Apex Book Company

I used to work for an Internet service provider in London. It was in technical support, a less-than-glamorous department–one of the team-leaders, in fact, ended up in prison for GBH (causing Grievous Bodily Harm) after attacking a member of staff who was belittling the role of tech support. It happened after a Christmas party, which probably explains why I tended to give that sort of event a miss. In any case, I was not the only collector there, although it took me a while to find that out.

One of the guys I worked with was an ex-bouncer. He was the sort of guy who bought a six-pack of beer just for the train journey home every night. He was big, and rather sweet, and one day he confided, shyly, that he collected Doctor Who.

Doctor Who is a BBC television programme that has run for longer than most people live. It features a time-travelling alien – the Doctor – conveniently reincarnating with a different face and personality every time a new actor takes the role. There have been over ten doctors at the last count, and Doctor Who aficionados therefore refer to the different reincarnations as The First Doctor, the Second Doctor, and so on.

“So you like Doctor Who? Cool,” I said. I’ve never watched a single episode, but for the British, the terrible props and special effects had bound them in childhood forever. It’s one of those things you have to grow up with, I guess. “You have a large collection?”

He confided that, yes, it was fairly large. “In fact, I have over three-thousand items,” he said.

“You’re joking.”

He wasn’t. Amongst the ‘items’ were rare Doctor Who annuals, one of them signed by the third, fifth and seventh Doctors. There were Doctor Who novels; Doctor Who dolls; signed photos of the different Doctors, items signed by the Doctor’s companions, technical manuals on the Doctor’s time-space-ship, the TARDIS and, of course, a wealth of memorabilia associated with the Doctor’s mortal enemies – the Daleks.

The Daleks are essentially rubbish bins that move. They say, “Exterminate! Exterminate!” They were invented by writer, Terry Nation, who holds the copyright separately to the Doctor Who franchise. An interesting cross-over in collecting came about fairly recently when a British company produced a soft-core pornographic movie called – wait for it – Abducted by the Daleks, in which the Daleks wheel about saying, “Penetrate! Penetrate!” and – waaaait for it – abducting naked Earth girls. The filmmakers were sued by the rights-holders and had to withdraw the movie from sale, which no doubt makes for a must-have item to collectors of both pornography and Doctor Who.

There were other collectors about. Another friend, as it turned out, had a near-obsession with the Beats. This was a loose group of poets and writers in the 1950s, of which the most well-known are probably Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. He would sit at his desk and bid on Ebay – I remember he once bought a signed limited edition Allen Ginsberg I was quite envious of – while another guy once bought a mouldy toast on Ebay, which had on it the holy appearance of the Virgin Mary. He kept it in a transparent plastic bag and would bring it out from time to time, when it would look mouldier and mouldier.

Not everyone collects. One team-leader used to merely sell weed on his break time (quite handy, that). Another guy only worked at the company as a secondary job. His real job was selling cars – he would send e-mails around occasionally about the latest model offered for sale. Apparently, he needed the tech support money just to pay off gambling debts.

But almost everyone collects. And many of the guys liked to read science fiction and fantasy – one guy had bought himself an expensive light-sabre replica, which he kept within reaching distance of his desk. Some of them didn’t care what condition the book was in, or whether it was signed, or even whether it was that good – they just wanted a lot of them, a steady supply. And not all of them were guys.

I used to work a shift – four days on, four days off – which was ideal. I had plenty of time to wander around bookshops, scouring for anything worth having – proofs, signed books, first editions, odd books, whatever I could find – and I used to sell books on Ebay in my spare time, too, even having some semi-regular customers for whom I would look for specific titles or subjects. There was a member of the local historical society, for instance, who was always interested in books on highway men and the Victorian underworld…and there was a collector of an epic fantasy writer who used to call me some evenings, when he would proceed to discuss his extensive collection for over an hour at a time. One time, I found a whole stack of science fiction paperbacks – I think there were sixty or more – and bought the lot of them for about £20-£25. There’s that old saying about words having weight – certainly sixty books do. I carried them on the bus in four plastic bags and took them all the way to work, where I sent an e-mail around saying I had them for sale. Somewhat to my surprise a woman from another department replied. She’ll take them. All of them (I was offering them at one pound a book). I met her at the car park (better known as a smoking corner, really) to do the handover. “Oh, I don’t mind which ones they are,” she said, “as long as its science fiction or fantasy and I have plenty of it. I read a lot, you see.”

“Well, this should keep you going for a little while,” I said, gratefully passing over one heavy bag, and then another. “Can I pay you only half now?” she said. “I don’t have enough money on me.”

“Sure,” I said, and gave her the rest of the books and she gave me half of the money and–

I had just paid for something very valuable – experience. Because, you see, she never did pay me the other half, nor reply to my e-mails about it. There is a moral here, of sorts, but I’m not sure what it is. Take the cash in advance, maybe, or never trust collectors who actually read their books. But mostly, I think it’s about how many collectors there are out there, and how varied they are. My mum’s friend collects cookbooks. A friend’s mum collects thimbles from around the world (a world, I might add, I never even knew existed). An editor I know passionately collects action figures, Frankenstein and Dracula and the like. Me, I used to collect bottle tops as a kid. What remains with me to this day is the smell of the alcohol on the caps. I have a small but choice collection of hand-carved African weed pipes. I still like to collect seashells when I’m on the beach. Collecting is an obsession – but maybe the moral here is that obsession, sometimes, is not such a bad thing.

Just take the cash in advance.

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.