Rare book or curiosity?

A Hastings-on-Hudson individual owns W.E.B. DuBois's own copy of The Souls of Black Folk. It's inscribed by DuBois to Hastings resident Kenneth Clark, and by Clark to his daughter. It's an early edition of the 1903 classic -- almost small enough to fit in the palm of your hand, with simple, sinuous ornamentation on a dull cloth cover. And here's the tragedy: smoke and water damage. The owner tells me it's worthless.

Moose Murders and rare books

Thinking a bit more about Louisa’s question, I realized I made the error of assuming valuable books = first editions. Not so! It doesn’t matter what edition a book is, if it’s scarce and the marketplace decrees that it’s valuable. The view of the marketplace is important. There may be only one copy extant of, say, the 1910 Kenyon College yearbook (I have old Mr. Steinfield’s, which is why I bring it up) but if nobody’s going to pay me a lot for it, then it isn’t valuable just because it's rare.

So clearly scarcity counts more than firstness. Thinking of scarcity brings me to Moose Murders, the legendary play that closed on its 1983 first night to some of the worst reviews ever to appear in the English language. (There was something about the play that encouraged hyperbole; critics were trying to outdo each other.) The morning after the night before, Not-Yet-Lydia’s father and I encountered Frank Rich’s Times review and one of us read it to the other.

I have wondered, how many people in New York City today claim to have been at that first night performance? Probably at least twice as many as the theater could have held. A month after that first night and his first night review, Frank Rich wrote another review, which contains this comment: What makes certain bombs into legends? It's hard to say, precisely - they don't wear fur coats. Once it was a mark of distinction for a play to close in one night, but in these troubled times even that phenomenon is a sad commonplace. Some theater people define legendary bombs by the amount of money that went down the drain, or the high caliber of talent expended, or the extravagant foolhardiness of the esthetic mission. Others let Joe Allen, the theater district bistro, be the final arbiter: that restaurant has a whole wall bedecked with posters from a select group of famous turkeys. Whatever the definition, it can't be quantified - a flop just must have a certain je ne sais quoi to rise to legendary status. But what I do know is this: the only Playbill I've saved thus far in this decade is the one from ''Moose Murders.''

So: what remains from Moose Murders is that program. Ten or so years ago, I did see a rare book dealer advertising one for more than a thousand dollars, so clearly notoriety helps too. If Mr. Steinfield had been a mass murderer instead of a kindly Ohio antiques dealer, that Kenyon yearbook might be worth something.

I have read that if all the people who say they voted for JFK in 1960 actually had voted that way, he would have won the election with 80% of registered voters instead of by <.1% of votes cast. Perhaps the ranks of opening night attendees of Moose Murders have swelled the same way.

Speaking of rarities: I could not find John Simon's review of Moose Murders online. Maybe his language scalds the electrons of the internet.

Tomorrow's valuable first editions

Blogging about rare American books for Riverrun, Louisa asks: What relatively common books should we be tucking away in our attics to delight the book collectors of 75 years hence?

Oh, what a different world we live in! I have American firsts, with dj, of three Francoise Sagan novels, from the '50s, and they're not worth much. Maybe ten bucks on a good day. If you visit Gordon Beckhorn's bookstore -- just around the corner from Riverrun at the end of the bridge in Hastings -- you'll find "valuable" firsts of in-print detective stories. Somehow the very idea of making this appraisal, and putting dozens of books away in cool dry storage, reminds me of buying, you know, Franklin Mint "investments." Who has enough cool dry space to set aside for 75 years?

Here are some mystery or sci-fi authors, first editions of whose first books are, I predict, gaining in value. James Lee Burke, Lee Child, Neil Gaiman, Sue Grafton, P.D. James, John Lescroart, Laura Lippman, Terry Pratchett, Ian Rankin, Peter Robinson. I'm specifying firsts only of the first, because subsequent titles for those authors would have had much larger first printings. Sue Grafton is translated into 26 languages!

I read somewhere that Terry Pratchett's books used to be the most shoplifted books in Great Britain, and I always tell people that when I am trying to hand-sell them. I would be intrigued by having books signed by both James Lee Burke and his wife, since his hero, Dave Robicheaux, kills off his wives like crazy. Or would Burke be like Roger Tory Peterson? Peterson dedicated his first book to his wife X, his second book to his wife Y, and subsequent books to "my [unnamed] wife" or others.

Firsts by Stephen Jay Gould, Carl Sagan, and E.O. Wilson will probably appreciate. Wouldn't it be cool to have their books inscribed to each other? Same with some of those detective writers. Robert B. Parker and Linda Barnes give shout-outs to each other's characters in their Boston-based books. Marcia Muller and Bill Pronzini's detectives also refer to each other in their respective series, but Muller and Pronzini are married to each other. Those would both be nice double inscriptions to have, but now that I think of it, all the shout-outs come in later novels that have huge first printings and so probably will never be worth much, inscriptions or not.

I doubt that memoirs appreciate: the first printings are too big. The first time I ever ran a used book sale, there were a half-dozen copies of A Long Row of Candles by C.L. Sulzberger. At least two were inscribed -- the sale was at All Souls Church at 80th and Lexington, lots of well-connected east siders. That title showed up for years at used book sales and remained unsold. There was also a longtime surplus of The Little Drummer Girl -- a stinker by John LeCarre. However, here's a first of the U.K. edition (Gollancz) of LeCarre's Spy Who Came in from the Cold: $3250. It probably helps that it's widely thought of as the best spy novel of all time.