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Posted: Tue Jul 10, 2007 11:12 pm
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| From mint to poor
Saturday April 19, 2003 The Guardian · "Good" means "bad", as many a cynical, honest bookseller will tell you. It is a handy mnemonic for the most accepted system of describing the condition of a used book (many dealers would hand-on-heart swear their customers had never used a book in their lives). It used to be that there were new books, which were mint, and in general sold by other people; fine books that were second-hand, but showed no serious signs of it; very good books, which no wholesome reader or collector would be ashamed of; and good books (often "good only"), which were not good at all.Below that was a sump or sink of nearly good, fair, fair only, poor, reading copies and working copies, these last the least favoured. Unless you could say "a poor copy, but all that survives of this previously unrecorded 15th-century sonnetteer", mostly you gave or threw away the lower ranks. (They continued to circulate subterraneously, of course, and might emerge like geysers if tastes changed, as they did for Biggles and Brent-Dyer, or if they were shown to be annotated by Samuel Beckett, when "expert restoration" might be called for.) Reluctance to damn a book often generated elaborations and intermediate grades, bibliographic versions of the academic "beta minus query": "not quite fine but very nice", "else good to very good", and the truly sad (though often true) "better than it sounds". (No book has ever been described as "worse than it sounds".) On the wilder shores of webworld, boastful hypertrophy alternates with superfluous apologetics. There is no need, guys, to point out that an 18th-century novel doesn't have a dust jacket. In this month's Antiquarian Book Review, Rick Gekoski, a modern-first dealer who has dragged many a huge beast of a book back from the jungle and brought it blinking in the spotlight like a 40ft ape, is appalled by people for whom fine is not enough: they want - and will pay absurdly for - superfine copies, unopened, unbreathed on, minimally touched and most certainly unread, "engendering just that physical and psychic queasiness that (presumably) comes with time travel". Mr Gekoski goes on to make speculations about his customers' psychosexual yearnings and fears, which he may yet come to regret. · Whatever you may suppose, book dealers do not rejoice over the destruction of libraries, feel glad that their surviving books are rarer, nor gloat over the prospect of replacement business. The (apparently) premeditated burning of Baghdad Library is just one more atrocity in the long story of man's inhumanity to paper. Fifteen hundred years ago, Baghdad was a checkpoint for Greek science and medicine and philosophy and mathematics (in Greek or Syriac or Arabic), making its roundabout asylum-seeking way to the barbarous west. (Some of the mathematics, of course, had started out in Babylon.) Without that migration, arguably, no Ottonian enlightenment, no Carolingian awakening, no Renaissance. Looks like we owe them. · The beginning of June is London Book Fair Week, when every roofed structure in Bloomsbury and West Kensington will house one or more rival bookfairs, some of international repute, some not. The Provincial Booksellers Fairs Association struck publicity gold this week with the results of a Valuation Day, normally the kind of occasion when members of the public are encouraged to bring in the treasures from their attic, to have them professionally sneered at. "Thank you for showing me this precious piece of your family heritage, which of course has no commercial value but must mean so much to you." But the PBFA's exercise turned up the fourth known copy of Isaac Rosenberg's self-published Night and Day (Whitechapel, 1912, maybe £25,000) and the sneerers aren't sneering any more. EK |
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