posted on 03 Feb 2016

Used and Rare: Travels in the Book World by Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone

I approached this book with the same mixture of fascination and trepidation I imagine a moth would have flying towards a candle flame. I was fascinated because this was a tale of book collecting – a topic I find almost impossible to resist – but full of trepidation because the authors were Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone.  To be fair, I know absolutely nothing about them other than the brief fly-leaf blurb but their photograph filled me full of dread. They have that all-American look that makes me shudder  - keen jaws, expensive haircuts, unbelievably clean skin and the look of middle-aged underwear models who could bore you to death about the healing properties of crystals. They look very sincere.

Having read the book I have to hold up my hands and confess my sins. Whilst I’m not entirely prepared to rule out the possibility that at least some of those stereotypical characterisations of mine might be true, I have to say that I found the book to be warm and charming and I have to admit that I even have more than a little admiration for the pair of them. This book has a couple of sequels and I have now got hold of those too – so that must signify something.

I’m conscious that this all sounds a bit grudging and sniffy – after all I expected to be disappointed and I wasn’t, so why not be more fulsome? Well, whilst I thoroughly enjoyed the Goldstone’s journey into book collecting world, there remains something homespun about the prose, something almost cutesy, something essentially Oprah Winfreyish – I couldn’t shake the feeling that books like this are the stuff of American daytime television.

Leaving my own prejudices aside for a few moments, the book has undeniable charm. The tale it tells is of a couple of middle class writers who discover  the joys of used book collecting and begin to travel the country, slowly being drawn further and deeper into the world of rare and used books and the people who sell them. Anecdote follows anecdote as the couple begin to define what they want and discover what they don’t want.

What makes the book a hit for me is their openness and their frank willingness to confess how little they know / knew and just how wide-eyed and unprepared they were for the eccentric and sometimes plain crazy world of books and book collecting. By the end of this instalment I was positively rooting for them to find their bargains or to stump up incautiously large amounts of  money for something the just had to have.

This book was originally published in 1997 and they have done follow-up volumes in subsequent years. I will be going back to join them again for their next venture into book world which is called Slightly Chipped: Footnotes In Book Lore and, at some point, I’ll report back on what I found.

 

Terry Potter

February 2016