(Distance travelled: 70-mile return trip. Profit (two years later): 1350 francs, sold through abebooks.com on account of Wodehouse’s inscription. Fact learned: Business can be mixed with pleasure, sometimes.)
Decision Time, Twickenham Bedsit, 1989
A single duvet on a double bed. It means that Jennifer has left. Eddy sees this but averts his gaze out of a nebulous notion of decency. Partly to put distance between us and so mitigate the mutual discomfort, I am making coffee in the kitchen area. The relationship has partly defined me for almost six years: we do, we don’t, we will, we won’t. It is going to be a testing time; reacquainting myself with the personal pronoun.
Avoiding eye contact by concentrating my efforts on not spilling the coffee, I hand Eddy a cup with an air of exaggerated calmness. There is a flurry of words about resignations and a change of scenes. Excited by the prospect of leaving it all for Paris, I, too, become garrulous. Coach timetables are scrutinised as the hypothetical seemingly turns to something more substantial. Little attention is given to the television which is left on so as to provide background noise should conversation dry up. But there is little chance of that happening while grandiose plans of book dealing and travel are being made and, to some extent, made up. Getting carried away, he almost misses the last bus back home. It’s nice of Eddy to have called. Our friendship has history and form.
We used to catch a bus and then the tube out to Heathrow Airport, ostensibly to watch planes. What we mostly did was wander Terminal 2, covertly helping ourselves to a panoply of baggage labels as well as anything else such as key rings and badges — all items offered by the airlines to passengers as freebies, which was how we also viewed them. Our Heathrow jaunts were considered self-made teenage entertainment in the late seventies; a successful Saturday afternoon culminating in a bag chock-full of tangled, multi-coloured paper that spoke of exotic destinations. Eddy was stopped on one occasion. I’d done a runner, leaving him to his fate. On the bus home, he relates the ‘bollocking’ that he’d been forced to endure.
Corcoran Irish Pub in Paris, 1990
Eddy has tipped me off. A Virginia Woolf? I don’t seek out the pub immediately, deferring an anticipated pleasure. I walk in desultorily fashion until Corcoran’s catches my eye. It is strange to walk off a French street and into an Irish pub. Irish by name but certainly not exclusively Irish by its patronage — inside is a mix of Brits and Parisians. Ireland is a country loved by the French; English boozers not commanding in gallic hearts anywhere near the same degree of romantic reverence. It can’t really be a Celtic thing either; the continent is hardly overrun with Welsh or Scottish pubs. Maybe it’s the Guinness label and their pure marketing genius.
The bar staff are unfailingly polite, graduates, perhaps, of a Guinness finishing school that produces clean-cut personable young men. In addition to pulling pints, they provide a social service for tourists and the homesick. This evening, I don’t class myself as either. I’m here for business.
I order a pint and sit down in the corner to the right of the pub’s door. This is where Eddy says he saw the book. The décor is typicaclass="underline" plenty of old pictures, mirrors, bric-a-brac, frames of old Guinness bottle labels and books to which I am drawn. There is a row of books on a single shelf running above my head. A frisson of excitement. Always the same. It’s not just the thought of finding a valuable book. It’s curiosity’s pull. Corcoran’s library comprises mostly small hardbacks lacking dust jackets.
Sipping Guinness, I survey the books whose spines have faded into a uniform appearance of greying grubbiness. On closer examination, beneath the dust, are the distinct hues of brown, green, red and blue. Book club editions, some with Boots Booklovers’ Library labels. George Eliot’s Romola in BCA plonked beside Board of Traffic Offences, third supplement to the 15th edition. And there, as Eddy has said, is a copy of To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf.
Taking care not to dislodge the surrounding titles, I reach up and extract it from the shelf. There is no dust jacket but it is a first, the book published by The Hogarth Press in 1927. I wipe the dust off the blue cloth, revealing gilt title lettering on the spine. There are no inscriptions. People still aren’t paying me any notice while I casually reach up to replace the book. Sipping more Guinness, I try to gather my thoughts.
A simple offer to buy it might raise suspicion. The thought to pocket it does cross my mind. Who would miss it? These books are for just for show, aren’t they? I could try to justify the theft but I can’t bring myself to actually steal a book. It feels wrong; it being a betrayal, as it were, of my trade. My moral compass, in spite of its innate dodginess, draws a distinction between a book and, say, a Cadbury cream egg whisked surreptitiously into a young boy’s pocket. What to do? Maybe I should come clean and offer to go halves with the pub on any profit accrued from its future sale. I finish my pint and leave with the intention of returning tomorrow with a canny plan.
I don’t need one.
Eddy has anticipated my prevarication. The following day in the Montparnasse McDonald’s, over a greedily consumed McBacon roll, the book is plonked down before me. He’d simply asked Simon, one of the bar staff with whom he is on friendly terms, to take home the book. As easy as you like.
It has a firm binding with no leaning to its spine, which is unusual given its previous resting spot. The book contents are in very good condition; no spotting or any marks. I get lucky in London. A dealer in Virginia Woolf pays over the odds because he has an authentic dust jacket lacking its book. Being a highly sought after title, its sale generates a good deal of wonga which I happily share with Eddy. A good proportion of his share will be spent on beer… in Corcoran’s.
Car Boot Sale at Mona, Anglesey, 2004
The sun is shining for once and it’s great to be tramping about this windswept green field in Wales. We arrive late and so have the excuse to lunch on local lamb burgers washed down with tea. Emily is eating candyfloss and Matty is absorbed in adding to his collection of Disney films. Making the most of this small window of pester free time, I look through a box of history books. I also notice some Enid Blytons and an Oxenham. None of them have dust jackets but the lady selling them says that she only wants £15 for the lot. Fair enough.
Later that afternoon, with the help of the internet and some reference books, it becomes clear that the Oxenham, despite its less than pristine state, is highly collectable. There isn’t another copy for sale on any of the main book websites.
After further deliberation and research, I upload the following details to my list of books in cyberspace.
Author: Elsie Oxenham
Title: Finding her family
Illustrator: W.S. Stacey