CURIOSITIES:WHEN IT COMES to collecting signed books, the internet has nearly ruined the opportunity for surprise. It has become harder to find something special in a box at a garage sale, because the web makes experts of everybody. Prices can be compared, and full descriptions written in the precise abbreviations of the book trade.
But if you look hard enough, for long enough, you can still unearth buried rarities. This popped up on Bookfinder.com last year: "Friel, Brian: Living Quarters. London, Boston, Faber & Faber, 1978. 95 p. 8to. Original paperback.; sig.; 1. Ed." Unlike novelists, Brian Friel is not on any circuit. You will not find him sitting at a table in Easons on O'Connell Street on a Saturday. There are few "limited editions" or "artist's proof on velum, numbered and signed by the author". He is a literary giant, but his fingerprints are found almost entirely in his works, not in the scrawl on the pages of published plays.
So I confirmed my order with the German bookseller, who replied that the sale - at a mere €40 - also included a letter written by Friel. "I don't know if I have mentioned this in my description." He hadn't.
Sure enough, when the package arrived, a letter fell out. A rarity sliding from a rarity; reclaimed from a shelf somewhere in Cologne, where it had been mistaken for just another minor curiosity. On Friel's personal notepaper, and dated 1984, it expresses his hope that the book arrives safely. A short note, banal in a way, but it is unique all the same.
Shane Hegarty