Guarded by Dragons: John Banville on a fascinating glimpse of the eccentric world of book dealers

Guarded by Dragons: Encounters with Rare Books and Rare People

Author: Rick Gekoski

ISBN-13: 978-1472133854

Publisher: Constable

Guideline Price: £18.99

The mania for collecting things is incomprehensible to non-maniacs. The rest of us have a hard time of it keeping down the clutter, and cannot understand why otherwise sensible people should want to accumulate drawers, cabinets and crates full of matchboxes, Victorian egg cups, medieval thumb-screws, Dinky toys.

Books are, of course, beautiful objects, when they are well printed and decently bound, and quite a few are even readable. But for most bibliomanes the content of the books they collect is of little interest; for them, what matters is that the volume in hand, on shelf or in vault, should have the rarity value of a hen’s tooth.

Rick Gekoski, an academic turned book dealer, is both amused and bemused by the business at which he makes his living. Born in the US, he studied at Merton College, Oxford – where not the least of his achievements was to win a tennis Blue, the highest sporting honour at the university – and went on to teach philosophy and literature at the University of Warwick. However, the green groves of academe soon turned sere for him, and in the mid-1980s he set up as a dealer in rare books. He has written previously about his life and adventures in the trade, and is the author of a clutch of novels with another on the way. A man of letters, then, as well as a dealer.

Gekoski  is wonderful company on the page, with a fine flair for storytelling and an eye for fascinating eccentricities among his colleagues and customers. And what an eccentric world it is he works in. Here are tales of unexpected deals going right and expected ones going fabulously wrong.

There is the decidedly shady chap called Tony, who seemed to be Italian and described himself as an “antique dealer from Wales”. He had a car boot full of first editions of DH Lawrence to offer for a thousand quid, in cash, a not inconsiderable sum in the 1970s. With a college friend acting as unlikely bodyguard, Gekoski met Tony in London, outside Luigi’s restaurant as arranged, and Tony opened the boot of his Volvo.

“The books were in what booksellers call ‘very good’ condition,” Gekoski writes, “which means not very good, showing signs of wear throughout, but not bad enough to be described as ‘good,’ which means terrible.” In the end he got the lot for £750, and afterwards felt bad for having haggled. All the same, that day a dealer was born.

Gekoski lets us in on the intricacies of the trade with candour and insouciance. As an example, he tells how in 1975 he bought his first copy of Sons and Lovers, dust-wrapped – a dust jacket in good condition is all-important – for $10 from a New York dealer, sold it three years later to Blackwell’s in Oxford for £42, and bought another copy in London for £75. This one he sold on a year later for £100 in order to buy “the ultimate copy”, from Blackwell’s, for £350.

In 1982, three years after purchasing it, Gekoski put it in his first catalogue as a rare book dealer and sold it for £1,950. See? That’s how it works.

One of the pleasures of the book is its lightness of touch. Unlike many memoirists who seek to ingratiate themselves by false modesty, Gekoski is genuine in his good-humoured modesty, and doesn’t hesitate to show himself in a less than glowing light.

In 2007, JK Rowling offered a handwritten and illustrated manuscript, one of seven she did for friends, of The Tales of Beedle the Bard – yes, that was the title – for auction at Sotheby’s, the proceeds to go to charity. Sotheby’s expected it to fetch “up to £40,000”. On the day of the auction, Gekoski and his wife were there. He gave his professional estimate of a sale price of “a hundred to one-fifty”. His wife guessed it would sell for £800,000. “‘There’s no Harry Potter collector who’d pay anything like that,’ I scoffed.” In the end, Jeff Bezos bought it for £1.95 million.

The elders of the trade were astonished, and immediately began to speculate on what the next one of the seven manuscripts would go for. The answer came when Rowling’s original publisher, Barry Cunningham, sold his copy, with a warm dedication by Rowling. It went for £368,750.

Gekoski’s book is not all Sotheby’s and light. He has a couple of hashes to settle, and he does it with a vengeance. He carries out a fine and well-deserved skewering of the absurdly overrated and anti-Semitic John Fowles. Matthew Evans, chairman of Faber & Faber and “a man of considerable acuity and probity” and “a slavish companion of the great and the good”, gets it in the neck too. Fabers had sought, by fair means and legal, to halt the sale, through Gekoski, of the correspondence of Charles Monteith, Evans’s predecessor. Evans had always longed for a gong, and eventually was made Baron Evans of Temple Guiting.

“The term ‘Guiting’,” Gekoski writes with a straight face, “derives from the Anglo-Saxon ‘gyte’ and means a dangerous outpouring.”

Guarded by Dragons – the title is taken from Saul Bellow’s novel Herzog – is both wonderful fun and a fascinating glimpse into an arcane trade now in jeopardy because of online bookselling. Gekoski’s arch villain is AbeBooks, which is “full of fake news, fake views, charlatans, incompetents and hucksters”. But another, unwitting, culprit is Oxfam; when an Oxfam bookshop, “with its peppercorn rent, free staffing and donated books”, opens in a village or town, “within two years the local second-hand bookshop will have closed”.

The chapter in which this unsettling nugget appears is titled “Stop! Thief!” It’s a funny old world, right enough.