Subtitle: Confessions of a Book Addict
Baxter's book addiction is undeniable, but is also completely unlike my own, although our reading overlaps. Baxter has been a collector, private and professional; he cares about the provenance of particular copies, which should be as untouched as possible, unless they're inscribed by some perverse celebrity, to raise the value. His perfect book is in some way unique and untouched, which as far as I'm concerned makes it no more a book than is the inside of someone's head. I would find his view much more annoying if it wasn't clear that he does really read (other copies) of the books he collects; and also that he recognizes this collectors' taste as perverse. He eventually decides that he can't be a 'collector of' someone he hopes to talk to even as a reader, let alone a colleague of sorts; so he sells his collection in a lump.
So; the book collecting with a lot of money in it has something in common with celebrity-memorabilia collecting, and something in common with antiquing for the money. No-one's going to suddenly mass-produce Poe manuscripts, which improves their investment value. I guess that partly explains why book-collecting became a rockstar, movie-star business in the 1960s and 1970s—according to Baxter, who doesn't say what proportion of rockstar income the trade took up.
Baxter's first connection to books and publishing was through science-fiction fandom in Australia in the 1950s, but he's worked all over the English-speaking world. He name-drops like an excellent schmoozer, and I should think that the pursuit of insiderdom has lots in common with collecting.
His claim that librarians never read books is, in my experience, untrue, and smacks a little of commercial distaste; library copies aren't any good for a bookrunner, though a copy unread by its rockstar owner is.
I was disappointed by his reaction to bookselling on the Internet. I can see why he doesn't like alibris, which bought used-book shops up wholesale; they're hard to compete against, and they don't themselves provide the knowledge some bookshop owners do. He spends too much time making fun of subliterate descriptions of books on eBay; he was happy to see the fools selling at car-boot sales, why not online? (Because you don't have to be cool and obsessive to buy online, just obsessive?) But it's oddly blinkered, or outright slanted, not to mention the universal-shopfront system that abebooks provides, which lets one search the databases of independent booksellers, who use the descriptions they already used to the trade; and purchases are usually made from the bookseller, not the intermediary. I should think this inconveniences Baxter, since he made a living by being an intermediary, but he seems intellectually honest enough that I was really curious how he'd describe it. Instead, silence.
I can't imagine that books reproduced as electronic files appeal to him at all, given his fascination with particular physical copies. Down some nearby trouserleg of time, a different Baxter is passionately devoted to Project Gutenberg, which relieves the trauma of his book-deprived Australian upbringing in a SFnal way. In this universe, he is so happy to live in the apartment above 's, to lug groceries up the very carpet-runner that threw up on, that I finished his autobiography with some charitable feeling. His next chapter was lists of important works, of modern or detective literature, many old enough to be out of copyright and therefore suitable hunting for a book-scanner too.
ISBN: 0312317255
So wrote clew in History (20th c.). | TrackBack