New Book: The Remarkable Martin Stone

by Stephen J. Gertz

Booktryst is pleased to announce the publication of its newest book and first fine press edition, The Remarkable Martin Stone: Remembering the Celebrated Rare Book Dealer and Blues Guitarist.

The edition is limited to 150 copies (of which 25 are hors commerce w/o hand-numbering), binding designed and text designed and printed by Alastair Johnston at Poltroon Press on Hahnemühle Ingres paper with type composed in Monotype Bell. It is bound by John DeMerritt. And it features an engraved frontispiece portrait by Frances Butler.

Each copy is signed by the designer/printer, binder, and artist on the colophon.

The Contributors:

Nigel Burwood; Tom Bushnell; John Eggeling; Marianne Faithfull; James Fox; Peter B. Howard; Barry Humphries; Ed Maggs; William Matthews; Michael Moorcock; Jeremy Reed; Charles Seluzicki; Iain Sinclair; and Sylvia Beach Whitman.

Advance Praise:

“From its stunning binding and elegant design to its superb, heartfelt writing, The Remarkable Martin Stone is a bibliophile’s dream. Seeing the legendary book scout through the eyes of those who knew him best--booksellers, writers, and musicians--gives us one final, glorious glimpse of a man who was charming and generous to the last. This is a book that anyone who knew, or simply knew of, Martin will hold dear; I know I will” (Rebecca Rego Barry, Fine Books & Collections).

By Subscription Only, no billing. Books will be ready to ship in early December 2017. However, I expect the edition to sell out sooner rather than later, so order asap.

Booksellers who wish to buy 3 or more copies for resale can purchase them at a 30% discount. You must, however, contact me directly; the discount cannot be granted through the buy option below.

Net proceeds will be donated to the ABA Benevolent Fund, which provided assistance to Martin during his illness.
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The Remarkable Martin Stone. Remembering the Celebrated Rare Book Dealer and Blues Guitarist. McMinnville. OR: Booktryst, 2017. Octavo. 53, (1) pp. Engraved frontispiece portrait. Patterned Japanese cloth over decorated paper boards. Printed spine label. Cobalt blue endpapers. Plum cloth slipcase. $200.

Cleaning Up With William S. Burroughs And Mata Hari's Knickers

by Alastair Johnston

Mata Hari (nee M'greet MacLeod, 1876-1915),
caught with her pants down, as usual

     Martin Stone has a knack for finding great literary association items. The legendary British rock guitarist (Savoy Brown, Chilli Willi & the Red Hot Peppers, Pink Fairies, Wreckless Eric) was celebrated in a memoir by Peter Howard, Martin Stone, Bookscout, and immortalized in Iain Sinclair's novel White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings (1987) and he is still on the search. Peter Howard, in his fond reminiscence, recalls Stone tracking down T. E. Lawrence's driver's license (though he was not able to acquire it). Finding it was not as significant as having the imagination to look for it, says Howard. (Lawrence died in a motorcycle wreck in 1935, presumably with his license in his wallet.)

     (Further aside: Mentioning the author of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, I always recall a bit by the great British satirist Alan Bennett: "Clad in the magnificent white silk robes of an Arab prince he hoped to pass unnoticed through London. Alas, he was mistaken... No one who knew T. E. Lawrence as I did, scarcely at all, could fail but to be deeply impressed by him. I went down to Clouds Hill to visit Lawrence, or "Tee Hee" as he was known at school, and knocked at the door of the rose-covered cottage. The door was opened by a small, rather unprepossessing figure, slight of frame, fair-haired and with the ruddy gleaming face of a schoolboy. -- It was a schoolboy: I had come to the wrong house...").

     Recently on Facebook, Stone mentioned he had bought Mata Hari's knickers formerly held in the Black Museum in Paris. Mata Hari, the famous spy who was executed by a French firing squad in 1917, was perhaps better known for not wearing her knickers. (They have a Clousseau-like provenance: A retiring inspector of police asked for them as a going-away present during WWII; his son inherited them, didn't want them, and sold them to an antique dealer in Versailles. Now who would not want Mata Hari's knickers?) Stone did not reveal the price nor how much he made on the sale other than to say when he was younger he could have bought a nice house from the proceeds.

Martin Stone, bookscout, on the scent of some rare knickers.

(Picture tweeted by AnyAmount of Books, 

Mais oui, c'est un Office Depot à Paris).

     In his essay "A Blockhead's Bookshelf" (collected in William Targ's Carousel for Bibliophiles [New York, 1947]), Walter Blumenthal says "you cannot hope to own a copy of Paradise Lost bound in the apple tree that proved Adam's undoing," but he does cite a Shakespeare bound in the tree featured in The Merry Wives of Windsor and other similar "association" items. These range from fanciful to preposterous, but imagination can conjur up some wonderful association items and, like our hero Martin Stone, imagining them can lead to discovery. Think of an I.O.U. from Godwin to Shelley, a ticket to see the World in Miniature issued to J. Swift, a map of the Hebrides marked up by Dr Johnson, a prescription for clap medicine made out to James Boswell, a laudanum prescription made out to Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The riverboat pilot's license of Sam Clemens. Put but your fancy in it.

Literary association item, awaiting authentication

     Fill the blank with the object of your desire. What do you collect? What do you crave? Seek and ye shall find. Somewhere there must exist a fair copy of Byron's autobiography, the original of which was burned in the offices of John Murray by Tommy Moore, "Hobby-O" Hobhouse and other craven cowards. Perhaps the scandalous tell-all autobiography, if a copy exists, is buried in some family archive in the attic of a stately home. I met a financier in New York who has Byron's Greek passport.

     There must be a name for non-literary artifacts with literary associations. Disjecta literaria? I have a paper plate used as a fan by Philip Whalen at a party, so inscribed by the poet in his elegant calligraphy. He would have thought of it as a goof, not a piece of literary history. It was a piece of trash, but Phil's comment ennobles it somewhat humorously.

Paper plate with food stains, inscribed by Philip Whalen 
(Dixie Paper Co., 9" picnic plate, Minden, Louisiana, ca. 1978)

       So how does one evaluate such things? People collect them for their literary association though they have no intrinsic literary value. Here's a case in point. The Pacific Book Auction Galleries in San Francisco have a sale coming up on October 10 of "Beats, Counterculture and the Avant Garde." It comprises 200 lots collected by Richard Synchef over the last 40 years or so. He seems to have been particular keen on getting authors to sign and inscribe works. He owned a copy of Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test signed by 40 members of the counterculture: Diggers, poets, artists, Grateful dead roadies, etc. Now it can be yours for about ten grand. Some of the figures in his collection, such as McClure and Snyder, are alive so their signatures can still be had. (Just last weekend Snyder was signing broadsides at the Watershed Festival in Berkeley.) But the Big Guns of Beat, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Corso and Burroughs have gone to their eternal rest.

      Some of Synchef's acquisitions border on fetishism. He has a check from Jack Kerouac to the IRS (dated December 1963) for $300, now worth an estimated $1000 to $1500. Then there's Neal Cassady's Letters from Prison (New York, Blast Book, 1993) signed by Carolyn Cassady and her 3 children, the recipients of the letters. "Rick, good to see you at the Beat Museum. Keep the Beat!" "Hey Rick - you flatterer! Best, Carolyn Cassady" and "It's too much! Jami Cassady." This brings up some strange visions of "The Beat Museum" and a desperate autograph seeker; maybe Neal Cassady himself was in a glass case there (Estimated $400 to $600). The strangest item of all, perhaps, is the shopping list of William Burroughs (1914-97).

rubbing alcohol, Lysol, honey, milk -- boil, then inject?

     While Burroughs is by far the most interesting of the so-called "Beat" writers, how valuable can this shopping list be? Dated circa 1989 it is estimated to sell for $500 to $800. It is a curiosity, containing "Small garbage bags," "Cat pans" (or is that cats paw?!), "rubbing alcohol" and "Lysol," as well as "Castille soap (the kind that makes water softer)". We get the sense Burroughs was a bit of a clean freak. Then there's "Saltines" and "Gravy" (amended in manuscript to "Brown gravy"): pretty sad dietary items. A second hand has added "Bic 'good news' razors (10-pak)" and "gourmet vinegar - white balsamic." Are biographers going to make bank with this, like the discovery that Abe Lincoln grew up eating pork ribs? I met Burroughs a few times and somewhere have letters from him.

     In one he thanks me for sending him a Victorian pamphlet on the Cure for the Opium Habit. Now there's a useful piece of his writing (if I can find it). I always thought it would be amusing one day to tell my grand daughter that I did drugs with Burroughs (when she is older and will not be shocked). I imagine Old Bill got fairly sick of young cocks like me showing up with their sad stash and offering to get him high. He never seemed fazed by any of it though. But now any piece of him seems to have intrinsic value, even a shopping list. Who would want this scrap enough to pay hundreds of dollars for it? You could apply the Cut-Up technique to it, but you'd still have a banal piece of waste paper.
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Corrections: The Kerouac check and Burroughs shopping list were not part of Mr. Synchef's collection. Those items were added to the auction by PBA Galleries to round-out the sale. Additionally, the copy of Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test was signed by only one of the Grateful Dead's roadies.
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Of Related Interest:

Beware of Hart Crane's Sombrero.

Ernest Hemingway's Typewriter Comes To Auction.
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A Wake For The Still Alive: Peter B. Howard Part 4

Photo: Ken Sanders.

 “peter’s tutorial” 

I am convinced that those of us who grew toward maturity as booksellers in the 70’s were a fortunate lot. The older generation was established, vital, active: Michael Papantonio, Hans Kraus, Jack Bartfield, Margie Cohn. Yes, I think of New York and New England as well. Growing up in Baltimore, one did not have to look far. But there were those others, the younger generation, ten or fifteen years my senior and making waves, cutting new paths. A shift was in process and we were watching it unfold.

The first time I met Peter Howard, he was being guided to my booth at the Boston Book Fair by Harvey Tucker. His mission was to get possession of a book I had brought: H. L. Mencken’s first book, Ventures Into Verse. Yes, there was some patter but there was also a kind of bravado, even macho; you could see it in the attitude of his hat and in the sudden way that the patter stopped and Peter got down to business. The old world gentility simply was not his style.

It was refreshing even if a bit intimidating at times. Peter was not shy about his intent. The best bookstore in the world, he let us know long ago, has one copy of everything in it. And our responsibility as booksellers on the road is to look at every book. It all sounds quite Faustian now. But Peter’s great curiosity, his own willingness to share and to learn has never been lost on me or anyone close to him. There is always something possible about the most seemingly impossible task. To deny it is to throw down the gauntlet. And you really do not want to find yourself in that position with Peter.

Peter Howard’s example, made flesh by the hand extended to each of us in both service and generosity, by the daring of his purchases and the commitment to his ideals as a bookseller - witness Serendipity Books - stays indelibly with us. It carried us on, iconic, sometimes fierce, new.

- Charles Seluzicki

Charles Seluzicki is proprietor of Charles Seluzicki Fine & Rare Books in Portland, OR.

Left to right: Larry Moskowitz, Peter Howard, Carol Sipper, Lou Weinstein, Ralph Sipper, c. 1975.
Photo courtesy Ralph Sipper.

“sui generis...”

Ever since I met him—and we’re not all that far from the half-century mark—Peter Howard, like a kindred force of nature, the ever-zealous Captain Ahab—continues to swim against the tide, march to his own drummer, and tilt not with windmills but any opponent, however formidable, whose wisdom or policies he has come to question.

In our loosely-structured book world, a realm that allows for more freedom of expression than just about any other I know, Peter stands out as a world class debater and debunker.  He might at any moment unleash that unmistakable tenor instrument of his in clarion tones of disapproval that easily resonate from the far reaches of a book fair auditorium.  Or he may let fly with a deadly verbal shaft from a well-stocked quiver that cleanly bisects the well-thought-out argument you supposed you were making.  Sui Generis is a  descriptor that might have been coined with this singular being in mind.

Back in the incunabular days of my rare-book apprenticeship, I would leave our remote Inverness home early enough to avoid the morning traffic and head for Berkeley’s Shattuck Avenue, the site of Serendipity Books.  In those shoe-horned premises I would forage all day for books, ever-aware of Peter’s forbidding presence.

On more than one occasion I stayed the night in the Howards’ basement, a room perimetered on all sides by floor to ceiling shelves.  This was the Rideout Room, so-called because it housed Serendipity’s collection of proletarian fiction, one that Peter had fleshed out considerably from the skeleton of Walter Rideout’s classic study of radical literature.  Years later, as such quirky things sometimes occur in our trade, Joseph the Provider, the book enterprise I established soon after I came under Peter’s sway, was able to place the collection en bloc in Tulsa University.

I was not the only house guest of Chez Serendipity in those early days.  When he was not on the road scouting books for Serendipity, David Sachs slept not with the fishes but on a pallet in a storeroom down the street.  David’s roommates?  Thousands upon thousands of  little mags.  In a nearby room, Peter’s longtime manager, Nancy Kosenka, reposed amidst a mountain of Billy Books. These constituted the abandoned inventory of Bill Pieper, whose premature death dictated their consignment to Serendipity.  Each of the volumes was meticulously coded in Peter’s feathery hand as “Billy.”

Those who know Peter are aware of the blinkered passion with which he is capable of embracing a concept.  There was the time he determined to make a proper omelet.  For this fire and brimstone insister upon orthodoxy, there was only one unswerving way to do so. You cooked an egg in a French omelet pan sans fillers which you then flipped and folded in the Gallic manner.  This, my host soberly informed me would serve as my lunch.  The next time Peter came to Santa Barbara, I played a variation on his spare theme.  My breakfast omelet consisted of three jumbo eggs, shallots, Black Forest ham, farmer’s market Chanterelles, and a modicum of one-year aged Gruyere.  This I served on a buttery croissant.  It was hard to discern whether or not my austere guest approved because he suctioned down the mélange in three mega-bites. Well, maybe four.  And never breathed a word of my apostasy.

W. S. Merwin has observed that what you come to remember becomes yourself.  Let’s  extend this thought by recalling a series of events that in sum epitomize the essence of another.

Some hand-held shots of Peter, then. 

We are in the San Francisco apartment where Joseph the Provider began.  Peter visits and asks for prices on two just-acquired John Steinbeck titles.  I divine that the one he really covets is the signed, limited “Red Pony” and craftily up the ante on my intended asking price, while correspondingly lowering that of the inscribed trade edition (I think it was “The Pearl.”).  Pouncing on the latter, my catlike buyer murmurs:  “You seem to have these prices reversed.”

In Berkeley I watch Peter dial the number of a Western Americana dealer and without so much as a hello or similar act of foreplay ask: “What’s early for Arizona?” get his answer, and hang up with the thrift of verbiage of which a Scotsman would be proud.

I offer a rare pamphlet to Peter at a rock-bottom price.  He recoils slightly, smiles knowingly, and, after making meaningful eye contact, asks:  “Is there a stack?”

Peter and I are at a post-LA book fair gathering on a sultry evening, having been invited to an older colleague’s home.  The other dealers and their matronly wives outrank us in terms of seniority by a generation.  Still in the coats and ties that back then constituted book fair dress code, several of us have loosened our collars as we sit poolside sipping drinks.  Over the light clink of glasses, a stentorian voice rings out.  It is Peter announcing his intention to take a dip.  And with the alacrity of a fireman throwing on clothes, Peter shucks his off and bellywhops in.  The silence, as they say, is deafening.  Having decided that a few perfunctory paddles will suffice, he flips over onto his back and floats—serenely and up-periscope—on the water’s surface.  I am able to report that like some pale-hued dust jackets, Peter, too, was only slightly sunned.

Several years ago our man exposed himself again to his peers, this time on the ABAA chatline, baring Serendipity’s finances at encyclopedic length and down to the most intimate details with the same insouciance that is a staple of his inimitable outrageousness.

Unlike many dealers, I have not much partnered through the years with colleagues on book buys.  Nevertheless, three decades ago I went to Michigan with Peter and my old partner, Larry Moskowitz.  Toby Holtzman was considering the sale of his comprehensive library of modern firsts and we were invited to make a co-bid.  Toby left  us alone to go over the copies, a process that consumed several hours.  The three of us reached an easy agreement as to the collection’s market value, more specifically what one might eventually realize from the sale of the books if everything fell into place.  Toby came back in and without consulting Larry and me and before our host had even crossed the room, Peter blurted out that RETAIL figure as our bid.  It will come as no surprise that Larry and I declined to walk this entrepreneurial tightrope, and Peter wound up taking on the books by his lonesome.

As time passed other major collections that we might have acquired went to Serendipity, including Gary Lepper’s Seventy-Five American Authors’ collection, Carl Petersen’s peerless William Faulkners, and 18,000 volumes that Carter Burden de-accessioned from his monumental collection.  And just a little over a year ago Larry’s own Loblolly books found their way into Peter’s benevolent care.

Only once can I recall a significant trove ending up with us.  In outbidding Serendipity and another major dealer for the late Kenyon Starling’s highspot-studded collection of Hemingways, Faulkners, and Steinbecks  I was made to feel something like the Randolph Scott character in San Peckinpah’s Ride the High Country who wistfully recalls:  “I was his deputy many times. Once he was mine.”

In 1973 Peter supported my application for ABAA membership.  I retain a copy of that document which was typed on one of Peter’s duodecimo invoice forms.  The last sentence described me as: “a fresh breath to this foggy coast.” 

I cannot let you have the last word here, old friend.  So let me venture this. If it is  breathing of which we speak, then you are an ocean-sized oxygen tank who has pumped life-giving  book air into the lives of,  perhaps not so many as the vast number of volumes in your keeping, but many, many more than anyone I know.

- Ralph Sipper

Ralph Sipper is proprietor of Ralph Sipper Books in Santa Barbara, CA.

Left to right: Stuart Teitler, Martin Stone, Bill Matthews, Charlie Seluzicki,
Peter Howard, c. mid-1980s.
Photo courtesy Martin Stone.

“bookselling is a service...”
 

In the dream landscape of every bibliophile there is a vast shop, seemingly chaotic, constantly churning and changing. If the moment is right, almost any book may be found there. This magical ideal has, perhaps, never had a true earthly counterpart, and in the atrophied, cleaned-up world of the twenty-first century even its shadow has almost vanished. Yet Serendipity Books remains, a mysterious anomaly as close as one gets to paradise. This is no dream; at its helm is Peter B. Howard, substantially human, quixotic, fired-up and endlessly entertaining.

I first met Peter at the Olympia Bookfair in the late 1970s; he had a table of James Joyce in absolutely marvelous condition, many of them inscribed. I stood there hypnotised. I was new to the game, working the coal-face of the book trade, a bottom-feeding outsider. I had never seen books like these; a first edition of Joyce’s Dubliners, brand-new in dust-jacket, that had never been tipped out of a sack at five in the morning in Brick Lane market.

Peter peered down at me with avuncular concern. "Stay well away from Joyce,” he said. "He's a nightmare to buy and sell."

He said he'd like to see my books and I gave him my address and phone number. He ignored the phone, and sometime after midnight there was a rapping at my window.

"Fuck off," I yelled. My home was in Whitechapel; bad people sometimes tried to get in under cover of darkness.

"Now, now, Martin, it's Peter Howard and I'm here to buy your books."

A fellow member of the 24hour club. I hid the cocaine and let him in.

He pointed at the far wall of my storeroom. "What are all those?"

"Minor Edwardian and Victorian fiction."

"There's no such thing as minor."

"Er, no, of course not...I mean, I rather like them all really."

"How much for the wall?"

I was check-mated; it was the first time I'd encountered the omnivore approach to book buying.

"Well, some of them are a bit more but mostly they're about two pounds each."

"Why can't they be more, Martin?"

No book dealer had ever asked me that question, either.

Across the road from my house was a brutally ugly corner pub, always full of shagged-out hookers and inept but vicious criminals. I took Peter there the next day to wrap up the deal; he seemed to love it. I knew this man could be a friend.

On Peter's next visit to Britain, we hit the road for the goldfields of Scotland and the industrial North, in those days crammed tight with unrecognised treasure. Queuing up at a self-service health food cafe near Edinburgh University, Peter caught me eying the girl students in line ahead of us.

"And they're all different!" he giggled.

We paid a visit to Tony Hattersley, who had retired to a giant granite mansion deep hidden up the valley behind Whitby, Dracula's landing-place. For forty years, the whole of the North had been carved up between Tony and Horace Halewood, his counterpart in Preston; between them, they controlled all the books and ruled the auction rooms with an iron fist. Tony had room after room of elephant folios, Victorian travel, private press books, a yellow shelf of Draculas.

Again the giggle.

I see Peter only every once in a while but his presence and influence on my life has been disproportionately large. He brought me to America for the first time, he bought me new teeth, he steered me through some very dark days, he and Alison opened their home to me whenever I wanted, even when they were both sick. I've acquired  mountains of wonderful books from Serendipity and sold mountains of books to them.

A few things I've learned from Peter:

Bookselling is a service (See PBH for a sterling example of this Buddhist principle in action).

Even so, there is no need to suffer fools gladly (See also PBH for correct handling method).

Rigid rules regarding profit margins are unnecessary and counter-productive; a good book can always be sold for more than its buying price.

When buying a library, always look at the other stuff around it. Where are the letters, paintings, prints? Is this Nietzsche's typewriter?

Clear the library straight away. You don't want to go back the next week to hear they've decided to keep the 1865 Alice In Wonderland because little Jimmy might want to read it when he grows up.

Every day, something new can be learned.

It never ends; there are always more books.

But I never did take any notice of Peter's warning about James Joyce, and over the years Mr. Joyce has been very kind to me. Beginner's luck?

-Martin Stone

Martin Stone is, by common acclaim, the greatest book scout of his generation. He currently lives in Paris.   

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[1] [2] [3] Tomorrow: Part 5.

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Booktryst thanks Dan Adams, John Baxter, Taylor Bowie, John Crichton, Mary Giliam, Ed Glaser, Eric Korn, John Martin, David Mason, James Pepper, Ken Sanders, Charles Seluzicki, Ralph Sipper, Martin Stone, Michael R. Thompson, Jeff Towns, and Vic Zoschak for their contributions.

A special thank you to James Pepper and John Crichton for their assistance with getting this project off the ground. Very special thanks to James Pepper and Ralph Sipper for their ongoing encouragement and support.

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[Sold Out]. A print issue of A Wake For the Still Alive: Peter B. Howard is available in a limited edition of 200 copies for sale, at $20 postpaid. All proceeds will be donated to the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America's (ABAA) Benevolent Fund.

Ordering information:

Payment by check only, payable to: Antiquarian Booksellers' Benevolent Fund.

Mail to:

Stephen J. Gertz
c/o David Brass Rare Books, 23901 Calabasas Road, suite 2060, Calabasas, CA 91302.

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