Dear Diary: Bookishly Unproductive
It was the sort of unproductive day that makes me crazy — usually. Not today, though. There were mitigating circumstances.
For one thing, Vestal McIntyre’s reading at McNally Jackson. I’ve talked enough, perhaps, about Vestal’s new book, and I’ll be writing it up soon. So I’ll just say that I attended in happy spirits. The usual crowd — usual in that it consisted of friends of the author who might never, or only rarely, have set foot in McNally Jackson before — chatted away with itself, but I did not, for a change, feel left out. Okay, forget the gross libel about “the usual crowd.” But it didn’t matter. If the audience at the reading consisted of two groups — (a) cool young literary folk and elders lucky enough to know them and (b) me — that was okay.
And here’s why: I’d had a call, shortly before I left for NoLIta, from a John Doyle, the book dealer whom I mentioned the other day. He offered me a very reasonable figure for the first edition (more or less) of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time (12 vols) that an old friend, who already had her own set, had just inherited from her brother — and that she gave to me about a month ago. Gave to me! Such astounding generosity! Mr Doyle’s check will be made out in her name.
It’s the second-set aspect of the thing that emboldened me to investigate liquidation. If there were only one set, it would have to be kept. If my friend didn’t want to keep it, then I should have to do so. But there were two! Two virtually identical sets. It turned out that the only really valuable volume was the third, The Acceptance World. Here’s why: the Heinemann print runs for the first three volumes was rather small. Kindling interest in Powell’s project took both faith and time. My friend and her brother missed out on the first two volumes, buying later printings (they look just the same as the originals) of the first two but catching on by The Acceptance World. When At Lady Molly’s was ready for publication, Heinemann printed a bigger run, and none of the latter nine volumes of Dance is as rare as any of the first three. (To see the pretty covers, scroll down.)
I’m so tickled, I could dance the polka — said Mr Wag like a bear.