The story has no beginning—I mean no single obvious starting point—but stories ought to try to begin somewhere. London will do, then. My bookstall in Hoxton Square was near the corner of Bowling Green Lane. I grew it, cultivated it, and—excuse my sentimentality—loved it for years to the exclusion of almost everything else. My stall backed onto a fence, the iron spokes of which were clothed with moss in every variety and shade of green and brown from two hundred years of growth. A church bell tolled periodically from one end of the street, a fire engine clanged from the other, and my books were situated comfortably between these sounds of spiritual succor and earthly warning.
Around people who enjoy books, the bashful disposition of my youth grew into a sociable one. Strangers talking over piles of books do not remain strangers for long. Had I never learned to like books, I would have become the dullest sort of hermit. When I was younger than you, Mr. Clover, I set myself for the law, persuaded that a profession in which books were carried about and consulted at all times would have to be agreeable. But the harder I tried, the more that discipline’s endless doctrines made my head ache. I quit with no plan in sight.
I’ve never been able to bear asking for help when I need it most, and I needed it then. What a spot to be in, with no prospects and no sympathetic family member. Fortunately there was a bookshop. Every young man’s story should have a bookshop. This one was not far from where I was boarded. I spent so much of my time inside—hiding, I suppose, from my friends and my parents’ friends, from my landlord, from having to justify my decisions and, high heaven forbid, make new ones—I might well have been counted as an employee. Soon enough I was. Stemmes, the book collector who owned the place, probably felt he had no choice but to invite me to apprentice. For more than three years I slept in a windowless chamber beneath the shop. I packed crates, pushed brooms, and tried to avoid falling from old shop ladders while wielding my duster, but I also learned about book values and imperfections, about which auctions to attend and how to win the best volumes, about how to search for the right book for a customer and, when necessary, the right customer for a book. I enjoyed every minute of the work. Well, that is not quite right. I disliked being closed up in dark rooms all day and growing unused to sunlight while trying to please a gloomy, stubborn man who would spout maxims such as “exaggeration is the octopus of the English language,” which I assumed must mean something. When I learned that an outdoor bookstall in a leafy square was shuttered, I gathered every cent I had in this world and purchased the municipal license, its shelves, and its stock.
My natural gifts for salesmanship may have been lacking, but they grew with the delight I had in my humble enterprise. I kept five sets of stacking compartments of shelves, with my chair in the middle, and an inventory tailored to the enduring loyalists who came by several times a week. Unlike other bookstall keepers, I never chased anyone away for wanting to read a chapter or two under the shelter of my awning on a hot or rainy day. In fact, readers too poor to make a purchase had been known to come to my stall every afternoon for two weeks until a novel was finished.
My parents never recovered from my dropping out of the law. Once, I overheard them speaking in their garden, my mother remarking to my father that at least I had my books—I will never forget how these words sounded in her voice. “At least he has his books,” as though without them I was nothing. They always blamed my reading, you know, for my having fewer friends than my brother and for my weak eyes, never thinking that because I had weak eyes and because I was shy, having a book at the ready rescued me.
I should mention that in the course of having the bookstall, I met a few handsome women now and again who were as interesting as they were affable. And my thoughts turned to starting a family whenever I would see Veronica and Emily, my beautiful little nieces, who lived in the country and kept me on my toes during my visits. But books are jealous mistresses. As soon as I was back in London my time was consumed to the point that the pursuit of anything more than cordial friendships was always cut short. Before long, I had lost my youth and my patience for indulging others. Books were everything in life; books were better than wine.
Yes, you could say I had all I ever hoped for. Before the age of thirty, I was blissfully self-sufficient, earning enough to live on and attracting notice for skills that carried special value in our trade. For example, I was unusually adept at deciphering handwriting that was deemed illegible scrawl by others, even though my own eyesight was never better than mediocre, and that only by being glued to spectacles. My abilities were useful in identifying markings made inside books by previous sellers or readers and by authors themselves on proofs or in rare first editions. I could imitate a particular person’s handwriting, as well, so that samples of the style and appearance could be mailed outside of London to potential buyers instead of waiting for photographic reproductions. I always had a penchant for remembering what I read, and for reading a wide range of subjects in literature and history alike, which allowed me to date proof sheets or other materials discovered unbound and waiting to be priced. It helped that I spent long days at my stall dipping into every sort of book imaginable in between serving customers. The worthy bookseller must know not only the details of Spencer’s childhood but also the history of papyrus in ancient Egypt.
Most readers mistakenly believe books are creations of an author, fixed things handed down from high into their waiting hands. That is far from true. Think of the most interesting, the most alarming and brilliant choice made by a writer in literature; now consider that equally interesting, alarming, and brilliant maneuvers were made by people you will never hear about in order for that work to see the light of day. The path is never without obstructions, even more so when the publication proves influential or controversial. After years of keeping my stall, I grew more conscious of such hindrances. I noticed other shadows over the literary kingdom I had been too naive to see, and had occasion to encounter some of the denizens of these shadowlands: shameless autograph hunters and forgers, collectors who tried passing off third editions as firsts, publishers who gave false discounts and fabricated advertising costs, customs officials who sought graft on expensive editions imported from abroad. There is a verse I write in my notebook from memory once a year: “Though an angel should write, still ’tis devils must print, and you can’t think what havoc these demons sometimes choose to make.” Thomas Moore meant the printers’ devils, the name for those men with the thankless and tedious tasks of dwelling in a printing press. But the devil has taken many forms in our trade.
