These men—and one particular woman of note—were not mere publishers’ clerks moonlighting as amateur thieves or spies. They spoke and wrote dozens of languages, were as well read in literature as any professor or man of letters, could identify the handwriting and style, even the stray pen marks, of thousands of authors and book illustrators through the small lens of an opera glass. Little wonder the rest of their brethren looked at them with equal parts awe and bitterness. They have been called audacious criminals, but this is not entirely accurate—the greatest bookaneers stepped into a void and helped control the chaos caused by the broken copyright laws and the maelstrom of greed that rumbles just beneath the surface world of books.
My prevailing interest in the tales of the bookaneers ripened into outright fascination once I became a footnote in Whiskey Bill’s operations. I filled my notebooks with any scrap of gossip and partial anecdote related to them. I myself might have composed a treatise, On the Classification of Bookaneers. But despite my thirst for a fuller knowledge of their practices, I confess I still could not bring myself to open any of the mysterious volumes Bill delivered to me. I knew just enough to know they were no ordinary books. They were bound by hand, usually in thick brown leather, with the metal clasp and a different title each time of a book that did not exist. I felt his eyes always upon me and imagined that if I did unclasp one of the volumes, even in the privacy of my own chambers, my connection with this secret world would vanish there and then. I would rotate the thing in my hand, squeeze the leather, and conjure possibilities. Proof sheets of a highly touted novel not yet published. Manuscript pages missing for a hundred years from an unfinished masterwork. A decoy meant to trap a rival publishing spy.
Cast a look at my little cart. Some fancy the book a quaint, tame object, and it is not difficult to understand why. But take a longer look, Mr. Clover. Recall that when the first presses produced copies of the Bible, the scribes who had to spend years at a time on the same work, just as it had been done for centuries, streamed out from the monasteries with quills raised in the air, decrying the work of the devil. When one of the pioneering tradesmen printed certain words in red ink to emphasize them, it was proof that he had used his own blood. That was why the printers’ assistants began to be called “devils.” Soon printers were threatened with burning, and some were indeed put into the fire along with their equipment. From the beginning, the creation of the modern book was viewed as the work of Satan—an attempt to usurp the word of God.
No tameness there, and those were just the opening battles. In my boardinghouse, you took note of my copies of Mary Shelley’s astounding and wild novel written when she was still more girl than woman. When Frankenstein was published, it was considered terrible and disgusting, a waking nightmare, yet it defied all intellectual hysterics by entrancing millions of unsuspecting readers. The book took on a life and importance of its own, not unlike how the creature does in that novel. Not unlike the bookaneers growing into a powerful monster nobody in the trade knew how to domesticate.
Since the advent of the modern industry, there are no parties in the book world who are innocent of commodification, commercialization, and competition, for even the high-minded authors who come to it young and starry-eyed compromise with reality; the readers remain relatively unaffected and pure, though their money must change hands. To a bookaneer, the past, present, and future of literature was all fair game. To the fervent imagination of a bookseller and collector like myself, there was no end to what treasure and mystery might be pressed between two boards.
Perhaps it was not only superstition, not only the pure pleasure of guessing that stayed my hand from the simple act of opening Bill’s books. I now must wonder if I feared how what I’d find inside would change my life.
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I BRIMMED WITH a new feeling of self-confidence about my place among other bookmen, and I gleefully frequented the best London social clubs and coffeehouses that served the literary and artistic circles. In these settings I was to encounter most of the reputable bookaneers of a generation. These were heady days, long before Molasses became mixed up in a case of murder, before the Berne copyright negotiations, when there was plenty of business for everyone. The trust Whiskey Bill had shown in me led other bookaneers to transfer books anonymously through my busy bookstall, as well as hire me for assignments that matched my talents for handwriting identification. I could never know when I was being tested or not, and always made certain to perform my tasks in a timely and straightforward manner, indulging only in necessary questions. It was in this way that I came to have a minor but useful part in the world of the most surreptitious of bookmen. It was in this way that I crossed into the sphere of Pen Davenport.
Davenport was one of the three most infamous bookaneers in the world—the immortals, you might call them. An American by birth but long a citizen of the world with no home in particular, Davenport could often be observed keeping society among the London litterateurs. Then there was Kitten, a French lady who was considered the most determined and skillful of the set. You can still see a striking image of her on the third floor of the British Museum, in a painting of a green-cloaked damsel, for which she was used as a model by one of the great Bohemian painters of the past decades. The third bookaneer who was equally celebrated, Belial, an Englishman whose real name until recently was unknown, was rarely seen in public. He was always on a bookaneering mission, as far as anyone could tell. Davenport commanded interest and attention, but if you looked at Davenport you would look for Belial, and that gave the absent one of the pair a unique power.