3/11/23
Newsletter #272
The Crack of Dawn
I’m not much of a collector. Many of my friends – particularly Sam – collected comic books. Not me. The only thing that I had that was any kind of collection at all was a drawer full of lighters.
When I got to L.A. and met my friend Rick, I found that he wasn’t a collector either. Rick had hundreds of books, but he didn’t care what editions they were – he didn’t buy books to collect, just to read, and I’m the same way. Except in one case.
Rick had a theory that I ended up prescribing to. It went like this: “If I’m only going to read one book from 1923 (or whatever year), it may as well be the Pulitzer Prize-winner. A group of people, purportedly experts, got together, voted, and this was their choice. It may not be the best book of 1923, but it’s got to be one of them.” Rick had read all of the prize-winning books before I met him: Pulitzers, National Book Awards, Nobel Prizes, and he owned them all. He had all of the Pulitzer Prize-winning books in a cupboard in his kitchen. The “collection” was comprised entirely of the cheapest editions Rick could find because he wasn’t collecting them, he was reading them. But as I looked at them I thought, “That could make a good collection.”
I kept the list of Pulitzer winners since 1918 in my wallet. Since one of my favorite pasttimes was haunting used bookstores, I relatively quickly – over two years – put together the complete collection, all in cheap editions. Then, unbeknownst to me at the time, I would spend the next thirty years replacing the crummy editions with 1st editions. And this created a joy I was able to experience many times – finding 1st editions of Pulitzer Prize-winners for a dollar.
Over the course of the years I did indeed replace most of them with, if not 1st editions, then at least early editions that looked like the 1st. I have a 1936 copy of Gone With the Wind, but it’s the 20th printing and worth nothing. If you bought the book in 1936, that’s what it looked like. And the chances of finding a 1st edition of GWTW were slim. It was a giant hit right away and there were maprinings.
I have a really early University press edition of A Confederacy of Dunes, and maybe it’s a 1st. It’s funky. I have a 1st edition of Ironweed, but it’s all wrapped like a library book.
Getting 1st editions of the most recent winners was easy, and I have a few signed by the author. I have a fancy reprint of the first winner, His Family by Ernest Poole from 1918, but I could never find any old hardcover copy. It’s awful and apparently no one bought it.
I put all of these books on the same shelf: oldest on the bottom, newest on top so it could keep growing. I printed out a little label that said, “Pulitzer Prize-winners, 1918 to the present…” put it on the shelf, and this was my one and only collection.
Then the internet arrived. Suddenly, every edition of every book was available, for a price. Even signed editions, with perfect dust covers. Most of my books didn’t have dust covers, and the ones I had were all battered and disintegrating. Compared to a real collection of 1st editions, with intact dust covers, my collection was shit. And all the fun went out of it.
It’s still my best collection, in it’s own bookcase in my living room (without the label), but somewhere in the early 2000s I stopped buying them. And reading them, too, but that’s a different story.
A question often posed to me over the years is: are they any good? The answer is that they’re really good, or they’re just bad. Somebody was going to get one every year no matter what.
Here’s my best find and it is not a Pulitzer Prize-winner. I purchased a 1st edition, without a dust jacket, of Frank Herbert’s Dune for $4.95, and didn’t even remember it for about ten years. I was cleaning up and trying to make sense out of all of my sci-fi paperbacks, and there it was, and I don’t remember buying it. Let’s start at the top. That book: perfect shape (“fine”), with a pristine dust cover, signed by Frank Herbert – $150,000. Same condition, not signed by the author – $15,000. My copy, no dust jacket, “good” condition – $150. Still, I paid five bucks.
All is quiet here in Delray Beach at 4:02 AM.
Another fabulous day is undoubtedly laying in wait for all of us. I mean, why not?