Among the various mischief makers and profiteers who have besieged books from time immemorial, there arose the bookaneers. Their origins go back to the first American laws to govern copyrights. That legislation, passed in 1790 by high-minded and arrogant legislators (the usual politicians, in other words), deliberately left works of foreign authors unprotected, which caused other countries to retaliate by withdrawing protection for American works. This opened doors to various kinds of pirates and black markets, European literature plundered by Americans and vice versa. Publishers did their best to shut those doors—at first. But you will find in life that greed for profits is too strong for even good men to resist.
In the new era—not just to publish, but to publish first and cheaply—the publishers had to find individuals with particular sets of skills who could obtain manuscripts and proof sheets through persuasion, bribery, extortion, and, at times, outright theft, then transport them from one country to another. After a while, the publishers and these covert agents expanded beyond trying to secure foreign books; assignments were handed out to spy on rival publishing houses and execute any errands that had to be accomplished out of view.
In short: a bookaneer is a person capable of doing all that must be done in the universe of books that publishers, authors, and readers can have no part in—must have no part in. Bookaneers would not call themselves thieves, but they would resort to almost any means to profit from
an unprotected book. Take the pocket Webster’s from the bottom of my cart and open to “B”—it would go right there, between “book” and “bookish.” No, you will not find “bookaneer” in any dictionary, but pay attention and we will fill one in.
You wonder, no doubt, how from my modest perch as a keeper of a stall and a hunter of books I would have any view at all of such a shadowy crevice in the literary universe. I admit to feeding a special fascination with the subject from the first time I became aware of it. When an acquaintance would point out one of these bookaneers to me at a social club or hotel tavern around the city, a bolt of excitement would shoot through me. It was not the same sort of thrill as one’s first glimpse of a long-read author—in that case, a personal encounter usually renders the subject more human, but in the case of the bookaneers, who were by nature secretive and remote, an encounter inspires a rather opposite effect. Of course, my own dealings with bookaneers were rare and brief, and I would never have anticipated that was about to change.
• • •
“I HAVE A BOOK for you.”
Those words reached my ears while I was pulling a wagon down a bumpy sidewalk from a storage room to my bookstall. I remember it as a hot and muggy afternoon. I protected the books from the humidity and sun with a light blanket. The man who addressed me had a confident gait and a wide build that commanded attention. I shielded my eyes from the bright sun for a better look. He had a bushel of red hair shooting out from under a formal hat, dancing eyes, and a thick but well-combed mustache.
A glance told me the book in his hand was not mine, for I make it a point to know every one of my volumes on sight. “Not one of my collection, but I thank you nonetheless.”
“I have this book”—the red-haired fellow said more slowly, revealing a wide gap between his front teeth on both the bottom and top, then held it close to me with both his hands—“for you, Mr. Fergins.”
With that, he let the book drop spine-first to the sidewalk, where it tumbled into the street. I hurried to pick it up before it could be trampled or knocked into the gutter. By the time I stood again, he was gone. I could not help but wonder if this stranger had known that I would never under any circumstances leave a book—even the ugliest, most neglected tome—abandoned in the street. I cleaned off the cover with my handkerchief. Inscribed on it in small lettering was the title Develin’s Leister.
Sometimes a customer would inquire whether I might sell a book on consignment, and I agreed whenever I could. I would subtract a small commission from a sale, and the whole transaction contributed to the reputation of the bookstall. But if this really was a request for a consignment account, never had I received a proposition so vague. After deliberation, I decided to add the book to my shelves and see what happened. When the stall opened the next day, there was a businessman whom I had never seen before, unmemorable in every way except for a small purple flower over his buttonhole, who browsed quietly for a few minutes before he purchased three books—including the one dropped by the flame-haired stranger, which I had placed on a low shelf beside two other volumes of similar color. I was somehow unsurprised by this strange turn in the strange circumstance. When I went to put the money handed over by the businessman in my strongbox, there was a five-pound note folded in my hand. I trembled with . . . confusion, amazement, excitement. My fingers, my hands, my entire body, were electrified.
You want to know more about the book that caused all of this disturbance. I’d put my palm to Gutenberg’s Bible that I never opened it. Right away I recognized that odd title: Develin’s Leister. The old farmers of England, trading tall tales, would often tease each other, “You picked that story up in Develin’s Leister!” The legend goes that Develin had been some poor farmer who was always promising to write a book but, like most people who talk too much of writing one, never wrote a word of it. Nobody ever determined where the title of the book came from or exactly what it meant, but the book itself never existed—it was pure myth, an emblem of all the books in the world that would never be written, which is a great deal.
