Someday, in a post-pandemic future when the simple act of browsing the shelves of your favorite used book shop becomes a reality once again—along with myriad other activities so many of us used to take for granted—you may find yourself in the poetry section, let’s say, scouting through the letter J.
David Jones is next to LeRoi Jones, with Erica Jong and James Joyce further along the row of slender volumes. Curious (what is the point of browsing bookshelves otherwise?), you notice a there’s a pamphlet insinuated between the Joneses. Not with an erudite title like The Anathemata or a startling one like Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, but with the nondescript title Verses. A gathering of some two dozen poems and five translations, it is by a writer whose name isn’t in the least familiar, one Edith Newbold Jones, and, as such, is very modestly priced. The chances are good, if you even bothered to look at it in the first place, that you shrugged, put it back, and continued your hunt for more interesting books. But let’s say that, instead, you read a few pages while standing there, saw some promise in Ms. Jones’ poetry, and were inquisitive enough to add it to your trove and take it home.
The Wikipedia page on Edith Wharton, who was just sixteen when her father arranged in 1878 to privately publish her first book, Verses, makes no mention of the fact that this slim volume ranks among the rarest books in American literature. On a good day in the auction rooms, you might realize enough to buy the bookstore where you found your treasure, if you were so inclined.
Verses by Edith Newbold Jones, aka Edith Wharton, is just one example of a number of valuable books many of us have never heard of, books that even some of the most seasoned veterans among bibliophiles and booksellers might handle without knowing what it truly was. (Adrienne Rich’s true first book, Ariadne, A Play in Three Acts and Poems, published by her parents in 1939 when she was only ten years old, is also impossibly rare and easy to miss in its paper wrappers swathed in opaque glassine.) What makes such mysterious rarities all the more interesting is that the internet is often of little help when it comes to finding these hidden black pearls of the atheneum. They’re easy to buy and sell without their temporary owner having the slightest idea what passed through unwitting hands.
This was certainly the case when the estate of an unidentified antiques dealer in East Kingston, New Hampshire, sold another slim, nondescript letterpress pamphlet, entitled Tamerlane and Other Poems, to H. G. Webber Antiques of nearby Hampton. Given the poor quality of the production, printed in 1827 by one Calvin F. S. Thomas, who otherwise manufactured apothecary labels and similar ephemera, and given its authorship was identified only as “By a Bostonian,” one can understand why the 40-page chapbook was marked just $15 when it was bought by a Massachusetts collector who recognized it for what it was: Edgar Allan Poe’s surpassingly rare first book.
Once discovered, Tamerlane continued on a storied journey involving rare book dealers, auction houses, and collectors. While researching my new novel, The Forger’s Daughter, in which Poe’s elusive debut plays a central role, I became fascinated by the people through whose hands the twelve known copies of this book have passed during the nearly two hundred years since it was issued—from philanthropists to thieves, naifs to pundits, attic prospectors to archivists in temperature-controlled repositories. It has been studied by Poe experts, reproduced in lovely facsimile editions, periodically displayed in some of our most renowned museums and libraries, but the basic mysteries enveloping Tamerlane—the rarest book in American literature—remain unsolved. The number of copies printed may never be known, nor what the financial arrangements were between the penniless Poe and young Calvin Thomas, nor why, to Poe’s chagrin, the ambitious if adolescent poems never garnered the attention of reviewers. For me, it’s still a matter of astonishment that Poe, starting from such obscure beginnings, would manage to write in the mere twenty-two years that followed before his untimely death, such influential masterpieces as “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and “The Purloined Letter”—too many to list here—that would forever secure his place in the pantheon.
Beyond Wharton, Rich, and Poe, there are other unusual first books by major writers whose identities are shrouded in pseudonymous fogs. Take Hike and the Aeroplane, published in 1912 by Frederick A. Stokes, New York, a first novel by Tom Graham, who would eventually go on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Since nobody by this name ever won the Nobel, it begs the question, Who is this Tom Graham?
