Kort and I went walking in downtown Plano to check out the historical festival going on. Nothing much going on there except for actors in vintage pioneer costumes. So we headed over to one of the antique stores which we'd never been in before. Ever since living in New Hampshire where amazing books, postcards and photos are to be found in Peterborough-area shops, I make it a point to slow down when browsing the bookshelves of antique stores. Well Nooks & Grannies had some great finds - an old Tuttle edition on Japanese flower arranging in a cloth case with bone closures, hand-bound (Japanese stitch) for $12.00 and a hard-to-find Peter Pauper hardback of Japanese haiku for $4.00. Someone who unloaded their old books at the antique shop definitely had an Orientalist thing going. I happened upon a vintage hardcover shell of Japanese fairytales that had been completely gutted. Needless to say, I was extremely disappointed. But a half hour later, as I was browsing thru the postcard and prints section, I found 11 full-color, watercolor plates that had been ripped out of that same book, individually plastic sheeted with a price sticker that indicated that the person pricing the inventory knew precisely what book those images came out of. So I assembled the shell with the individual pages and marched up to the guy in the shop who had tried to unload a vintage camera one me for a discount price for which film is no longer made (check the internet he said). The lady behind the counter tells me "the book came in that way." The man attempts to call the shopowner who has neither a cell phone or call waiting. He finally gets thru and asks her for a price for the collection. The book is damaged, missing pages and would need to be rebound. Each full-color page on its own was priced at $9.95. She said she'd give me the hardcover for free and give 20% off all of the pages which still came out to about $90. The man pushes the owner to drop the price, and she lowers it to 25%. I say no way, take my Peter Pauper and Tuttle and walk. When I got home and checked the internet for the price of this little 1913 edition, on the low end it came out to $35 and on the high end it came out to about $65. Uh-huh. The whole transaction annoyed me because of the lack of care for the original book and its integrity - pimping out each individual page for a wildly inflated price. This was a specialty book with Japanese artists providing the artwork, not a rare William Blake edition - but still - I was against the breaking up of the Blake edition that auctioned last year. While at the shop, I heard one of the senior volunteers working the cash desk say, "Call Sotheby's." Obnoxious.
What I love in old books are the embossed covers and the beautiful end pages, the simplicity of imagery, the low-tech production and the lack of slickness and the emphasis on craft. All things I love in a good modern-day chapbook.
While I love frequenting antique shops in small towns, it was creepy going thru the black and white photos of people's family portraits - babies and old ladies, ranch-style homes, happy memories, all sold off to modern day collectors at ridiculous prices. I believe in the karma of objects and while I pick up the occasional used book or item, postcard, of clothing for a deal, sometimes walking into these repositories of frozen memories has a strange effect.
No comments:
Post a Comment