A Ghost Story

I don’t know how I became a dealer. It snuck up on me. I began collecting as a boy in Washington DC, laying down a lifetime pattern of wanting and hunting, of desire, frustration and occasional satisfaction.

When I was seven, Topps (a company previously best known for making Bazooka Bubblegum) began issuing baseball cards, and I, like all of my friends, was immediately obsessed by them. For a nickel you got five cards and a flat piece of gum that was unchewably stiff, nastily over-sugared and invariably thrown away. The ideal was to acquire all of the twenty-five players on your team – mine was the Washington Senators, though I switched allegiance to the Brooklyn Dodgers when we moved to Long Island in 1954. Topps knew how to get you hooked: most of the cards were common, but the most desirable ones were issued in much smaller quantities. We boys would buy and buy, yearning to fill our gaps. At Topps there must have been an avalanche of nickels rolling in.

I was desperate to get the card for the Senators’ first baseman Mickey Vernon, my favourite player, who led the American League in batting in 1953. I bought and bought, leafed avidly through the five cards. Wrong teams! Wrong players! No Mickey. I had to have him and I offered remarkable enticements to a friend who did – mountains of my duplicates, or a choice of the scarce cards I knew he needed. Knowing how much I yearned for my hero – in acquiring the card you magically acquired the person – he declined, reckoning he’d get a better deal in the future. I cajoled, pleaded, ranted. No dice.

To outflank my mean (soon to be ex-) friend, I went to the shop that sold used comics and baseball cards, where the choices were as wide as the prices were intimidating. The dealer was a podgy red-faced old man (most men were old) in a soiled Yankees shirt, with lank grey hair and a bored expression. (I don’t know if he had acne, but memory requires it, so I have given him some.) On those interminable hot summer days my father would watch benignly as I prowled about in the stifling gloom.

Dad didn’t collect anything himself – he had a large number of books that were casually acquired rather than compulsively assembled – but he was amused by my ardour, and when we got back to my grandparents’ bungalow, where we spent the summers, he would take a few minutes with me as I installed my acquisitions into my collection. I shocked Granny Pearl by spending five dollars on a card that I’d been wanting for ages. I kept it on my bedside table for a week, and showed it off to envious friends, before putting it in the White Owl cigar box that Poppa Norman had given me, and forgetting about it. I was offered one or two tempting trades, but declined to part with my treasure except in a swap for a Mickey. No deal. I regularly and intemperately accused Topps of unfair practice: manipulation of the market meant manipulation of me. Scarcity engenders need.

In most boys the collecting mania fades after adolescence. My stamp collections and Lionel trains went on to my closet shelf, from which they eventually but mysteriously disappeared; my Topps cards in their cigar box, too, obscurely decamped. I never regretted the loss of the stamps and trains, but the early Topps became highly collectable in later years (a 1952 Mickey Mantle rookie card is worth $75,000 today), and I must have had a few that would have become valuable. And that, of course, is why they become desirable, as boy collector after boy collector shelved them, and myriad moms threw them out in a clear-up as the erstwhile fanatic went to college and entered that collecting latency period from which few emerge. If you return to collecting as an adult, it is more often art or furniture, carpets or ceramics perhaps. Or books, though not many go that route. There are very few book collectors, and almost no one understands them. We hardly understand ourselves.

My unappetizing acquaintance with the baseball-card dealer hardly served as a role model for rare-book dealing – no one entering that dusty room could have thought, ‘I want to be like him, that’s just the job for me!’ I wanted my Mickey Vernon card because what I most dreamed of was to be Mickey Vernon. I played first base at school and later in Little League: first baseman was a life plan, dealer was not.

You couldn’t, until quite recently, train as a book dealer, and though there are now MA courses in the subject I don’t entirely believe in them. You learn the trade willy-nilly, by trial and (mostly) error. You pay for your mistakes, buying the wrong thing, or the right one at the wrong price. You learn quickly. During my time writing my DPhil at Oxford, I haunted the local used bookshops, and it became a challenge to see if I could pay for my holidays by scouting – Americans call it ‘running’ – and selling my purchases at a profit to members of the book trade. On visits home, my father became fascinated by my new vocation, and would sit in his Eames chair, put his record of The Magic Flute on his new Danish teak hi-fi, and quiz me on values. The guide in those days was Van Allen Bradley’s The Book Collector’s Handbook of Values.