Aside from the glimmerings of a prose style that the writer would later develop into distinctively his own, the only hint as to the true authorship of this book is in the dedication. “To Edwin and Isabel Lewis,” it reads, “The Author’s oldest friends.” And while one would have to pay upwards of $10,000 for a nice copy of Sinclair Lewis’s Hike and the Aeroplane at auction, there is always the slim but plausible chance you might find one scrupulously, if erroneously, shelved somewhere between Nadine Gordimer and Graham Greene, priced far less than that.
James Weldon Johnson was an influential civil rights activist, a lawyer and educator ahead of his day. The first African American executive secretary of the NAACP, the first black professor at NYU, Johnson served for a time as the US consul to Venezuela and Nicaragua, wrote what would become known as the “Negro National Anthem”—“Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing”—with his musician brother Rosamond, and participated in the Harlem Renaissance. He also wrote a novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, the story of a biracial man navigating an America festering with racism and discrimination, published in 1912 by Sherman, French, & Company of Boston. Because he was concerned that Ex-Colored Man might ruin his diplomatic career, Johnson published the work anonymously, to a less-than-receptive audience. Fortunately, because Alfred A. Knopf republished it in 1927 with its author’s name provided and an introduction by Carl Van Vechten, the book has been relatively easy to find ever since. That true 1912 first edition, however, in its drab cloth binding, is scarce, and, interestingly, its condition is usually the worse for wear—a fact that strongly suggests it was read over and over again, despite its controversial subject matter.
Tom Congalton, proprietor of Between the Covers Rare Books in New Jersey, tells a splendid story about a bookseller friend in Atlanta who, while browsing the stacks of another local dealer some 25 years ago, came upon a book published in Galesburg, Illinois in 1904, with a fairly racy title for its day, In Reckless Ecstasy, priced $1.00. The dealer figured its author, Charles A. Sandburg, might be Carl Sandburg’s father or another relative, and decided to buy it as an oddity some Sandburg aficionado might like. “The owner wasn’t in the shop,” Tom recalls, “and since the mutually agreed upon discount between the dealers was 20%, but the clerk was only authorized to extend 10% off, he asked that it be put on the ‘hold shelf.’ It was the principle of the thing.” When, a month or two later, he mentioned it in passing to a rare book specialist in New England, he was told to rush back and pray the book was still there, as it happened to be Carl Sandburg’s extremely rare first book. He did, it was there, as was the owner, and he bought it for 80 cents. In Reckless Ecstasy passed through the hands of two more booksellers—boomeranging from the East to West Coast and back again, to find a home with Carter Burden, one of the great collectors of twentieth century literature. It now resides in the Morgan Library.
I am sure the Morgan possesses, as well, a copy of Maggie, A Girl of the Streets by Johnston Smith. Printed for the author in 1893 and bound in paper wrappers, its press run was an ambitious 1100 copies, though apparently only two were sold through Brentano’s and now there are only about 35 known copies of Johnston Smith’s first novel—that is, Stephen Crane’s—in existence.
Why writers would want to cloak themselves in pseudonyms or publish anonymously when their first books are presented to the public is a question with many possible answers. Poe probably didn’t want his father, who was upset with him about his gambling debts, to know his whereabouts. Edith Newbold Jones wouldn’t marry Edward Wharton and take his name until seven years after Verses appeared. And another three dozen would pass before she would be the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for The Age of Innocence, by which time her maiden name—along with her vanity press debut—was largely forgotten. Johnson had a growing reputation to protect.
First books are not alone among those by well-known writers that are veiled in some kind of obscurity. A second book can have the same fate. To wit, Charles Norden’s 1937 novel Panic Spring, was in fact Lawrence Durrell’s second book. After the dismal sales of Durrell’s maiden voyage, Pied Piper of Lovers, his publisher Faber & Faber wanted the author to have a fresh start, and convinced him to publish this new one, set on the imaginary Greek island of Mavrodaphne, using an imaginary name. Copies of the American edition in dust jacket, published by Covici-Friede, are scarce; the Faber edition in jacket is all but impossible to find, proving, perhaps, that pseudonyms don’t always work. (By the way, if you ever come upon a watercolor of Corfu, the isle on which Mavrodaphne is apparently based, signed by one Oscar Epfs, don’t be fooled—the artist is actually Lawrence Durrell, who was an accomplished painter.)
