pirates. The publishers who try to empty the pockets of readers quake at the sound of Bill's name more than any other. But he rewards his friends richly and opens paths for them.”

“What do you mean ‘paths'?”

“Paths to great fortune and glory.” He added, somewhat hastily, “they say.”

“What does the man look like?”

“What should the man look like?”

Before I could object to the absurdity of the question, he pushed his chair out and hurry-scurried away. Disappointed that the exchange had ended almost as soon as it became interesting, I then felt his noxious breath return on my neck.

“A head of fire,” he said.

I spun around. As my eyes followed this imp strutting across the tavern on his way to the piano, they landed on another figure—the redheaded man who had dropped the mysterious book at my feet in the street. He was taking his high hat down from a hook, and as he fixed it on his head, Whiskey Bill—for I realized who he was at one fell swoop—tipped it in my direction, meeting my eye and offering that condescending, satisfied, double-gap-toothed smile that would become so familiar.

I had an urge to follow after him as he ascended the stairs, and a competing urge to run out the back door. But I did not budge. However distant my own life was from the bookaneers, I correctly surmised that any attempt to question him would run counter to what had just transpired. Whiskey Bill was ready to tell me who he was on his terms. It could not come from his own lips, and I knew enough to understand that nothing ought to come from mine. I remained seated for a long time, contemplating the peculiar situation and my position as an accomplice to a prominent bookaneer. I might have been filled with more qualms than I was, but the fact was, the longer I thought of it the more thrilled I was for it. The secrecy and potential danger—at least as I imagined the life I was entering—was enormously gratifying. I realized in an instant, as though struck in the face, that I did not have everything I wanted and hoped for—that I wanted this, wanted to be inducted into this realm. I actually prayed to God that night not to make a misstep that would strip the chance.

Apparently pleased by what had already passed at my bookstall, and my discretion at the Crown, Whiskey Bill began delivering books at irregular intervals. He never came to my stall. He'd pass me the package in a crowded street or sidewalk, on an omnibus or a ferry, with no explanation of how he'd found me and no conversation beyond the most basic greeting. Then a customer, different each time, always a stranger to me, would purchase the volume at my bookstall, leaving a too-large sum of money in my hands and never waiting for change.

My general interest in the bookaneers had given me some advance knowledge about Whiskey Bill. Despite what the printer's devil proclaimed to me, Bill was not the greatest example of his field; in fact, had there ever been a Professor Agassiz to work out a classification of the literary pirates, Bill would have been placed in the second tier, forever trying to push up his rankings. Then at the bottom rung were the so-called barnacles, those who had some experience in bookaneering but no patience, resorting to careless thefts and inevitably spending time in and out of jails; as the name suggests, these were parasites of the trade, acting on intelligence purloined from better and more successful practitioners.

The legends of bookaneers' deeds passed around Pfaff's Cave in the old days would inevitably include dramatic circumstances and intrigue, breathless chases through streets and buildings, confrontations with celebrated authors and battles of will with ruthless printers of wealth and power. As usual the truth is a source of disappointment. The commonplace bookaneer usually did little more than sit in dingy taverns to negotiate sundry transactions, act as a courier avoiding customs, and submit poems and stories plagiarized from an obscure magazine to other obscure magazines under false names, with the ambition of pilfering a few dollars here and shillings there. No heavily armed authors waiting in ambush, no sudden betrayals by trusted associates, no hidden passageways aiding an escape.

But if so many representatives of the craft were drudges and Jeremy Diddlers, a small and unofficial guild of professional, expert bookaneers rose to the pinnacle of greatness. They moved frequently between both sides of the Atlantic. I believe I could count the ones operating at a given time on one hand. They grew beyond the control of the publishers, who came to fear as much as rely on them. Each was a king.

These men—and one particular woman of note—were not mere publishers' clerks moonlighting as amateur thieves or spies. They spoke and wrote dozens of languages, were as well read in literature as any professor or man of letters, could identify the handwriting and style, even the stray pen marks, of thousands of authors and book illustrators through the small lens of an opera glass. Little wonder the rest of their brethren looked at them with equal parts awe and bitterness. They have been called audacious criminals, but this is not entirely accurate—the greatest bookaneers stepped into a void and helped control the chaos caused by the broken copyright laws and the maelstrom of greed that rumbles just beneath the surface world of books.

