The Bookman's Wake Read Online Free PDF Page A

got to be sure, and the
     only way to be really sure is to have a bibliography on the
     book in question. In that shining moment the bibliography
     pays for itself five times over. Bibliographies are not for
     casual browsing or for bathroom reading. They are filled
     with all the technical jargon, symbols, and shorthand of
     the trade. The good ones are written by people with demons
     on their backs. Accuracy and detail are the twin gods, and
     the bibliographer is the slave. A bibliography will tell
     you if a book is supposed to contain maps or illustrations,
     and on what pages these may be found. It will describe the
     binding, will often contain photographs of the book and its
     title page, will even on occasion— when this is a
     telling point—give a page count in each gathering as
     the book was sewn together. If a printer makes an
     infinitesimal mistake—say the type is battered on a
d
on page 212, say the stem is fractured ever so slightly,
     like a hairline crack in a skier’s fibula—it
     becomes the bibliographer’s duty to point this out.
     It matters little unless the printer stopped the run and
     fixed it: then you have what is called in the trade a
     point. The bibliographer researches relentlessly: he gets
     into the printer’s records if possible, trying to
     determine how many of these flawed copies were published
     and shipped before the flaw was discovered. Those copies
     then become true firsts, hotly sought (in the case of hot
     books) by collectors everywhere.
    Bibliographies are among the most expensive books in the
     business. A struggling book dealer on East Colfax Avenue in
     Denver, Colorado, can’t possibly buy them all when
     the asking price is often in three figures, so you pick and
     choose. I remembered when the Grayson book was published:
     it was announced with a half-page spread in the
AB
, an ad that promised everything you ever wanted to know
     about the Grayson Press. I had torn out the ad and stuck it
     in the book when it arrived. The title was
The Grayson Press, 1947-1969: A Comprehensive
     Bibliography
, by Allan Huggins. The blurb on Huggins identified him as
     the world’s top Grayson scholar and a collector of
     Grayson material for more than twenty years. The book
     looked substantial, one for the ages. It was thick, almost
     eight hundred pages, and it contained descriptions of every
     known book, paper, pamphlet, or poem ever issued by the
     Graysons. It had come in a signed limited edition at $195
     and a trade edition at $85. To me it was a working book. I
     took the trade edition, and now, as was so often the case,
     I was damn glad I had it.
    It was divided into four main sections. First there was
     a narrative biography of Darryl and Richard Grayson. This,
     combined with a history of their Grayson Press, took sixty
     pages. The second section was by far the biggest. It
     attempted the impossible, the author conceded, to catalog
     and annotate every scrap of Grayson ephemera, all the
     broadsides that the brothers had printed over a
     twenty-two-year career. This consumed more than four
     hundred pages of incredibly dense copy. The third section
     was called “Grayson Miscellany”: this contained
     the oddball stuff—personal scraps, Christmas cards
     (the Gray-sons had for years printed their own cards,
     charming pieces that, today, are eagerly sought), special
     announcements, trivia. Even the commercial jobs they had
     taken on—posters, menus for restaurants, brochures
     for the Oregon Fish and Wildlife Department —all the
     unexciting ventures done purely for cash flow, are now
     avidly collected by Grayson people. There would never be a
     complete accounting: a fire had destroyed the printshop and
     all its records in 1969, and it’s probably safe to
     say that previously unknown Grayson fragments will be
     turning up for a hundred years.
    It was the final section, “Grayson Press
     Books.” that was the highlight of the bibliography.
     Grayson