The Cookbook Collector (7 page)

The programmers were cheering like sports fans, like NASA officials at a shuttle launch. High fives. Hugs. Emily and Milton told each other how relieved they were. Yes,
relief
was the word that felt permissible. Relief after the long, complicated filing and the brief, torturous delays. All along, Alex had worried that the wave might crest before Veritech arrived. Now here they were in November 1999, and the wave was bigger than any of them had imagined. One hundred nineteen dollars a share. They were on track for listing in the top ten IPOs of the year.

Other emotions remained unspoken. While the group rejoiced in its collective fortune, a private calculus commenced. As one of the three company cofounders, with three million shares, Emily had come into a personal fortune on paper of $357 million. Emily’s assistant, Laura, as employee four, owned half a million shares. As of that morning, she had $59.5 million. And so on down the line, for each of Veritech’s 156 employees, from the oldest, with over two years’ seniority, to the newest, who had signed on to work for options. True, everyone’s stock was locked up for six months, after which—who knew? The shares were volatile. Theoretically the whole industry could go up in flames, but on-screen, Veritech continued to rise, breaking new ground, etching a new social order. Newly minted millionaires like company chef, Charlie, gazed with awe and quiet jealousy at Veritech’s cofounders, now fabulously wealthy. Newly comfortable Miguel, the cleaning engineer, gazed quietly at Charlie. And Veritech, which had been a team where everybody was so free and easy, first names only, could no longer pretend to be a classless society.

“All right,” said Alex, after giant cookies had been delivered and more coffee served. “All right, you guys.”

Despite the early hour, the others followed him upstairs to work. No one knew the precise etiquette for becoming wealthy in an instant, but it felt wrong to sit and watch the stock price for more than thirty minutes as a group. From now on the programmers would check Veritech’s progress every thirty seconds on their desktops.

PART TWO

Light Trading

Thanksgiving Week 1999

6

G
eorge was courting a collection. He wasn’t sure how many books there were. One hundred? One thousand? He had seen only two. The seller was secretive. She said she had inherited a collection of rare books from her uncle, and George assumed the volumes had sentimental value. The two she brought George were intriguing. The first, an 1861 Mrs. Beeton, was not rare by any means, but it was in exceptionally good condition. Beeton’s
Book of Household Management
was so thick that most copies ended up in three pieces because their bindings didn’t hold. This copy was a good little brick with its red leather binding still intact. The second volume the seller brought was much older. The long title began:
The whole duty of a woman, or a guide to the female sex from sixteen to sixty
 … and included a promise to provide
choice receipts in physick and chirugery with the whole art of cookery, preserving, candying, beautifying, etc
. The book had been published in London in 1735 and would have been valuable, except that it was so badly worn. The cover was falling off and the pages warped and spotted. The title page was torn.

The Beeton was the sort of book listed in catalogs as a “wonderful gift” for the everyday book lover. It would not tempt a serious collector. George could sell Mrs. Beeton for four or five hundred dollars. He was doubtful about
The whole duty
.

“This one’s in rough shape.” He showed the volume’s wear to the seller, even as he noted hers. She was about his age, but she looked shattered, as though she had never recovered from some early loss. Gray-eyed, sharp-featured, she was tall and pear-shaped. Her long gray hair fell straight past her narrow shoulders to her waist. She might have been a teacher once, or a social worker, but more likely she was a perpetual student, and a case study all her own. Her name was Sandra McClintock, and she wore faded clothes and cowboy boots, and she walked everywhere. She told George she’d only brought him two books because she didn’t want to carry any more. He did not believe her. “The cover is ripped,” he said. “The pages here are stained….” He turned the leaves deliberately.

Were there others like these? Better? And how were they acquired? He tried to look diffident as he wrote a check, one hundred dollars for the pair.

“Are they all cookbooks?” George asked the seller, but she didn’t want to discuss the matter. “Are you interested in an appraisal?”

“Maybe. I might be.” She didn’t object to the evaluation, but she looked disappointed as she took the check. Clearly she had hoped for more.

George fretted after she left that she would not come back. What if Sandra had something really valuable? He waited three days for her to call, and when she didn’t, he phoned, and asked to see her. She did not want him to come to her, and so he invited her to bring more books to the store. Had she contacted another dealer? He knew all the dealers in the area. He would have heard. Was she setting up an auction? He didn’t ask.

He wanted Jess to hurry up and fly home for Thanksgiving. He was afraid Sandra might arrive while he was out and leave books with Jess, or even allow Jess to open them and ooh and ahh and say, “Those must be worth a fortune!” This scenario seemed unlikely, given Sandra’s cautious approach, but Jess had a way of bounding in at the worst moments. She had asked once, in front of college students with a box of books to sell, why George paid so little for contemporary novels.

