We talked for a moment about what to do. “She’ll come home with me,” Ralston said. “It ain’t the Brown Palace, but she can rest easy till Denise gets home.”
We helped her out to the car. Ralston gave me a paper with his telephone number and told me to call him later. I leaned down and spoke to her through the open window. “One last question, ma’am. Do you have any idea who bought those books?”
“Yes, of course. He was looking for fast money, so he sold them to a bookstore.”
There it was, the only ray of light in what had so far been a damned hopeless story. If a book dealer had bought that entire library for thirty dollars, even allowing for the much cheaper values of the time, it had certainly been one hell of a fraud. But what did that matter now? Like Richard Burton and Charlie Warren, like her mother and father, the garbageman and his horse, Gallant, the Boise relatives, and all the others, that bookseller would have died a long time ago.
Then she said something that hit me like a slap. “When I think of those awful book people—those Treadwells—how can they live with themselves?”
It was the hint of present tense that turned my head around.
“Mrs. Gallant…are you telling me that place is still in business?”
“Of course it is, it’s been there forever. Haven’t you ever heard of Treadwell’s? It’s a den of thieves, passed down in the same rotten family for a hundred years.”
CHAPTER 5
If I had spent more time on the road I might have known about Treadwell’s. A bookman who travels always picks up local scuttlebutt, and one who travels constantly eventually knows everything about everybody. The notorious get reputations, and booksellers do love to talk candidly with a colleague they can trust.
In an hour I had made six calls to dealers I knew around the country, and I had several pages of notes on Treadwell’s Books. I had its address, its phone number, and a good description of its general layout. Its Yellow Pages ad boasted of two million books on three large floors in an old redbrick building on Eastern Avenue just off South Broadway, in an area of downtown Baltimore not far from Johns Hopkins Hospital. Over the years I had been in so many bookstores like that, I could almost see it. Dark stairwells, creaky floors, narrow aisles, deep and dusty shelves. Books double- and triple-shelved, books stacked on end, piled on top of the overflowing bookcases, with another overflow on the floor at the end of each section. Books on every conceivable subject and a few on topics nobody could have imagined. It was possible in such a store that some of the titles in the back rows of each section had not been touched in decades.
The store’s history was colorful and long. It stretched back across much of the century and had spawned generations of bookpeople, beginning with old Dedrick Treadwell, the king of knaves in that turn-of-the-century book world. The Treadwells had always had a dubious reputation in the book world. “They’d pay as much as anybody if they were bidding against other dealers and the books were good,” said a bookman in the D.C. area who knew them well. “But if it’s just them and some poor know-nothing who’s just inherited a houseful of books…Well, I’m not one to call another man a crook…let’s just say I’ve heard stories, and let it go at that.”
In his early days, old man Treadwell had operated out of various hole-in-a-wall shops. In the early thirties he had leased the building on Eastern Avenue with an option to buy. He had clearly set his sights on bigger game, and soon he and his son were sucking up books by the tens of thousands, all over the East Coast. They were voracious buyers, insatiable raptors of the book trade. “God knows how many books that we now consider classic and sell for four figures were blown out of there for nickels and dimes then,” one dealer said. They were of the turn-‘em-fast schooclass="underline" buy cheap, sell cheap, get the cash, move on, and buy some more.
I love stores like that: I can spend hours and thousands of dollars in those dusty, half-lit book dungeons. But they are becoming severely endangered as rents go ever higher and downtown space is consumed by high-traffic, high-profit enterprises. Soon they will be like the people of Margaret Mitchell’s Old South, no more than a dream half-remembered.
The first Treadwell must have imagined the trends decades ago. He bought the building and his son had sons and flourished there. They rode out the Depression, the war years were good, and the postwar even better. The second generation died and a third came along. A few of them stayed in the trade; most left to find, they hoped, a brighter future elsewhere. Today the managing partners were brothers of the fourth generation, Dean and Carl Treadwell. I got good descriptions of both from a dealer in Chicago. “Dean is a big, burly fellow with a beard,” my friend said. “Carl is a smaller guy, quieter, but you get the feeling there’s a lot going on with Carl—some anger, maybe even an occasional original thought. Carl gives you the feeling of still water running deep, and Dean would rather come off as a hail-fellow-well-met, salt-of-the-earth type. Dean likes to pretend they’re just rubes, but make no mistake, there are two cunning minds under all that bullshit he puts on. And they do know their books.”
Maybe so, but in the current generation, Treadwell’s had suddenly fallen on hard times. “Carl’s the culprit,” said the guy in Washington. “You didn’t hear it here, but he’s gotten himself into bad company—gamblers, thugs, the Baltimore mob. Gangsters may even own a piece of that store now. I heard Carl lost his pants in a poker game last year.”
“You should get out more,” said my friend in Chicago. “Everybody knows about the Treadwells.”
For another hour I meditated over what I had learned. There have always been a few crooks in the trade. As one old bookman put it, there’s a bad apple in every town. Sometimes he’s an obvious con man dripping with charm. He may be the cold thief who walks casually out of a bookstore with a ten-volume Conan Doyle tucked into every inch of his pants, coat, and shirt, the signed volume crammed desperately into some dank body cavity, and immediately finds another bookseller eager to hold his nose and buy it, fifty cents on the dollar, no questions asked. He is also that rival bookseller who must know a hot book when he sees one. He wears more faces than Lon Chaney in the best of his times. He’s the sweet-faced kid who jacket-clips worthless book club editions and sells them as firsts to the Simon Pure collector. Occasionally he’s a renegade, thriving on intimidation and operating from the trunk of a car. He may be any kind of personality, but that glitch in his character keeps him working the shady side of the street forever. His spots never change.
As I grew into my business I learned how gray it all is. There is such an eye-of-the-beholder mentality in the book trade that it plays perfectly into the hands of the enemy. What must be paid as a rock-bottom minimum to keep it just above the level of fraud? Should it matter if a two-hundred-dollar book is in tiny demand compared with a book that sells easily for the same two hundred? How much may be deducted for condition, and by whose standard must condition be measured? We don’t like to admit it but the flimflam man has a trait that’s all too common to the rest of us. The degree of his crookedness is a wild variant, and our own generosity can vary as much from one of us to the next.
It’s no wonder that the trade is such a warm, fertile place for pond scum; what’s amazing is how little of it you actually find there. Most dealers pay 30 to 40 percent, straight across the board, which is certainly decent, considering the overhead. Many do scale back what they pay because they may have those books for years. Some of them may never sell. And there’s one thing that will always separate us from a cheese-pushing hose artist: we never lie on either end, buying or selling, and he always lies—on either end, both ends, and in the middle.