Sometimes maiden names and pseudonyms have nothing to with hidden value. A fairly experienced book collector might encounter Willa Cather’s The Fear That Walks by Noonday, published in 1931 by Phoenix Book Shop, and reason rightly that her greatest books—My Ántonia, The Professor’s House, Death Comes for the Archbishop—were behind her, and that this was just another of the many limited editions she signed over the years. Bound unpretentiously in dark olive-green cloth with a paper spine label, the volume doesn’t hold a candle to the luxurious deluxe editions that Cather’s friend and publisher Alfred Knopf brought out. One might fearlessly walk away from The Fear That Walks without a second thought. But to do so would be to walk away from the author’s rarest book, of which fewer than ten examples of the thirty originally published remain “uninstitutionalized,” to use the parlance of the trade. And the institutions, i.e. libraries, which own those twenty-odd examples are unlikely ever to put them on the market.
Other volumes are rare not because their authors’ names have been altered or erased but because their influence has been overshadowed or forgotten, and their books lost. How many collectors of mysteries, hard-boiled crime novels, and detective fiction—that genre invented by the “Bostonian” who penned Tamerlane—possess a first printing of Snarl of the Beast by Carroll John Daly, published in 1927 by Edward J. Clode? While its striking front cover art that depicts a man in silhouette running down a cobbled street might entice you to pull it down off the bookstore shelf, were you lucky enough to glimpse a copy, chances are you might put it back, looking instead for Hammett and Chandler, Highsmith and Mosley. Once a popular author, Daly is deemed to have invented the very voice of hard-boiled fiction, creating a private eye named Race Williams who precedes Sam Spade by several years. If by chance, though, you decided to buy your find—one of the few surviving copies of Snarl in the first state jacket, priced $2.00 and with an advertisement for Richard H. Watkin’s Half a Clue on the rear flap—you might find it’s worth in the tens of thousands of dollars.
Examples of such rarities abound. Even the rarest books do eventually surface, like species once thought to be extinct that are now and again sighted. As it happens, copies of Poe’s Tamerlane, known as the “Black Tulip” or Holy Grail of American letters, seem to surface once in a generation or so. It seems unimaginable that there isn’t a genuine thirteenth copy out there, mislaid in a stack of seed catalogs or tied with faded ribbon in a parcel of unread family documents from the turn of the last century or stuck in the back of another larger old book. Given that the last such copy came to light in 1988, I think it’s safe to say we’re due. Who knows but that somebody going through old boxes of books while sheltering at home might find a copy bought years ago by a great-great grandparent’s parent.
One of my personal habits as a fisher of books (to rephrase the old Gotham Book Mart motto, Wise Men Fish Here) is to search bookshops not only for the authors and titles I know, but to keep a keen eye out for writers about whom I know nothing. Haunting bookstores, whether new, used, or rare, in person or even online, can provide the inquisitive an education that cannot be had elsewhere. And when we are able to go—masked if Covid-19 demands it and the conditions are safe; unmasked if the pandemic has passed—to second-hand book shops, to yard and church and library sales, to book fairs, and even to the dim corners of antique stores where there are a couple of shelves of display books in a barrister bookcase, it will be a memorable day. One on which the discovery of lost and elusive works will be if not a probability, then never, at least, unimaginable.
—Author’s note: I would like to thank Kevin Johnson (Royal Books), Lorne Bair (Lorne Bair Rare Books), Heather O’Donnell (Honey & Wax Booksellers), Jim Cummins (James Cummins Rare Books) and particularly Tom Congalton (Between the Covers Rare Books) for the excellent advice and anecdotes that only years in the stacks can inspire. —BM
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