‘Brighton Rock?’ he’d ask.

‘One of the scarcer ones, especially in dust wrapper. Bradley’s wrong on it, I’ll bet.’

‘He says $100–$200.’

‘I’d pay $500 if I could find one and if you’d lend me the money.’

He would have. He was uncommonly engaged with my new incarnation, possibly because it was the first time I had deviated from the directions he’d laid down. I’d majored in English at the University of Pennsylvania, as he had, and, after outgrowing my desire to be a baseball player, wanted first to become a psychoanalyst, if not that a university English teacher and, failing that, a lawyer. He’d wanted the same things in the same order, and though mildly satisfied to have ended up in law, he was glad I hadn’t done so myself. Lecturing was better, and this book running better yet. No one in the family had ever been good at business, and my combination of literary and financial acumen fascinated him. I would come home from New York after a day’s scouting, with a few hundred dollars profit in my pocket, and we would both be lost in admiration. We contemplated setting up a business together: Son and Gekoski, Rare Books.

He died in 1980, at the age of sixty-eight. Though the cause was pancreatic cancer, in some ways I think he just wore out. As he lay peacefully awaiting the end, he said, ‘I never had much energy,’ as if that explained it. Though he outlived my mother by eleven years, and she had bags of it (most of it misdirected), my father wasn’t built to last, and seemed not to regret it. I did, terribly. His virtues were Chaucerian: largeness of vision, freedom from cant, shrewdness, benignity. He treated everyone he met with the same quiet respect, lived an exemplary inner life, and would have died reconciled to his God if he’d had one. His example and legacy became part of my psychological and moral cellular structure and his death, like his life, formed and enabled me. His financial legacy – I inherited £60,000 from him in 1981 – allowed me to pursue my passion, and I added gem after gem to my collection of rare books and manuscripts: the corrected typescript of Virginia Woolf’s Freshwater, the only known copy of Sons and Lovers in a dust wrapper, a pre-publication inscribed copy of Almayer’s Folly (Conrad’s first novel), and best of all, a fine first edition of Ulysses.

The example of, and yearning for, Mickey Vernon’s baseball card provided the source and template for these manic acquisitions: my collecting was driven by love, scarcity and psychic identification. In acquiring a baseball card, you alchemically incorporated the actual player; so too owning first editions by Eliot and Joyce brought me closer to them, made them mine, made them me. I wanted the best things – the best writers – that Dad’s money could buy, regretting only that he was not there to watch approvingly as my cigar box filled.

A year later I issued my first catalogue, R. A. Gekoski Modern First Editions, and sold my whole collection. I had found to my surprise that the pleasure of ownership diminished sharply over time. Once a card went into the box it seldom came out again. From gloating over my Ulysses to taking it for granted took only a few months. Anyway, Dad’s money having run out, the only way to insure fresh examples of the precious and rare was to sell what I had. In my new life as a dealer the initial emotional structure applied: to buy, and to sell, only what is the cause of pride and delight, to acquire what is rare and well-nigh unobtainable, to specialize in the Mickey Vernon cards of the rare-book trade.

Analogies with drug addiction are inescapable: you end up dealing in order to support your habit. Being a dealer has a further advantage: not only do I buy the best things that I can locate and afford, I get to display them to a constituency that understands what I am doing. If collecting is isolated and atomistic, dealing is a form of self-display: here, my first catalogue proclaimed, is the result of connoisseurship, here is what I can do, what I am.

This partly explains, I suppose, my fascination with ‘Et Tu Healy’: what could be more desirable than offering this apparently unobtainable ghost by one of my revered authors? Yet even this doesn’t explain, quite, the intensity of my desire to locate a copy. Generally I fixate on material that is rare, expensive and important, but it would be hard to claim much in the way of scholarly or even biographical significance for this scrap of a poem.

No, its magnetism has something to do with my father. ‘Et Tu Healy’ was written by James Joyce when he was nine, in response to imperatives that were surely derivative: the little boy expressing what his father felt. The poem, psychologically, is an unconscious act of identification and homage from son to father. Perhaps that is why I find the story of it – the text of the poem itself doesn’t matter – so moving, why it unconsciously recalls my attachment to my own father, my childish wish to talk and to be like him.