Rick Gekoski: Tolkien's Gown
Sep. 8th, 2009 09:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustPart of my haul from the charity shops of Richmond: bought mostly for its wonderful title, but also because it was only a couple of quid, and random pages were entirely readable.
Gekoski is a rare book dealer; that is, he buys and sells individual books which are desirable because they are first editions, or inscribed by the author, or in some other way which has nothing to do with the quality of the text. He is perfectly capable of talking about the content of books; I loved this, for example:
But this is almost entirely not what this book is about. More typical is the chapter which begins with Gekoski's catalogue entry for a copy of the first English edition of Lolita, signed by Nabokov to his cousin, priced at £3,250. This drew a response from Graham Greene, enquiring, if this copy - "which isn't even the true first edition" - is worth so much, how much was his own signed copy of the original Paris edition worth. Gekoski's reply, in full, was:
And so on. The book is based on a series of radio talks, but rewritten; in the absence of the archive clips which illustrated the broadcast version, Gekoski has had room to extend his own stories, and he tells them well. It's an entertaining book rather than a life changing one, though I admit to a certain frisson at even a third hand contact with these treasures - and yes, Gekoski did at one point own Tolkien's gown.
Gekoski is a rare book dealer; that is, he buys and sells individual books which are desirable because they are first editions, or inscribed by the author, or in some other way which has nothing to do with the quality of the text. He is perfectly capable of talking about the content of books; I loved this, for example:
"Like many readers, I never finished The Satanic Verses. On every page I found something to admire: an aperçu, a fabulously wrought phrase, an odd angle of vision that made me smile. It had genius, but there was something unrelentingly same-y about the prose, and the succession of scenes, that made me feel that, after a few hundred pages, I'd had enough. I wasn't disappointed exactly, just prematurely satisfied.""prematurely satisfied" - oh, yes! I've read books that I've really liked and admired, yet felt no urge to look for more by the same author - now I have a phrase to describe my reaction.
But this is almost entirely not what this book is about. More typical is the chapter which begins with Gekoski's catalogue entry for a copy of the first English edition of Lolita, signed by Nabokov to his cousin, priced at £3,250. This drew a response from Graham Greene, enquiring, if this copy - "which isn't even the true first edition" - is worth so much, how much was his own signed copy of the original Paris edition worth. Gekoski's reply, in full, was:
Dear Mr Greene,
More. Would you care to sell it?
Yours sincerely,
Rick Gekoski
And so on. The book is based on a series of radio talks, but rewritten; in the absence of the archive clips which illustrated the broadcast version, Gekoski has had room to extend his own stories, and he tells them well. It's an entertaining book rather than a life changing one, though I admit to a certain frisson at even a third hand contact with these treasures - and yes, Gekoski did at one point own Tolkien's gown.