“Because they’re ephemera,” he said.

“All of them? Even Thomas Pynchon?” Jess held up a battered paperback copy of
V
. “Even Saul Bellow?
Humboldt’s Gift
for a dollar?”

After he’d bought a stack of novels and chucked the rest and said good-bye to the students, he clapped his hand on Jess’s shoulder. “Do you think I want a running commentary on prices? When I want your analysis of the book-buying business, I’ll ask you. In the meantime, let’s treat this as a store, not a seminar.”

She didn’t look in the least contrite. “I was talking about literature, not analyzing the book-buying business. And if I were, I wouldn’t confuse a seminar with a store. And I wouldn’t confuse a store with a folly.”

“A folly,” he echoed, incredulous, offended.

“A folly like an expensive hobby,” she said, assuming he didn’t know the term. “A folly like a little miniature ruined castle in a garden.”

“‘Little miniature’ is redundant,” he pointed out.

“You know what I mean.”

“Yeah, well, I’d like my folly to be a little less expensive, which is why I want you to stop theorizing about my prices in front of customers.”

“All right, fine.”

Tuesdays and Thursdays were peaceful. George’s other assistant, Colm, was discreet, spectacled, a tenth-year graduate student writing on Victorian commonplace books and the art of quotation. Far better for Sandra to meet Colm. He was judgmental too, but indirect.

However, as George feared, Sandra dropped in on a Monday.

“Hello,” said Jess. “May I help you?”

Sandra hesitated. “I’m here with a book for George.”

“We don’t buy books on Mondays,” Jess informed her.

“Sandra,” cried George, rushing from the back room, “come with me.” There was no door between the store’s two rooms. Bookcases simply poured through the open passageway. “Watch your step,” George warned. The back room was a full step down.

“I was thinking,” Jess said, following them, “we should install a ramp here.”

George gestured her away.

“We could get one made of plywood, and then if we straightened out the front entrance, we’d be almost wheelchair and stroller accessible.”

“Jessamine,” said George, and she understood and backed off.

“I have one more book to show you,” Sandra told him. “But this is the last one.”

“The last one you have?”

“The last one I’ll show.”

Why is that? George thought with sudden dread. Is she saving the rest for someone else? But he said, “Let’s have a look.”

She unwrapped a pristine copy of
The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook
. “It’s the first British edition—with the recipe.” Sandra turned to the page with the title “Toklas’ Haschich Fudge.”

The original hashish brownies.
Peppercorns, nutmeg, cinnamon, coriander, stone dates, dried figs, shelled almonds, peanuts, … A bunch of canibus sativa can be pulverized. This along with the spices should be dusted over the mixed fruit and nuts … it should be eaten with care. Two pieces are quite sufficient
….

“True,” said George.

“What do you think?” Sandra asked at last.

“It’s not perfect.” He pointed to the tiniest of tears on the dust jacket, the spots freckling the title page.

“You don’t want it?” She needed money.

“I want it.” The book was charming. It was very good. Of course he wanted it. But what he really wanted was to see the rest. What sort of trove was this?
The whole duty
and
Alice B. Toklas
cohabiting on the shelves? “I’d be happy to appraise your whole collection,” he said once again. “If the other books are in this kind of condition …”

Sandra looked grave.

“Even if they’re not …”

He heard the shop door. He felt a gust, a moment of traffic and chilly winter; heard Jess’s voice. “Hey!” A man’s voice, a rustling as the door closed again. Sandra and George stood together as before, examining the book, but subtly the climate in the store had changed. Jess was talking to a friend in the other room. He guessed Noah from Save the Trees. Jess had introduced the kid to George several weeks ago, calling him Director of Trees or VP of Tree-Saving, almost as though she were practicing for her parents, as if to say, This young man is not only idealistic, but management material as well. Yes, there he was leaning against a table stacked with books. Tall, wiry Noah with the frayed jeans, holes in the back pockets. He of the long arms and wide brown boyish eyes. Noah who was always touching everything. George tried not to notice. In fact, he refused to look.

“Really? You’re so lucky!” Jess trilled to Noah in the other room. “I want to go there.”

“You should come with us,” Noah said.

George couldn’t help imagining Jess sailing away with Noah. Surely they’d sail across the sea on Noah’s nonprofit ark. He hoped they would.

Even as he ushered Sandra out, he heard muffled laughter. He couldn’t see Jess and Noah anymore, but he sensed them in Medieval History. He knew the sounds of flirting in his store. The rustles and faint scufflings between the shelves, the creak of bookcases leaned upon, the squeak of the rolling step stool.

