Yes, I am worrying about Hillary’s emails. I’m also thinking, though, about Philip Roth’s books. Well, one book in particular.
According to an article in the New York Times last week (by my old New Yorker “Talk of the Town” editor, Charles “Chip” McGrath), Philip Roth’s books are going home to Newark. America’s greates novelist of the unrequited id has bequeathed his book collection, numbering some 4,000 volumes, to the central book repository of his birthplace, the Newark Public Library. A dedicated room will be built for them there.
Until now, the books have pretty much all resided at Mr. Roth’s house in northwest Connecticut, where,” as Chip McGrath writes, the collection “has more or less taken over the premises. A room at the back of the house has been given over to nonfiction. It has library shelves, library lighting — everything,” according to Mr. Roth, “except a librarian. Fiction starts in the living room, takes up all the walls in a front study, and has also colonized a guest bedroom upstairs.
“Copies of Mr. Roth’s own books and their many translations are stuffed in closets and piled in the attic.”
That’s the line in the story that got me. Picturing Philip Roth’s “own books” chaotically stuffed and piled, I found myself seized by a sudden spasm of possessiveness.
The year was 1995. I was standing at the cash register in my little bookshop in midtown Manhattan, Chartwell Booksellers. It was early afternoon and Michael Korda, the legendary Editor-in Chief at Simon & Schuster and a great friend and customer of the store, was pulling open the door.
He was not alone. Often, in those days, Michael would bring writers along with him to the shop. On this day, I recognized the lean and hungry-looking gentleman at his side immediately. It was Philip Roth.
Michael seemed a bit agitated. “We’ve been walking since lunch,” he explained breathlessly, introducing me to the eminent author, whom Michael was then editing. “We’ve been looking in Barnes and Nobles for Philip’s books. And it’s been a little embarrassing. I decided I had to bring Philip to a real bookstore.” Michael looked at me hopefully. “What have you got of his?”
Timing is all in bookselling. I have come to learn this. Finding the right book at the right moment for the right person, regularly, enables a small bookshop to survive. Winston Churchill has long been my meal ticket at Chartwell Booksellers. Upon request, however, I have also hunted down books by many other authors. Winston Churchill brought me my first important customer, the notorious corporate raider, Saul Steinberg; I built a collection for Saul of “everything that Winston Churchill wrote, in first edition, bound in leather,” exactly as Saul asked me to. When we were done, Saul next handed me a list of almost two dozen authors and bid me do the same for them. His list ranged from Saul Bellow to Oscar Wilde. It included Hemingway (but not Fitzgerald), Robert Frost and Osip Mandelstam, Thomas Mann and Lillian Hellman. Norman Mailer and Leo Tolstoy.
And Philip Roth.
It was a fabulous list. At the time, Saul and his high society wife, Gayfryd, were hugely visible supporters of PEN, the international writers’ organization that Mailer was then president of. Sumptuous fund raisers were hosted at their palatial 740 Park Avenue triplex (formally the residence of John D. Rockefeller, Jr.). Along with their lengthy author list, I was provided a color chart for the leather clamshell boxes I would be fabricating (to house each book, whole, rather than carved up and rebound – a conservation function that I advocated). Gayfryd had color-coded each author’s leather for “The White Library,” the room where the books would reside. (Saul’s Churchill collection was kept in The Music Room, a ballroom-sized chamber hung with massive Master paintings, including Rubens’s Venus and the Three Muses Mourning the Death of Adonis and Titian’s Salome with the Head of Saint John the Baptist. The first time I visited the room to check out the completed, 51-volume, burgundy-leather-cased Churchill collection we’d built, in its home space, I couldn’t find the books. So dwarfed were they by the over-sized artworks and red-velvet-flocked walls, it took me a good 15 minutes of circling the room to finally spot the not insignificant set in a notched bookshelf niche near the Music Room’s arched entranceway. I had walked right by them. Twice.)
Philip Roth’s oeuvre on the day of his and Michael Korda’s entrance into Chartwell Booksellers numbered 21 titles. As fate would have it (it always does), all 21 books were piled at that moment on a desk right behind me. This enabled me to engage in what, I would hazard to say, remains my most theatrical moment as a bookseller. “What have I got?” I repeated to Michael Korda and Philip Roth. “I’ve got everything,” I said, reaching behind me to heft my very tall pile of Roths and, in one motion, slam the pile down on the countertop.
“In first edition.”
Roth’s bushy eyebrows shot up like thick quotation marks. Michael blinked and then beamed. “Bravo,” he said and started clapping. Then we all laughed.
I explained about Saul Steinberg. “Oh, I know Saul,” Roth nodded. “I’ve been to some very swanky dinners at that place of his.”
“For PEN,” added Michael.
“Would you sign everything,” I asked Roth. “For Saul?”
“Of course,” he replied. And did.
As he reached the last book — which had been his first — Goodbye, Columbus, Roth stopped. “Wow,” he said, handling the pale-jacketed volume for a moment. “Do you think you could find me a first edition copy? I lost mine a long time ago.”
I told Philip Roth I would be delighted to.
Goodbye, Columbus is not an easy first to find. It would take me a few months to locate a really good copy. I believe I paid $250 for it. I note that signed first edition copies today sell for upwards of $5,000. That’s what happens. (And Philip Roth is still alive.)
I sent the book with an invoice to the address Roth had given me in Connecticut.
I never heard from him again.
The next time I saw Michael Korda, I mentioned this. Michael shrugged ruefully. “He’s been going through some things,” Michael simply said. “Send him a reminder through his agent, Andrew Wylie.”
I did.
Nothing.
I let this all go a long time ago. It almost seems apt; a nugget of literary curmugeonry. Philip Roth stiffed me for a copy of Goodbye, Columbus. Put it in the books.
I salute those books and their author, whom I continue to read with enormous appreciation. Now they are all going to a reading room of their own at the Newark Public Library. A very good thing. Let the library take note, however, just for the record: One of those books is over due.