FERGINS
Robbery of a publisher—I said that if he regarded that as a crime it was because his education was limited.
MARK TWAIN
You meet all kinds in the black arts—I mean printing.
A PRINTER’S DEVIL AT THE CROWN
If you should ever meet people who tell you they know something about the bookaneers, be skeptical. They probably deal in myths and fables. That most people have never heard of the bookaneers and never will stems from the bookaneer’s unique position in that long, twisty, and mostly invisible chain of actors that links author to reader. It will be the bookaneers’ collective fate to have appeared and disappeared with only traces left in our atmosphere, like so many meteors. The story I have to tell is about a particular bookaneer of the most extraordinary skill—the last true representative, some might say, of that name and tribe. My account is true in all particulars, because I was there.
The story has no beginning—I mean no single obvious starting point—but stories ought to try to begin somewhere. London will do, then. My bookstall in Hoxton Square was near the corner of Bowling Green Lane. I grew it, cultivated it, and—excuse my sentimentality—loved it for years to the exclusion of almost everything else. My stall backed onto a fence, the iron spokes of which were clothed with moss in every variety and shade of green and brown from two hundred years of growth. A church bell tolled periodically from one end of the street, a fire engine clanged from the other, and my books were situated comfortably between these sounds of spiritual succor and earthly warning.
Around people who enjoy books, the bashful disposition of my youth grew into a sociable one. Strangers talking over piles of books do not remain strangers for long. Had I never learned to like books, I would have become the dullest sort of hermit. When I was younger than you, Mr. Clover, I set myself for the law, persuaded that a profession in which books were carried about and consulted at all times would have to be agreeable. But the harder I tried, the more that discipline’s endless doctrines made my head ache. I quit with no plan in sight.
I’ve never been able to bear asking for help when I need it most, and I needed it then. What a spot to be in, with no prospects and no sympathetic family member. Fortunately there was a bookshop. Every young man’s story should have a bookshop. This one was not far from where I was boarded. I spent so much of my time inside—hiding, I suppose, from my friends and my parents’ friends, from my landlord, from having to justify my decisions and, high heaven forbid, make new ones—I might well have been counted as an employee. Soon enough I was. Stemmes, the book collector who owned the place, probably felt he had no choice but to invite me to apprentice. For more than three years I slept in a windowless chamber beneath the shop. I packed crates, pushed brooms, and tried to avoid falling from old shop ladders while wielding my duster, but I also learned about book values and imperfections, about which auctions to attend and how to win the best volumes, about how to search for the right book for a customer and, when necessary, the right customer for a book. I enjoyed every minute of the work. Well, that is not quite right. I disliked being closed up in dark rooms all day and growing unused to sunlight while trying to please a gloomy, stubborn man who would spout maxims such as “exaggeration is the octopus of the English language,” which I assumed must mean something. When I learned that an outdoor bookstall in a leafy square was shuttered, I gathered every cent I had in this world and purchased the municipal license, its shelves, and its stock.
My natural gifts for salesmanship may have been lacking, but they grew with the delight I had in my humble enterprise. I kept five sets of stacking compartments of shelves, with my chair in the middle, and an inventory tailored to the enduring loyalists who came by several times a week. Unlike other bookstall keepers, I never chased anyone away for wanting to read a chapter or two under the shelter of my awning on a hot or rainy day. In fact, readers too poor to make a purchase had been known to come to my stall every afternoon for two weeks until a novel was finished.
My parents never recovered from my dropping out of the law. Once, I overheard them speaking in their garden, my mother remarking to my father that at least I had my books—I will never forget how these words sounded in her voice. “At least he has his books,” as though without them I was nothing. They always blamed my reading, you know, for my having fewer friends than my brother and for my weak eyes, never thinking that because I had weak eyes and because I was shy, having a book at the ready rescued me.