Speaking of burnt books, the most notorious examples I personally saw in a bookstore, actually offered for sale, were several first edition Arthur Machen titles. Early stuff. Fin de siècle. Previous siècle.
I remember a brief talk with my pal Alan Warren — probably best known for This Is a Thriller, concerning horror episodes on 1960s TV such as Twilight Zone — who mentioned he’d been looking around in Serendipity Bookstore recently.
“Do they still have The Burnt Machens?”
“Yes, they’re still there.”
The Burnt Machens became a legend in our circle. Obviously a major Machen collector had some kind of housefire. And instead of shoveling them out, they ended up for sale in a bookstore.
I remember the mild shock I experienced when I first saw them on the shelf. Primo Machen firsts, which I couldn’t afford in that era. I was curious to check the prices put on them.
They weren’t cheap.
But they were burnt.
Serendipity was close to being a classic of a bygone era. When I finally went in its doors on University Avenue in Berkeley, I was a happy book browser. They stocked all kinds of old books most stores by the 1990s had given up on. Whole sections on rolling casements of poetry chapbooks. Books you weren’t going to see anywhere else.
The owner, Peter Howard, was something of a legend — apparently he was a major player in the move into “hypermodern inflation,” where the titles of fairly new writers such as Stephen King were nudged up until the prices were on a level with highly collectable books from decades before. Maybe they couldn’t push a Kingie into a price range with Dickens or Faulkner, but they jumped recent books ahead much more than you’d expect. Created a collecting surge, a vogue.
Personally, I couldn’t stand Peter Howard. What a jerk. Fortunately, he had some great assistants, so if you explored the offerings on a day he wasn’t there, it was cool.
He had a policy of not putting prices on books — or if they had some outdated price on them (he had far too much stock to go through and update anything), he’d reprice them when you brought them to his desk.
I went in one time with Dennis McMillan and Howard pulled his on-the-spot repricing technique. Dennis left the books on his desk and exited the building. He was pissed.
Yeah, that practice was a No Go. I recall (or think I recall — I’d swear to the Serendipity incident, but this one I could easily be imagining) one day when Dennis and I went into the legendary McDonald’s Bookstore in the first block of Turk Steet on the edge of San Francisco’s Tenderloin.
McDonald’s was what I imagine many junk bookstores once looked like, back in the days of Vincent Starrett prowling the offerings in Chicago. Cavernous long room. Bookshelves that seemed to rise up at least twenty or thirty feet. Stuffed with items. Books stacked in huge piles on the floor, so some areas were hard to navigate.
You just knew something great had to be there.
But you’d never find it.
McDonald’s seemed to make most of its money selling skin mags kept near the cash register next to the front door.
Dennis found something he’d buy, however, took it to the register. And the guy verbally repriced it. Dennis turned and walked out the door.
McDonald’s closed eventually, and sometime after Peter Howard died Serendipity went belly-up. I don’t know what I was doing at the time, but I missed the close-out sales where the remaining stock, finally, was dirt cheap.
I sometimes wonder if The Burnt Machens were among the last items left.
And did they bring in as much as five bucks each?
