Memories...

This photo is of me, taken 12 years ago at the California Int'l Antiquarian Book Fair, in San Francisco. I look half asleep -- or stoned, as someone was nice enough to point out -- and I think the people I'm talking to were from a book shop in Turin, Italy, but I can't swear to it.

It was when the fair was still at the Exposition Center, just south of the 80 as it fed onto the Bay Bridge. Everyone bitched about the venue because it was long and cold and the roof leaked when it rained, but I felt it fit the aura of the fair, perfectly. It was also easy to move into and out of.

I was there to pack and ship out books that had been sold at the fair. Both domestic and international, using FedEx. It wasn't a cheap service but it did fairly well, so we had it again in 2012, in LA, and 2013 back at the Exposition Center. But things sort of petered out and it was stopped. And I no longer traveled there, to help.

The first book fair I attended, with Heritage, was in 1999, when I flew up from LA with a book a client wanted to see. Worth $10,000. I wrapped it in tissue and bubble, shoved it into my backpack, flew into Oakland, caught Bart across to Civic Center and walked to the venue...about a mile and a half. Two of the sales people were horrified at how casual I'd been, going through Oakland, and said I should have grabbed a cab. I shrugged it off. I was already having my sense of value corrupted, by then.

I think it was at that fair that one of the owners, Lou Weinstein, met with a man who'd found a load of old books in the attic of a house he was buying in Kauai, Hawai'i. I'm not sure how they connected, but the man brought a box of them to the entrance, Lou met him, looked over a copy of Mark Twain's The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and offered the man $32,000 for all the books in the box. Said he'd write him a check, right then.

The man thought Lou was trying to scam him and spoke with Security. They knew Lou, laughed, and advised him to take the check. He did. Lou brought the box back to our booth, had one of the guys input that book straight into our system then let a fellow book dealer know he had a copy. Offered it for $65,000. They snapped it up. They had a client looking for that particular book, and I hear sold it to him for $100,000. It became the talk of the fair.

What made the book so valuable was, it was a first edition, its binding was nearly pristine, none of the pages were marked or foxed from age, and it had all of the original advertisements in the back. The other dealer's client needed this book to complete his collection of Mark Twain. So that book paid for our time at the fair, and the rest of the books in the box were gravy.

That uncorrupted my sense of value.