Apex Book Company

by Lavie Tidhar

Last week I was going to tell you about the Titanic Omar, the priceless book that went down with the Titanic in 1912. But it got me to thinking that I should perhaps explain a little more about the life of a book-runner, and that leads, in my case, to Philip Pullman, and how he unknowingly helped pay my way through university.

Even with a half-tuition scholarship, the fees were enormous. For four years I had a part-time job at a small company that basically collected money from people. It made the mob look friendly. I didn’t do any collecting; I merely worked in the office. But it was not a good way to earn a living, and in any case it wasn’t enough to support rent, and travel, and life in that great book capital that is London. Naturally, I continued to hunt for books, but now it was less about my own collection and more about earning a bit of extra cash.

To my credit, I became aware of Philip Pullman before the rest of the market. This was in the early stages of the Harry Potter phenomenon (which I might talk about a bit later) and Pullman was still not a widely-known name. I discovered him the old-fashioned way: I read Northern Lights (you might know it under the US title, The Golden Compass) and fell in love with it, and after that I tried to read everything else by Pullman. This was after book 2 came out – The Subtle Knife – but before publication of the trilogy’s conclusion, The Amber Spyglass. Subsequently, while collectors were already scenting blood (and avidly collecting Pullman), most people may not have heard of it or assigned any particular monetary value to the name in the way J.K. Rowling and Harry Potter were beginning to be considered.

Now.

Book hunting isn’t ethical.

There are tricks of the trade. One of them, and a rather shameful one, I ended up employing when I got hold of my first Northern Lights first edition.

I found it in my local library.

It is a universal truth of book collecting, that the first hardcover edition of a book, a lot of the time, ends up in libraries. From a reader’s perspective, that’s a good thing. From a collector’s point of view, it’s nothing short of sacrilege. Book collectors hate library books. From their point of view, librarians take a beautiful, pristine first edition – and then proceed to mutilate it. Stamps. Librarians love stamps. The more the better. They like to glue dust-jackets to the spine. They like to glue cards into the ffep (front free endpaper). Worst of all, they lend the books out. Let a popular book sit in a library for a year, and soon enough you have to throw it away. Which is what libraries regularly do – either that, or sell them for a few pence on the shelf of discarded books called ‘Books for Sale’ (and remind me to tell you about library book sales a little later).

So ex-library books (as they’re called), are not worth much. As a rule of thumb, they are worth about ten percent of the value of a first edition. Which doesn’t sound like much, but when the value of a first edition is £4000…

My local library had a first edition of Northern Lights. It was worn out, it was stamped, but the jacket was nicely preserved, and it was a genuine first. (Sometimes it’s difficult to tell. With this particular title, for instance, you had to check the price on the jacket was the correct one – it changed in subsequent printings – and other arcane ‘points’, as they are called. I won’t bore you with them).

They also had a first edition of The Subtle Knife.

Here’s a rule to get you through life as a book fanatic: always keep the librarians friendly. In this instance, I went up to the chief librarian, a very nice lady called Janice, and – stammering a little – said that I would quite like to have those copies of the book, since they are – cough – first editions, and I was a collector, of sorts, and – would it be okay if I gave you new copies of the book to replace the old ones?

Janice looked at me like I was crazy. “Sure,” she said.

I raced down to the paperback shop and picked up shiny new paperbacks of both the books. Then I went back to the library. The librarians seemed happy to see me. “So it’s okay?” I said.

“Sure. Let me just stamp the old ones Discarded.”

I was taken aback. I should have predicted it, of course. It is Standard Librarian Practice, a last, loving use of the whip – I mean, the stamp – before letting go. “Um,” I said. “Would you mind terribly not doing that? I – well, I don’t like the stamps all that much.”

Janice looked at me like I was crazy. Then she gave me the books.

I went home that day with almost a thousand pounds’ worth of books. They had cost me, as far as I recall, about £12.99.

