Strange genius of the rare book dealer who made me an offer I just had to refuse – in the garden of a Wiltshire pub
Some years ago, I was having lunch with an old friend in the garden of a pub in the middle of the Wiltshire countryside. From out of nowhere, a stranger approached our table, introduced himself to me in a friendly fashion, and said: ‘If ever you want to sell your Conrad, I’d be pleased to make you an offer.’
This man was Rick Gekoski, author of this rollicking new book about his life in the rare book trade. It so happens that the great novelist Joseph Conrad once worked on a ship captained by my wife’s great-grandfather, and she has a copy of one of his books, An Outcast Of The Islands, inscribed to ‘Captain Paton from the Author, who shall always remember with pleasure the time when he served under his order as second mate of the Adowa’.
It’s a wonderful book to have, but how on earth did Gekoski (pictured right) know about it, and how did he know who I was, and what brought him to that Wiltshire pub? We are still in possession of our treasured Conrad, but ever since our brief encounter I have held Gekoski in some awe.
He is famous – some might say notorious – among rare book dealers for his boldness. In a profession that values the pitter-patter of discretion, he has never been backward in charging forward.
His self-confidence is reflected in this brash hotch-potch of a memoir. ‘I charge ten per cent to represent a client at auction, and I’m worth it,’ he boasts on one page. He is also unabashed about the world of the antiquarian book dealer. When he first came into the profession in the mid-1960s, it was, he says, ‘stuffy, hidebound and unsophisticated’. He himself is clearly neither stuffy nor hidebound, but there is a strong touch of bull-headed realism about him that might be mistaken for a lack of sophistication. There are two things you need to know if you wish to become a book dealer, he explains: ‘at what price is a book buyable and at what higher price one might sell it’. Furthermore, ‘the term “priceless” is for lazy dopes and headline writers’.
He arrived in book dealing through the unusual path of academia. For years, he taught English literature at Warwick University. He had signed a contract to write a critical appraisal of D. H. Lawrence, but his heart wasn’t in it. ‘I was making scant progress. It bored me.’ He took up collecting Lawrence first editions, and, before long, he realised that this was what excited him. Whereas his academic writing was ‘glacially slow and unenthusiastic’, his increasing interest in buying and selling books was ‘focused, passionate and highly organised’. Having bought 12 Lawrence books for £41, he sold them for £333. He was on his way. ‘I probably knew more about DHL prices than, well, anybody. It was manic, obsessional, and out of character.’
Authors and publishers alike tend to be sheepish about money, but Gekoski is as upfront as a supermarket cashier. By being open about prices, he shows there is never a fixed value to a rare book: it all depends on who is buying, and who is selling. At a New York Antiquarian Book Fair in the late 1980s, a copy of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, signed by the author to his fellow poet Paul Valéry, was on offer for $12,500. In the short period while the dealers were setting up their booths, it sold four times between dealers. Gekoski then bought it for $24,000, and sold it that evening over the phone for £30,000. The next morning, the dealer who had sold it to him the day before asked to buy it back, explaining it was ‘better than I’d first realised’. In 2002, the book sold at auction for $101,575.
Gekoski is very interesting on the neglected subject of authors and greed. Over the course of his career, he has often been approached by authors wishing to make a quick buck by selling manuscripts and presentation copies. He says that William Golding, in particular, was always complaining about being short of money. Golding once told Gekoski that he’d love to buy a new car, but he couldn’t afford it.
‘It was the first of a number of his comments about being short of money. Once I saw his house and extensive gardens, and reflected about the lifetime royalties on Lord Of The Flies, I rather doubted he was. After dinner and a lot of drink, I encouraged him to buy a new Jag. “That’s very well for you to say,” he responded, “you’re a rich man!” ’
Golding later offered to sell him the original manuscript of Lord Of The Flies for £1million, at least four times more than its market value. Greedier still was James Watson, the scientist and co-discoverer of DNA, who demanded a mammoth $20 million for the manuscript of his unreliable autobiography The Double Helix, even though this was ‘not for a second, not even close, not even close to close’ to its true value.
Gekoski portrays Watson as an egotist, a racist, a sexist (‘Genetically, women have no sense of humour’) and a liar, who boasted that he had invented a scene in which his partner Crick exclaimed that they had just discovered the secret of life. ‘I had to make some things up to increase their dramatic impact… Of course he said no such thing!’
His final assessment of Watson’s character is characteristically blunt. ‘It was no wonder to me, by this time, that the eminent biologist E.O. Wilson once labelled Watson “the most unpleasant human being I have ever met”. Yet – I feel rather rueful admitting this – I was rather enjoying our lunch. There’s something utterly fascinating in meeting someone not so much on, as totally off, the spectrum.’
Another of Gekoski’s bêtes noires was the antisemitic glumbucket John Fowles, best-selling author of The French Lieutenant’s Woman, who would scribble meanspirited notes in the margins of books. Gekoski noticed that he had written ‘almost unimaginably bad’ inside Helen Fielding’s first novel.
Gekoski remembers Fowles with strong distaste. ‘He carried himself commen
surately with his reputation and his elegant house, a grandee, however introverted, whose every word and gesture seemed designed to show that he was smarter than you.’ After Fowles’s death, his Journals were published, and Gekoski looked himself up in the index. ‘A certain amount of “big” talk,’ was Fowles’s verdict. ‘Difficult to have contact with that world without a feeling of nausea.’ This was Fowles at his most humourless and priggish.
The great strength of Gekoski’s outlook is that it combines a relish for commerce with tremendous joie de vivre. He loves literature, with all its highways and byways. At one point, he enthuses about reading Sylvia Plath’s scribblings in the margins of her copy of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (which he sold for £575 in 1985). ‘That’s what happens when you read someone’s marginalia, you’re peeping over their shoulder, reading the book with them. It makes you feel more privileged than you have a right to feel, as if you are actually inside the reading process.’
Back in 2004, Gekoski wrote another jaunty book about the world of rare book dealing, Tolkien’s Gown. Some of the stories he tells in this new book seem like barrel-scrapings from that first book, and he also includes a certain amount of slightly peevish scoresettling, particularly in his account of the time when the grand firm of Faber tried to prevent him from selling bits and pieces they claimed were rightfully theirs. But for the most part Guarded By Dragons is fresh and fun and bursting with good stories.
He has now retired from the world of book dealing to concentrate on writing. The internet has taken the romance out of rare books: the thrill of the chase has gone. On the other hand, I fully expect him to pop up in another pub, on another day, enquiring about my wife’s Conrad. ‘I will always buy an interesting book, at the right price,’ he concludes. ‘Why wouldn’t I? It’s what I do.’