Jess, he chided silently, does he have to be one of those idiots who lie down in front of logging trucks? Really, now. But of course she had to find a leftie leafleter who shouted, “Would you like to save our forests today? Our trees go back to Biblical times!” to complete strangers on the street.

He had never seen Jess in action at the corner of Bancroft and Telegraph, but he could picture her. “Our trees predate Henry James. They gave their lives for him.”

“You’re not serious,” he heard Noah tell Jess.

“I am,” she said. “I’m afraid of heights.”

“I can’t believe you’d work for Save the Trees and never want to … experience them!”

“Can’t you experience them from the ground?”

Now he was whispering.

Silence.

“Jess,” George called.

No answer—as if to say, Oh, now you want me to come, when you brushed me off before.

He sat at his desk and glared in her general direction. In a moment she appeared in a V-necked sweater and a gauzy Indian skirt, the kind sold in stores called Save Tibet. She didn’t look embarrassed, or disheveled, or in the least undone. He couldn’t fault her, except that she looked far too happy for such a murky November day. There she stood, radiant. Her eyes were shining. All that from Noah? Had the shaggy tree hugger really cast that kind of spell?

“What is it?” Jess asked him.

“Get back to work, please.”

She smiled at him. He’d never asked her to do anything “please” before. She didn’t hear that he used the word only for emphasis. “Could I show Noah the Muir?”

“Is he interested?” George spoke in the third person even as Noah materialized behind Jess.

“Of course.” Then Jess saw that George meant “interested to buy,” and she looked a little disgusted. She liked to think of Yorick’s as some sort of rare-book room, a miniature Houghton or Beinecke.

He unlocked the glass case, and Jess took out
The Mountains of California
.

“Cool,” said Noah.

“
When I first enjoyed this superb view, one glowing April day,”
Jess read aloud,
“from the summit of the Pacheco Pass, the Central Valley, but little trampled or plowed as yet, was one furred, rich sheet of golden compositae, and the luminous wall of the mountains shone in all its glory. Then it seemed to me the Sierra should be called not the Nevada, or Snowy Range, but the Range of Light
.”

Golden compositae, George thought. How easy it was to forget the mountains, just a drive away.

“And look at this.” Jess opened the book and showed Muir’s inscription on the flyleaf.

Noah traced Muir’s signature with his fingertip. “That’s incredible.”

“That’s fifteen hundred dollars.” George took John Muir away from Jess and locked him up again.

Later, after Noah had to run off to work, Jess approached George at his desk. “Could I ask you something?”

“You could.”

“If you love books, why don’t you like sharing them with other people?”

“I do like sharing them,” said George. “I like to exchange them for money, in a transaction economists call making a sale.”

“You can hardly stand it when other people look at them.”

“Looking is fine. I don’t enjoy watching people paw through a signed—”

“You touch your books all the time,” Jess protested.

“I wash my hands.” He had her there, and he saw her smile, despite herself.

“You’re very supercilious,” she told him.

You’re very pretty, he thought, but he said, “Anything else?”

“Do you like owning books more than reading them?”

He began to answer and then stopped. “You want me to admit that I like owning better, don’t you? Then you can tell me that books are about reading, and that words are free.”

“No, I’m really asking,” she said. “Which do you like better—having or reading?”

“I like reading books I own,” he said.

“Does owning improve them?”

“You mean why not go to the library? Look at this
Gulliver’s Travels.”
He unlocked the glass case again. “This is a 1735 printing. Do you see the ridges here?” He held up the page for her. “This is laid paper. See how beautiful it is?”

“What happened there?” She was looking at the white scar on the back of his right hand.

“Cooking accident,” he said.

She couldn’t help staring at where the scar disappeared into his shirt cuff. “That must have been some knife.”

“Look at this. Do you see the chapter headings?” He showed her the thick black type. “When I read Swift here, I’m reading him in this ink, on this paper, with this book in my hands—and I’m reading him as his contemporaries read him. You think there’s something materialistic about collecting books, but really collectors are the last romantics. We’re the only ones who still love books as objects.”

“That’s the question,” said Jess. “How do you love them if you’re always selling them?”

“I don’t sell everything,” he said. “You haven’t seen my own collection.”

“What do you have?”

“First editions. Yeats, Dickinson—all three volumes; Eliot, Pound, Millay …” He had noticed the books she read in the store. “Plath. I have
Ariel
—the English edition,” he added temptingly. “I also have Elizabeth Bishop.”

“I wish I could see them,” Jess said.

“You would have to come to my house.”

“Are you inviting me?” She must have known this was a loaded question, but she asked without flirtatiousness or self-consciousness, as if to say, I only want to know as a point of information.