Stalking the Elusive Codex
by David Loftus
[A version of this essay appeared in the Winter 1994
issue of the late, lamented Plant's Review of Books.]
Before the advent of the World Wide Web, the orthodox method of putting your hands on that lovely out-of-print gem was to request a search through your favorite local bookseller.
But that didn't always turn up the goods.
And I noticed something odd when it did: If my bookseller asked for a maximum I was willing to shell out, the coveted tome always turned out to cost just that much. I'll go as high as 50 dollars, I told the dealer at J. Michaels in Eugene, Oregon, for an original clothbound edition of The Films of Akira Kurosawa by Donald Richie, and by golly that's how much it eventually set me back.
I couldn't help wondering whether that copy really happened to be the best available at that rate, or was simply a handy sample to which they automatically applied my maximum fee.
What made for truly memorable hunting was a combination of patience and luck: when I'd had a book in mind for years, a book I either remembered enjoying years before or had always wanted to read because of glowing reviews or the plaudits of friends, and suddenly it leaped out at me from the shelf of a musty used bookstore.
A book like Roger Caillois's short novel Pontius Pilate, which Luis Bunuel had praised highly in his quirky autobiography, My Last Sigh. Or Helmut Tributsch's study of the evidence for the ability of animals to predict earthquakes, When the Snakes Awake.
Often, the regular channels didn't suffice. No matter how intricate the web of American book finders' networks might be, tracking down that shy jewel for my collection required ingenuity and persistence.
I first encountered Mikhail Bulgakov's magical novel The Master and Margarita, in which the devil visits modern-day (that is to say, 1930s) Moscow, in my college library. A graduate student friend advised me to bypass the Michael Glenny translation for the one by Mirra Ginsburg. Supposedly, Glenny mistakes the Russian word for "refrigerator" for a proper name, thus inserting a mysterious minor character in the text for three pages, who then disappears forever.
I think I read that library copy at least twice in four years. Determined to possess one of my own, I requested a search through one of my favorite bookstores, the Boston Book Annex at 906 Beacon Street near the Fenway. They turned up nothing. The book was apparently nowhere to be found. Imagine my joy when, a few years later, I ran across a clothbound copy of the Bulgakov in that very shop! Never accept what people tell you about a book's availability, and never give up.
Since the beginning of the 1990s, several new translations of the Bulgakov have been published, making this wonderful book much more readily available in quality form, for the benefit of new readers to adore.
Of course, each of us has his breaking point. Patience can take you only so far. When you just gotta have that book, you may have to turn to crime.
I first encountered Deliver Us From Love in the course of prowling the love and sex sections of Harvard's libraries. Whenever I had extra time for pleasure reading apart from my studies, I often drifted down there. (The HQ sections of the Library of Congress numbering system -- feminism, sex, and women's issues -- were stored in underground Pusey Library, if you'd like to ponder that for symbolism.)
That's how I discovered If Love Is the Answer, What Is the Question?, Uta West's cosmopolitan meditation on modern relationships, for example. I also vaguely recall a book by an advertising man who placed billboards on the Manhattan subway lines to advertise for a wife, and some goofy sociological tracts on the nature of love.
Deliver Us is an engaging collection of essays in which the Danish journalist Suzanne Broegger spins quite rational arguments that lead inexorably to outrageous conclusions, to wit: monogamy, the nuclear family, private life, and children should be abolished, men should be barred from higher education for the time being (which I found particularly charming), and so on, all in a sophisticated, witty style. There are also some unnerving accounts of rape, and an elegiac visit to the public bath in pre-revolutionary Iraq.
This was another out-of-print volume (translated by Thomas Teal, published by Delacorte) which a regular book search failed to turn up. Eventually I discovered that the Boston Public Library had not one, not two, but THREE copies of Deliver Us From Love.
I peered inside the covers and discerned they were not doing a brisk business of circulating. Surely the library could limp along with just two copies? A friend counseled me on the perfectly legal way to "steal" a book from the library. Check out the book, she said, and keep it until it is overdue. When the library takes official notice of the fact, dutifully inform it that you have lost the book and pay for it. Then it's yours.
Splendid as this plan sounded, and despite my conviction that the BPL could survive on only two copies of the Broegger, I still had grave qualms. I had heard that the library loses 40,000 books a year to theft, patron loss, neglect, defacement, and other fatal causes. That was about how many individual books were published nationally each year at that time.
I hated the thought of willfully adding myself to that sorry statistic. But my jones was overpowering: I had to have that book. I checked out a copy and twiddled my thumbs.
There'll be a run on the book, I thought. Broegger's latest work will become a surprise bestseller, she'll be in the news, someone will translate her other books, and everyone will be trying to find a copy of her debut.
It was almost time for me to pay the piper. I put aside the money and screwed up my courage. And then . . . I discovered a used copy for sale at the Boston Book Annex -- the same shop where I'd found my Bulgakov! I joyfully returned the library's third copy, which probably sits untouched to this day, and paid the fine with a clear conscience.
I have to believe the Goddess of Books looked into my heart and saw my desperate need as well as the fact that I had always paid her obeisance with a pure heart, and she rewarded me. I shall never risk sinning again.
If anyone knows where I can get a clothbound copy of Jerry Mander's Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, gimme a ring, okay?
[Postscript: I revisited Boston -- and the Boston Book Annex -- in June 2001. The place was still great, it now had two resident cats, named Guthrie and Kiefer, and I bought a stack of books that I mailed home to Oregon.
[I also returned to the Boston Public Library for the express purpose of finding and photographing the fabled three copies of Suzanne Broegger's book, but though it was listed as being in the collection in the electronic catalog, I couldn't find it anywhere on the shelves. The BPL is a great library, but their shelving always sucked.
[Thomas Gleed, a net-acquaintance I've never met face-to-face, read a copy of this essay after I sent it to him and mailed me a beat-up first edition of the Mander book.]