I kept them, of course. I was, after all, a collector. At least, I kept them for as long as I could. Finally I sold Northern Lights for, if memory serves, £675 – which paid my rent for two months in a row. I pulled the same trick again – I scoured the local libraries and located two other copies of the books and replaced them for new paperbacks. After that, although I tried, I never did manage to find them again in the libraries – perhaps other unscrupulous collectors had done the same thing I did – but for a while – I had bought a first edition The Amber Spyglass when it came out, complete with a discount – I had a complete set of the His Dark Materials trilogy on my shelves, in first edition.

They’re all gone now. Rent, and transport and, if I am being honest, a few pints of beer, had all taken their toll on my collection. But this isn’t where it ends.

Philip Pullman wrote, besides His Dark Materials, a series of novels modelled on the Victorian Penny Dreadfuls, featuring Sally Lockhart. While not in the same league as His Dark Materials (from a collector’s point of view) they are still highly-sought after. It so happened…

There was a shop I loved going to every time I travelled into London-proper by train. I would get off at Waterloo station and circle it on foot – it’s a lovely area full of strange little stores right alongside the Old Vic theatre – and one of the shops on the corner, still there as far as I know, is a remainder bookshop.

Remaindered books are the ones that publishers send to the bookshops but are returned unsold and, instead of pulping them, the publishers discount the books – at a fraction of the original cost – and try to sell them again in remainder bookshops. There are no more bargains to be had in a remainder shop than in a general second hand shop. A lot of titles don’t sell for a reason. Occasionally, however, one strikes gold – as I did one afternoon.

I was browsing the general titles when I saw new boxes had come in, the books just being unpacked, and the man with the price-gun was affixing price-tags to the covers. Idly, I turned over to watch – and realised the books on the table were The Tiger in the Well, the third title in the Sally Lockhart books. Not one book – books. They were all copies of the same title.

I went over to look. The books looked new, which was impossible, since the title had come out ten years or more before. I picked them up. They were lovely, jacketed hardcovers, and looking at the copyright page confirmed that they must be, indeed, true first editions.

“Where did these come from?” I asked the man. He waved the price-gun and shrugged. “Some publishers’ warehouse,” he said indifferently. “Been sitting there for years.”

The book was glued to my hands. I was not letting it go. “How much is it?” I asked, showing him the book. He pointed at the cover. There was a small sticker on it. It said £3.99.

“How many have you got?”

He shrugged again. “Not many,” he said. Take a look.” And he wandered away to price a stack of Naked Chefs.

In the event, I found six copies. Six pristine, As New copies, first editions that had been waiting for me in a basement for ten years. I bought them, of course.

Over the next few months I sold them, one at a time. I got between £100-£150 for each. A far cry from Northern Lights, perhaps, but nothing to be sniffed at.

My last Philip Pullman find came from my own nearby hunting-grounds. It was in a charity shop I had checked only a day or two before, and I went in just to pass the time for a few minutes. What I did not expect to see was the almost perfect first edition of The Subtle Knife sitting demurely on the shelf, sandwiched between Dick Francis and Jilly Cooper in an unholy manage-a-trois.

I picked it up. It was priced at £2.

Philip Pullman, although he doesn’t know this and probably never will, is not only one of my favourite writers but also is responsible for paying my way through university. I have none of the books left now. Most recently, I re-read Northern Lights in a cheap, second-hand copy – and the book was just as good as it had been in my first edition, of course. But for a while there, thanks to Pullman, I got to eat and had a roof over my head. And for that I am eternally grateful.

Lavie Tidhar writes weird fiction. This is his web site. He grew up on a kibbutz in Israel and lived in South Africa and the UK. Most recently he’s lived in the Banks islands of Vanuatu, in the South Pacific, one of the most remote and isolated places on Earth. Lavie’s website is http://www.lavietidhar.co.uk/.

In 2007, Apex Publications released a collection of Jewish adventure stories titled HebrewPunk from Lavie Tidhar. This book is available as a direct order from the Apex Store and from the Apex aStore.

Feed the writers!