posted on 01 Apr 2016

Rare Books Uncovered : True Stories of Fantastic Finds in Unlikely Places by Rebecca Rego Barry

I suspect that every book collector, whatever it is they collect, dreams of the perfect find - even if you never really expect to stumble on the mother-load. Fabulous finds and fortunate serendipity always seem to happen to someone else. As a result we're usually reduced to reading about the good fortune of others as a way of experiencing the thrill by proxy. This is pretty much the territory Rebecca Berry is trying to fill for the book collector - it's really a sort of bibliophile pornography.

However, to work well and help fill the collecting gap, a book detailing famous rare book finds by others more fortunate than yourself needs to be well written and the examples that get selected need also to be inherently thrilling. Sadly, I have to report that this particular book is rather flat and lacking verve and the examples she chooses are very hit and miss - there are just too few that would make the pulse of the book collector race. Berry writes mainly for a trade magazine known as Fine Books and Collections and her style reflects this kind of house magazine journalism - it's very formulaic and two-dimensional and fails to bring the instances of rare book finds to life in any meaningful way.

What we get here is an assemblage of short narratives about famous finds - not only books but book-related material and ephemera. Some of these are really very well known by anyone who is likely to buy this book - which book collector hasn't heard about Poe's Tamerlane or the way Barter Books stumbled on an old unused propaganda poster and ended up making it ubiquitous ( Keep Calm and Carry On)? She also showcases other examples which I found to be pretty unremarkable and really don't seem to qualify as 'fantastic finds' at all - just because something comes to light unexpectedly it doesn't mean that its a fantastic find.This book could really have been half the length it is - there's a distict hint of padding about some of the entries.

I was very much looking forward to this book coming out because when this sort of thing is done well it can be fantastically entertaining. However when it's just run-of-the-mill you're left with something thats more like a collectors catalogue than a set of dream-fulfilment narratives. Disappointing.

Terry Potter

April 2016