The Web Of Books – Hemingway's Ghost

Interior of MacLeod’s Books, Vancouver, B.C.

Two weekends ago I visited a retired antiquarian book dealer at his home in North Atlanta, where he continues to sell them via the world wide web. Like a true biblio-holic, books are everywhere: in the basement, living room, kitchen, den, the front foyer, stacked on tables, any flat surfaces…they have even established a beachhead in a recently constructed addition, a “Florida room” that’s been weather-sealed, glassed in, insulated and climate-controlled to keep the elements at bay, since book bindings and moisture have been sworn enemies since time immemorial.

The initial lure was his proffer of “World War II books”, which he’d heard I had a particular passion for (mostly because my father was a combat veteran of that conflict). As we sat in the “Florida room” idly chatting while the pressure of our lapsed acquaintance began to normalize, my host started to gauge my individual interests in the books I pulled off the shelf — one in which I learned he and his wife are mentioned (actually at great length).

“No,” he parried diplomatically, “that one’s not for sale.” He entreated me to open the book to the section where he and sa femme are mentioned, which I did, reading silently with growing delight. “This is more than just name dropping,” I said, “he goes on for pages about you!” This led to the telling of an annual junket he and his wife used to take to Cape Cod, where they fell in love with the climate, ambiance and geography ~ junkets which also doubled as buying trips to replenish his bricks-and-mortar store (of which I’d been a frequent customer over the years). On one trip, he said, they hit the proverbial motherlode of used book sales that every biblio-holic dreams of: the liquidation of the antiquarian section of the oldest public library in North America, the Sturgis Collection.

As if that were not satisfaction enough, he said, they were selling these gorgeous leather volumes with the distinctive bookplates and opulent backings for $2 each! Needless to say, my host and his wife set upon the tables and amassed a pile so large it took up a large space on the floor, which they established title to by throwing some sweaters and jackets over the stacks to mark them, in effect, “off limits”.

“And everybody else left them alone?”, I asked in disbelief. “They didn’t just throw off the covers and start grabbing your books for themselves?”

“No,” he shrugged, as casually as if I’d just inquired whether he’d paid his most recent electric bill yet. I blinked in mute astonishment that there are still places on earth where people respect the sanctity of property.

After he’d regaled me with the vagaries of the industry locally (the times when ~ unlike today post-Amazon ~ there were many other local used bookstores like his and the owners all had to fight over the same turf for new inventory; how he had sold his thriving enterprise to a daffy dame who ~ tho’ a book lover too ~ had almost run the business into bankruptcy such that he actually came out of retirement and bought it back from her), he brought forth a book he said he’d tentatively settled on a price for: a grammar school textbook owned by Margaret Mitchell which, as was her habit as a child, she signed with her first name “Margaret” in every one, but which in later years she had returned to and re-signed with her full name “Margaret Mitchell” as a sort of auctorial afterthought. Since the subject of Atlanta’s greatest (and most tragic) authoress was on the table, he expanded to say that a neighbor’s housemaid (no doubt an authentic High Confederate fixture worthy of Hattie McDaniel) had for years watched as the occupants chez Mitchell hauled box after box of old volumes from the house and unceremoniously dumped them in the garbage, after which she would stealthily come behind them and fish self-same books out of the trash and take them home, probably thinking what a “cryme” it was for white folks to waste perfectly good books that way.

The payoff came years later when she contacted my host and said she had long been ready to sell the amassed collection, but that no reputable local dealer had had the nerve to venture into her high-crime, predominantly black southside neighborhood to appraise it. My host had dashed any such hesitations and gone to see her forthwith. When he had taken stock of this one-of-a-kind prize he asked her, “What would you like to get for these books?” She told him ~ almost apologetically ~ that she needed a new car. He told me that with the subsequent sale of just one of the books, he bought her a decent used car for which she was eternally grateful and content.

In years to come he sold an autographed first edition of “Gone With The Wind” (not part of the trashed Mitchell haul, God forbid) to Cher’s road manager for, I think, $30,000. The manager had told him that Cher was a huge fan of Gone With The Wind and that he had wanted to get the chanteuse something to “really impress her”. I’m certain the road manager’s future with Cher Enterprises was assured with that gift.

Eventually it came time for me to plunge into the matter at hand and find some books to take home with me. He led me to the basement rooms where the meat of his Civil War and World War collections were housed. After glossing over a couple of the weightier books devoted to the Civil War ~ Battles And Leaders of The Civil War (in 3 volumes) ~ he left me to my own pursuits. Before leaving he pointed out another multi-volume set which contained the rosters of every Confederate soldier from Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia. Once I had mastered the roster’s classication system, I went by alphabetical listing through the Alabama volumes until I came to page 587 where I found, recorded for posterity, this entry:

Smith, E.A. 33rd Inf. Co.K. 1st Lt.

Confirming my great-grandfather’s assignment and rank in the CSA.

After a good couple of hours, I left with some must-have’s which, like any good biblio-holic, I didn’t know existed or that I wanted until I laid eyes on them: