It is no exaggeration to say the publishing trade nearly ran aground a few years after I began to assist Pen Davenport. Several times, as a matter of fact. The greatest change for the community—and the terrible threat to the continued livelihood of the bookaneers—was the attempt to enact an international agreement on copyright. This movement, wide awake after a dormancy, tipped the trade into a state of uncertainty that disrupted every level of the profession, from the papermakers and compilers to the millionaire publishers. Meanwhile, printers and binders perfected methods to make books more cheaply and quicker than ever imagined. Book prices fell into disarray. Bookselling was no longer a trade for a rational man, as I discovered while keeping the dire accounts of my bookstall. You might wonder, as I continue my story, whether I was wise to put my bookselling business at further risk through my unorthodox associations. There were times when the added income from Davenport’s assignments were all that stood between the operating or shuttering of my much loved bookstall.
I have mentioned that it was the lack of copyright protection for foreign works on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean that gave birth to the modern bookaneers. To shine the bright light of the law over the publishing field would all but obliterate their profession. Indeed, there came a time when the United States—a nation where it seems even lawmakers detest laws—finally agreed in principle to an international treaty. Authors celebrated the news and visited Congress to shake hands, but the gloom was palpable for those who were accustomed to keeping order in the hidden corners of the trade.
About a decade into my association with Davenport, some older bookaneers passed away or retired. The formidable queen bee of the group, the deceptively named Kitten, was gone, though her indelible mark never went away, especially from the methods and emotions of Davenport. Many of the lesser bookaneers moved on to simpler work, and the parasitic barnacles scrambled for whatever scraps remained. But here was something strange: it was the first-rate bookaneers, those who had been most nimble in their techniques and had shown the greatest abilities and foresight in their line of work, who blinded themselves to the inevitable downfall of the profession. The very best of the remaining bookaneers, it seemed, were set to sink with the ship because they could not fathom dry land.
The literary taverns around London sat gloomy and idle, often half-empty, filled with faint echoes of golden times. Fewer and fewer assignments reached me from Davenport. With my business troubles mounting, I was forced to sell some of the rarest editions in my personal collection. Visiting Paris for this purpose, I found its book community mired in a similar malaise, and witnessed or heard about the same affliction in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, as well as Berlin, Barcelona, Vienna, Zurich, Rome, and all the centers of publishing.
That brings us to approximately a year ago, in the fall of 1890. One quiet morning back at my stall, I was contemplating the dispiriting numbers of my ledgers. In the grip of such hard times I could not afford a single loss to my stock. Any bookstall owner will tell you that being in business outdoors means books disappear. It might be the wealthiest gentleman in the neighborhood who, peeping into a book of history, remembers an appointment and, without thinking, walks away with the unpaid-for volume. There were others, mostly urchins of the street, who would try to grab a book to sell somewhere else for small change. I kept one of those great, big theological tomes at a table in front of my chair, which I could drop onto an offender. I also employed a young boy of my own to stand guard and watch for books that “grow legs.” Lastly, I kept the books on my shelves spread out just enough that I could see out every side of the stall from where I sat.
My little guard had gone on an errand for me when I spied through one of these slits a boy of ten or eleven strutting by, walking his fingers along the spines of the books. He slowed his step. I knew what was about to happen. I leapt up armed with my Jones’s Theology but he had already begun running off at the speed of a thunderbolt. By the time I started to give chase, I was too breathless from the exertion even to yell “thief,” and the little Oliver Twist was far gone into the crowds.
To my surprise, I did not find anything missing. I counted my inventory once more. There was, as it turned out, one book more than there should have been. I recognized the size, shape, the clasp, the grain of the plain brown leather, and most of all the name of a nonexistent book, in this case Concerning the Three Impostors, by Emperor Frederick II. It had to be—it was one of Whiskey Bill’s, so long absent from my sight. I looked around, as though the bookaneer might be standing there tipping his dandyish high hat to me as he had done from the stairwell at the Crown, which by this point had long ago closed its doors. Exhilarated by the chance to do what I never dared, I carefully opened the metal latch, threw aside the leather strap, and with great ceremony turned to the title page, then turned to the next page, then the next, the next, then skipped ten, twenty, forty-five pages ahead, thirty pages back. The pages were blank.