Pulsing Hearts beneath the Tweed

Antiquarian bookselling is not a famously perilous profession. In my nineteen years at Sotheran’s, the antiquarian bookdealer in London, I have never had a life insurance policy refused on the grounds of risk to life and limb, and I don’t face mortal danger in my quotidian round of bibliophile duties. It might, therefore, seem fanciful when I say that Bernard J. Farmer’s detective novel Death of a Bookseller (1958) manages to combine a devilish murder plot with a realistic depiction of the London antiquarian book trade, but I promise it isn’t. The book may be over sixty years old now, but much of what it reveals about the trade is as true today as it was then.

For a start, it’s a cracking read, with a cast of characters that includes Sergeant Wigan, detective turned bibliophile, various cranky booksellers, an American billionaire collector of voracious appetites and his beautiful but dangerous female assistant who takes a razor blade to the face of a dealer who asks for too high a price. Such individuals are not exactly the everyday denizens of the antiquarian bookshop, but the book trade does have its dangers. The plot revolves around a dealer, Michael Fisk, who is apparently killed for a first edition of Keats’s Endymion, and one can’t help being reminded of the horrific case of Adrian Greenwood, the Oxford bookseller who was murdered in 2015 for a rare copy of Wind in the Willows. Such dangerous urges really do exist among collectors and dealers, especially when big money is involved. Bernard J. Farmer was himself a book man. He collected the work of G. A. Henty, rather like Dishan Dand, the billionaire of this novel, and produced the first bibliography of Churchill. In 1950 he wrote The Gentle Art of Book Collecting to go alongside his crime novels. He was uniquely qualified to write Death of a Bookseller because, in order to supplement his literary earnings, he worked for seven years as a police officer. He was surely the prime authority on the peculiar netherworld where crime and book-collecting rub shoulders. He certainly knew the jargon and intricacies of bookselling. The edition of Keats around which the novel revolves is given a description worthy of the most meticulous antiquarian dealer’s catalogue: ‘Keats’s own copy of his poem Endymion, with an inscription: “From the author to the author, John Keats, 1818” . . . contemporary binding, calf gilt.’ He even knew the book well enough to note the details that prove that this copy was a true first: ‘The first issue of the first edition . . . should have two leaves of advertisements at the end dated May 1818. This copy had.’ If Farmer was still alive I’d offer him a job, though he would be surprised at the effect of inflation. In the novel, this book is sold for £250. Today, an unsigned copy is worth well over £10,000. Still, some things in bookselling never change. When Farmer refers to the ‘standard sets of Dickens, Thackeray and Scott, which . . . left him cold, for they were only of small money value’, I share the pang of dread, because I have had to let down so many hopeful vendors with so many boxes of Waverley novels. He acknowledges the academic side of the business, noting the amount of time spent in the British Museum looking up arcane bibliographical references, and he tips his hat to probably the oldest joke in antiquarian book-dealing:

You offer them a penny pamphlet several hundred years old. It’s marked ‘One Penny’ and you ask ten pounds. ‘Coo,’ they say, ‘it’s marked One Penny and you ask ten pounds. You are a blooming swindler.’

Where the book is at its most revealing is in its discussion of the hierarchies within bookselling, a class system that still exists. Our guide to what Sergeant Wigan calls the ‘labyrinth’ of the book business is Charlie North. Charlie is a runner, one of those indispensable people at the bottom of the pyramid who usually don’t have a shop but who are geniuses at finding lost gems and selling them on to the established trade. Their influence has waned since the Internet made it easier for everyone to find rare works in out-of-the-way places, but they still exist and can perform wonders.

You can always tell a runner in a bookshop. He uses his eyes, not his hands or his feet. And he’s quick . . . I can go through a big shop in half an hour and know I haven’t missed anything worthwhile.

He reveals that runners often wear rags (though they have good sturdy boots) so that they can pick up books at ‘beggar’s prices’, and they are excellent actors. One of Charlie’s associates has been known to present himself as a gaudy American china collector, Cyrus K. Ripshafter, who will buy an absurdly over-priced porcelain jug just so he can ask for a neglected old book to be thrown in for free: he knows that the book is actually a William Blake first edition. Charlie also lets slip a trick that is certainly not legal:

I see a first I want. I abstract the said first . . . and so that no gap shall show which will reveal said abstraction, at least to the casual glance, say, of an assistant in the shop, I fill the gap with a volume of no worth from my own pocket.

I should say that I don’t think that any of the runners who visit our shop have ever played this particular game. In reality, the relationship of dealer and runner is based on trust. But here the hint of skulduggery just adds to the maverick romance of the runner’s life: ‘Free-lancing as a runner has its hazards; but better that than eight pounds a week and slavery’ (please note that the enormous inflation in prices has not translated to booksellers’ wages). These characters are contrasted with the upmarket West End dealers who might be fictionalized versions of Sotheran’s of Sackville Street, such as Messrs. Bettle & Bettle of New Bond Street, and Ferrow’s, whose layout represents perfectly the journey of the collector from dabbler to member of the inner sanctum:

A big bookshop was like a cell within a cell within a cell. The outer cell was for casual buyers . . . The next cell was for customers who wanted something more important and were prepared to pay a good price for it. The next cell was for customers who ordered from catalogue; and these customers might be distributed all over the world.

A good many traditional bookshops were designed along these very lines, and although our shop isn’t, those divisions do describe our clients very accurately. The ideal is always to convert a casual shop customer into someone who buys a book unseen because they know it is something they need and they trust the bookseller implicitly on condition and price. Ferrow’s, like Sotheran’s, is always in pursuit of that alchemical miracle. To that end, in this book at least, the posh boys are just as bad as the humble runners. Charlie describes Joel from Ferrow’s stealing a book from an auction and selling it to another high-end dealer on the sly. In Bernard J. Farmer’s antiquarian book world, absolutely no one is to be trusted. It works brilliantly as the setting for a crime novel, and when you add in a sprinkling of the occult, murder becomes almost inevitable. It emerges that Mike Fisk’s death is connected to his collection of esoteric works. One of the questions you are always asked as an antiquarian bookseller is whether you have any books of a diabolical bent bound in human skin. Such things exist and fetch high prices: they exert an enormous fascination because they give a glimpse into the mysterious and the chilling. They are exactly the kind of thing that gets people into book-collecting. Farmer’s detective story works so well because he understands perfectly the mindset of the book collector: ‘Book-collecting can be like a fever. All prudence may tell a certain person or persons to stay away. But they won’t.’ In this case, books are being used as a lure to trap a murderer, because the temptation to seize Fisk’s collection will be too great to resist. That might seem ludicrous to the non-bibliophile, but to someone who has seen collectors’ fever – and makes a living by feeding that fever – it is perfectly credible that not only could a crazed bookman kill for the right volume, but he could also be sufficiently lacking in control to be duped into giving himself away. Antiquarian bookselling has a rather fusty image, and there is good reason for that. One look around the average bookfair will reveal an awful lot of tweed, and I am not afraid to admit that I too possess a brown jacket with elbow patches. But underneath those old clothes pulse hundreds of passionate hearts in thrall to the next leather-bound thrill. Perhaps it should be a surprise that there are not more terrible bibliophile crimes. I can only assume that it is because people who love books would rather sit and read them than skulk around in the cold.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 81 © Chris Saunders 2024