I could see that the volume given to me by the stranger was not an old one. There was a metal clasp, attached to a strong strip of leather, as was customary in bygone eras for large volumes of devotion. But the grain of the leather was recent. The book, in all ways, was a chimera. More than that, there was an implicit threat in the tone of the stranger’s words to me, at least in my ears, forbidding me to open it.
Not long after all this transpired, my former employer Stemmes was forced by ill health to close his shop on the Strand and retire to the seaside. When a bookshop in a city of culture such as London stops its operations, it is viewed by the wider community as a failure of mankind—a sign that books are no longer being read, or only the wrong sort of books, that literature’s finally dead, or in a temporary state of decay, that bookshops will one day disappear altogether and be replaced by mail order, that eventually books themselves would be finally and fully buried by that awful foe, so much cheaper and easier to carry: newspapers. But for those of us in the trade, it was about saying farewell to a friend.
A celebration for Stemmes was held at a lively, somewhat seedy tavern. In addition to the honoree’s good friends, fellow collectors, and booksellers, there were some newspaper and magazine men as well as representatives of the less respectable publishing classes using the occasion as a stage for debauchery. A rotund young man, hardly sixteen, whose face was pocked and freckled, squeezed himself into a seat next to me. He already smelled strongly of alcohol and his manners betrayed a general vulgarity.
“Pardon my thick legs, sirs, pardon!”
Trapped by this creature, I looked to the other side of me, but the nearest person, an Irish illustrator of my acquaintance, was engaged in a rant with another man against the newest school of painters in London. I whistled a song to suggest I was content to be by myself with my pint, but hints were not this young man’s forte. He told me he was a printer’s devil—a fact I also might have guessed by the inky smears up and down his fingers, knuckles, and hands. The freckles I had noticed on his face were actually splatters of ink, maybe from that day, maybe from a year’s worth of toil.
I moved again to change my orientation, but the devil nudged my ribs hard with his elbow. “Any great men here, fellow? I’d give a shilling to see Tennyson or Browning in person before they die.”
“I shall let you know if I see them.”
“Literary men must drink to write. Believe me, I know. Oh, I’d never write a word myself if I can help it. But I watch. Do I. You meet all kinds in the black arts—I mean printing. All kinds! From the meanest machine men who run the press, to the great bookaneers. The authors rarely venture down into the bowels of the presses, but I’m sent to them oftenly enough when I’m asked to collect proofs—you’d think I was the tax collector, you would, to see their faces fall when I show up at their doorsteps asking if they’ve finished their chapters—”
I stopped him. “You have actually met a bookaneer before?”
“Why, man, nearly the whole class of them have passed before my eyes one time or another since I started in this line as a mere boy of twelve. Even Belial, one time.”
“By heavens! What was he like?”
“The greatest one I ever seen,” he went on, ignoring the question and enjoying the fact he had hooked his fish, “the chief of them, is a fellow named Whiskey Bill. You’ve heard of him?”
I said I had.
“It’s said he near invented the profession single-handedly. Surely he’s too humble to admit it. He is not to be crossed, or quarreled with—of course that goes without saying when it comes to those hardened book pirates. The publishers who try to empty the pockets of readers quake at the sound of Bill’s name more than any other. But he rewards his friends richly and opens paths for them.”
“What do you mean ‘paths’?”
“Paths to great fortune and glory.” He adde
d, somewhat hastily, “they say.”
“What does the man look like?”
“What should the man look like?”
Before I could object to the absurdity of the question, he pushed his chair out and hurry-scurried away. Disappointed that the exchange had ended almost as soon as it became interesting, I then felt his noxious breath return on my neck.
“A head of fire,” he said.
I spun around. As my eyes followed this imp strutting across the tavern on his way to the piano, they landed on another figure—the redheaded man who had dropped the mysterious book at my feet in the street. He was taking his high hat down from a hook, and as he fixed it on his head, Whiskey Bill—for I realized who he was at one fell swoop—tipped it in my direction, meeting my eye and offering that condescending, satisfied, double-gap-toothed smile that would become so familiar.
I had an urge to follow after him as he ascended the stairs, and a competing urge to run out the back door. But I did not budge. However distant my own life was from the bookaneers, I correctly surmised that any attempt to question him would run counter to what had just transpired. Whiskey Bill was ready to tell me who he was on his terms. It could not come from his own lips, and I knew enough to understand that nothing ought to come from mine. I remained seated for a long time, contemplating the peculiar situation and my position as an accomplice to a prominent bookaneer. I might have been filled with more qualms than I was, but the fact was, the longer I thought of it the more thrilled I was for it. The secrecy and potential danger—at least as I imagined the life I was entering—was enormously gratifying. I realized in an instant, as though struck in the face, that I did not have everything I wanted and hoped for—that I wanted this, wanted to be inducted into this realm. I actually prayed to God that night not to make a misstep that would strip the chance.