My prevailing interest in the tales of the bookaneers ripened into outright fascination once I became a footnote in Whiskey Bill's operations. I filled my notebooks with any scrap of gossip and partial anecdote related to them. I myself might have composed a treatise,
On the Classification of Bookaneers.
But despite my thirst for a fuller knowledge of their practices, I confess I still could not bring myself to open any of the mysterious volumes Bill delivered to me. I knew just enough to know they were no ordinary books. They were bound by hand, usually in thick brown leather, with the metal clasp and a different title each time of a book that did not exist. I felt his eyes always upon me and imagined that if I did unclasp one of the volumes, even in the privacy of my own chambers, my connection with this secret world would vanish there and then. I would rotate the thing in my hand, squeeze the leather, and conjure possibilities. Proof sheets of a highly touted novel not yet published. Manuscript pages missing for a hundred years from an unfinished masterwork. A decoy meant to trap a rival publishing spy.

Cast a look at my little cart. Some fancy the book a quaint, tame object, and it is not difficult to understand why. But take a longer look, Mr. Clover. Recall that when the first presses produced copies of the Bible, the scribes who had to spend years at a time on the same work, just as it had been done for centuries, streamed out from the monasteries with quills raised in the air, decrying the work of the devil. When one of the pioneering tradesmen printed certain words in red ink to emphasize them, it was proof that he had used his own blood. That was why the printers' assistants began to be called “devils.” Soon printers were threatened with burning, and some were indeed put into the fire along with their equipment. From the beginning, the creation of the modern book was viewed as the work of Satan—an attempt to usurp the word of God.

No tameness there, and those were just the opening battles. In my boardinghouse, you took note of my copies of Mary Shelley's astounding and wild novel written when she was still more girl than woman. When
Frankenstein
was published, it was considered terrible and disgusting, a waking nightmare, yet it defied all intellectual hysterics by entrancing millions of unsuspecting readers. The book took on a life and importance of its own, not unlike how the creature does in that novel. Not unlike the bookaneers growing into a powerful monster nobody in the trade knew how to domesticate.

Since the advent of the modern industry, there are no parties in the book world who are innocent of commodification, commercialization, and competition, for even the high-minded authors who come to it young and starry-eyed compromise with reality; the readers remain relatively unaffected and pure, though their money must change hands. To a bookaneer, the past, present, and future of literature was all fair game. To the fervent imagination of a bookseller and collector like myself, there was no end to what treasure and mystery might be pressed between two boards.

Perhaps it was not only superstition, not only the pure pleasure of guessing that stayed my hand from the simple act of opening Bill's books. I now must wonder if I feared how what I'd find inside would change my life.

 • • • 

I
BRIMMED
WITH
a new feeling of self-confidence about my place among other bookmen, and I gleefully frequented the best London social clubs and coffeehouses that served the literary and artistic circles. In these settings I was to encounter most of the reputable bookaneers of a generation. These were heady days, long before Molasses became mixed up in a case of murder, before the Berne copyright negotiations, when there was plenty of business for everyone. The trust Whiskey Bill had shown in me led other bookaneers to transfer books anonymously through my busy bookstall, as well as hire me for assignments that matched my talents for handwriting identification. I could never know when I was being tested or not, and always made certain to perform my tasks in a timely and straightforward manner, indulging only in necessary questions. It was in this way that I came to have a minor but useful part in the world of the most surreptitious of bookmen. It was in this way that I crossed into the sphere of Pen Davenport.

Davenport was one of the three most infamous bookaneers in the world—the immortals, you might call them. An American by birth but long a citizen of the world with no home in particular, Davenport could often be observed keeping society among the London litterateurs. Then there was Kitten, a French lady who was considered the most determined and skillful of the set. You can still see a striking image of her on the third floor of the British Museum, in a painting of a green-cloaked damsel, for which she was used as a model by one of the great Bohemian painters of the past decades. The third bookaneer who was equally celebrated, Belial, an Englishman whose real name until recently was unknown, was rarely seen in public. He was always on a bookaneering mission, as far as anyone could tell. Davenport commanded interest and attention, but if you looked
at
Davenport you would look
for
Belial, and that gave the absent one of the pair a unique power.