Diary: Sven Birkerts, Catalogue

Too tired to read, but too jangled yet for easy sleep, I brought an old Lame Duck Books catalogue to bed last night. Wherein I found two inset images on facing pages, one of the front cover of Walter Benjamin’s Einbahnstrasse (One Way Street) (Berlin, 1928, $8,500) and the other the original cover of his Habilitationsschrift, or PhD thesis, the “Ursprung des Deutschen Trauerspiels,” “The Origin of German Tragic Drama,” (Berlin, 1928, $6,500)—I had to sit up and adjust my glasses for a clearer look. Then, later, a full-page color reproduction of a manuscript page by Jorge Luis Borges (from an essay on Francisco de Quevedo), the whole manuscript on offer for $125,000. Trust me, I could keep listing. There is distinct pleasure for me in this nomenclature, these details: “Holograph manuscript, nine small quarto sheets.” Not that I could—or would—ever buy such a thing, and not that I care for the fine points of the items being described. What I care for is the fact of description. But that’s not all of it either, no. It matters to me that there is a forum, a milieu—however limited—within which these particulars matter, and I both despise and celebrate the extravagance of these market valuations. Despise because these books and manuscripts are priced for rare-books libraries and collectors, who consider these remnants not as themselves, but as components of their larger holding, which has value according to its comprehensiveness. God forbid someone should buy any of these offerings to stroke its pages and get a proximate high from its greatness or rarity! No, for some of the biggest buyers these objects are like corn futures.

But I am also lifted, roused, moved even, by the strange specific intersections of history and artistic or intellectual initiative. What a chasm exists between, say, Borges at his desk in 1948, writing by hand on sheets of notebook paper, and my short burst of intrigued absorption. Between the two, as between imaginary brackets, is the whole complicated narrative of how art acquires value. I couldn’t delineate the sequence if I tried. I’m content to siphon from it, drawing off whatever will strengthen the case to myself: that there is, at least potentially, value in the act of writing that includes but also goes beyond the satisfactions of putting words together and finding readers for them in one’s own time and place. Not egotistically—it’s not like I imagine future catalogues advertising my legal-pad drafts of this or that essay. But I do take heart, solace, from any evidence that the contingencies of reception—whether something is in-print or out-of-print, reviewed or not reviewed—are not necessarily the last word; that a wayward copy of a work deemed worthless in its day can survive a gauntlet of time and arrive at the judgment of posterity. That there is a process analogous to water finding its level, even if that level is marked in dollars and cents.

Of course, I don’t think all these things as I’m turning the pages. I’m zooming in on names and titles, playing associational trivia with this obscurantist bric-a-brac. I can’t help myself. Did I know J. K. Huysmans had a book called La Cathedrale? No. But I have a flash of myself in one of my first Ann Arbor rooming-house setups, assembling my books, maybe two shelves’ worth, and then quite proudly arranging on the rug my small collection of black-spined Penguin paperbacks, one of which was Huysmans’ Against Nature, which I had bought at Centicore Books on Liberty Street because I had been intrigued by the cover description heralding the novel as a “masterpiece of decadence,” or something equally appealing. And I had read it, preening myself on how far off the beaten collegiate track I was venturing …

But as I say, the flash is momentary, and I have a dozen others as I page through: Hesse’s Der Steppenwolf—there is the summer before my senior year in high school, the hillside at Cranbrook where I went to read, setting myself up to be found should the right finder happen along; and a color plate of the dust jacket of Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust, which I never read (mea culpa!) but the design of which reminds me instantly of a mint-condition first edition of his Pylon I found at the Association of American University Women’s huge book sale in State College, when I was starting to get more serious about this sort of thing, and then looking it up later in the big volumes of the B.P.I. (Bookman’s Price Index) to find it listed at $60 (though I don’t know whatever happened to that edition); and, with a genuine, doubly sorrowful wince, a picture of the Shakespeare & Company first printing of Joyce’s Ulysses, which Lame Duck has on offer for $32,500. The catalogue reproduces what the caption calls the beautiful “Hellenic blue wrappers,” which remain embossed on my retinas, for it was that color blue that caught my eye in a book barn in Maine years ago when I was traveling and book hunting with my book-besotted friend Whitney. I extracted the item from a bin and with the appearance of utmost casualness carried it into a mote-bright corner (it really was a barn). Alas, it was not the first printing, no—it was the fifth or sixth—but I quashed my great disappointment and bought it anyway, and then with cavalier nonchalance I presented it to my friend. No doubt I had a reason—I owed him for gas, or maybe he had something I liked—but once given it was gone. Back in those days I thought that only first editions had value. It did not occur to me to look this up. Not then. And when I did a long time later I found that it traded in the low thousands—the low thousands!—but my dear old friend Whitney and I had parted ways some time since, and …

This is how it is with books and catalogues and, sometimes, dear friends. Turning the catalogue’s pages last night I had the feeling that I was following a long thread around myriad twists and turns, through a structure standing not in space but in time, not necessarily making my way toward anything, no implicit destination, but rather making my way forward just in order to admire the devious elaboration of the thing.

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Sven Birkerts will publish The Miro Worm and the Mysteries of Writing in October with Arrowsmith Press.

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