ENDPAPER
A fortune in rare books
BY PRADEEP SEBASTIAN
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In “Nabokov’s Butterfly”, Gekoski tells the stories of 20 rare books that passed through his hands.
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Recognised for his distinction in the field, he was made a judge for the 2007 Man Booker prize: the first book dealer to be on the panel.
Lore on rare books: Rick Gekoski.
IN 1988, rare book dealer Rick Gekoski offered the First English edition of Lolita in his catalogue for £3,250. A few weeks later, Graham Greene wrote to him, saying, “Dear Mr. Gekoski, If your copy of Lolita, which isn’t even the true first edition, is worth £3,250, how much is the original Paris edition inscribed to me worth?”
The Olympia Press Lolita is a great edition and a copy inscribed by Nabokov to Greene was special for many reasons. “Dear Mr. Greene,” wrote back Gekoski, “More. Would you care to sell it?” Greene already own
ed another first edition, also inscribed by Nabokov, and felt he could sell the Olympia edition. Gekoski bought it for £4,000. He opened the book and read the inscription,‘For Graham Greene from Vladimir Nabokov, November 8, 1959’. It was followed by a drawing of a large green butterfly.
By the next morning, Gekoski had sold it to a rich book collector (Bernie Taupin, Elton John’slong-time lyricist) for £9,000. The moment it had gone out of his hands he felt bad. He had wanted to keep it with him. In 1992, Gekoski traced the book and bought it back for £13,000. After owning itfor a short while, he sold it again to a book collector. In 2002, the book appeared at a Christie’ssale and sold for an astounding $264,000.
We know Greene’s part in getting Swami and Friends published. From Gekoski’s short but entertaining book, Nabokov’s Butterfly and Other Stories of Great Author and Rare Books, we learn it was Gre
ene who brought Lolita to the notice of a reading public when he chose it as his best book of the year in 1955. Lolita had been fairly obscure till then since it had been published by Maurice Girodias in Paris, who&#
8217;s Obelisk Press usually published classy pornography.
In Nabokov’s Butterfly, Gekoski tells the stories of 20 rare books that passed through his hands. The lore on rare books is delightful but equally fascinating is his short publishing history of each book.
Wonderful accounts
While there are several books on rare books there is only a handful on rare book dealers. David Meyer’s Memoirs of a Book Snake: Forty Years of Seeking and Saving Old Books and (more recently) Inclined Toward Mag
ic: Encounters With Books, Collectors, and Conjurors are also wonderful accounts of rare books and their dealers.
Gekoski’s specialisation is rare 20th century books: what is known in the trade as modern first editions. Recognised for his distinction in the field, he was made a judge for the 2007 Man Booker prize: the first book dealer to be on the panel.
In some editions, his book is also titled Tolkien’s Gown and Other Stories of Famous Authors and Rare Books. In the 1960s, as a post graduate at Merton College, Oxford, Gekoski found himself living in the same college house a
s Tolkien. He kicks himself every day for not getting Tolkien to sign first editions of The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings, which today would fetch $135,000 and $90,000 respectively. Tolkien was nearly reclusive but
would gladly inscribe a book for a fellow from the same college.
However, one day Gekoski found out from the college porter that Tolkien was getting rid of things from his room. Hopeful of making a discovery, Gekoski was disappointed when no first editions or signed copies turned up. What he did find was Tolkien’s old college gown. It even had a name tag sewn on it. Being a Tolkien fan he decided to keep it. Decades later, when he was putting out his book catalogue, he decided to sell the gown as well. Shortly after the catalogue went out, Julian Barnes, then a young novelist, phoned him to ask if Gekoski was interested in Joyce’s smoking jacket or perhaps Lawrence’s underpants and Gertrude Stein’s bra. Gekoski got the point and took the gown off the catalogue.
Estimating prices
While working on William Golding’s bibliography, he toyed with the idea of buying the manuscript of the Lord of the Flies. Evaluating, buying and selling a first edition, he writes, is easier than estimate the price of a manus
cript of a modern classic. A nice crisp first edition of Lord of the Flies with a fine dust-wrapper, for instance, is sold usually at $9,000 — the manuscript for anything between $90,000 and 430,000. But Golding, he tells us, tho
ught even this too cheap.
The highest sum so far paid for a manuscript, the book dealer informs us, is two million dollars for On the Road. What would the manuscript of Catch 22 or Catcher in the Rye be worth? There are
only 100 signed copies of Ulysses. At a 2002 Christie’s sale, it was sold for $460,000: the greatest price paid for a 20th century book.
Gekoski owns a first edition, which he treasures. And he is not even tempted to sell it. First Eds of The Great Gatsby and The Sun Also Rises with dust-wrappers have broken the $90,000 dollar barrier.
What is crucial to these editions is that they also possess fine or near-fine dust jackets.Is there in the book somewhere a story about The Catcher in the Rye? There certainly is, and it has to do with more than just a first edition
: Salinger threatened to sue Gekoski for possessing archival material (correspondence, notes, transcripts of interviews) relating to Ian Hamilton’s unauthorised biography of the writer. Salinger pleaded with Hamilton not to write a biography but when Hamiltonwent ahead, the author took him to court. Salinger won and, years later, Hamilton decided to sell some of his research material (and the correspondence that followed) to Gekoski.
Eventually, the book dealer had to return most of the material to Salinger. (In exchange, Gekoski wanted Salinger to inscribe his first edition of Catcher in the Rye. Salinger refused, of course.) But there were a few letters he sol
d to private collectors and libraries for a small profit. Rick Gekoski was also one of the publishers included in the fatwa against Rushdie but that’s a story I’ll let you read in the book. There are more stories of rare books in Nabokov’s Butterfly. There is one even about the Harry Potter books. Apparently the bookshop Gekoski owns in London stocks only 50 books. But each is worth a fortune.
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