A Bookseller's Diary: You, too, can give your love a first edition-

Writing at Vulture, Kyle Buchanan declares a new wave is cresting:

In January’s The Boy Next Door, there was an early scene where handsome stalker Noah (Ryan Guzman) presents object-of-his-affection Claire (Jennifer Lopez) with a “first-edition copy” of The Iliad. Audiences guffawed. Foolish Noah, The Iliad was written almost 3,000 years ago! Nice try, you dumb, hunky movie.

Then, in February’s Fifty Shades of Grey, there was an early scene in which handsome stalker Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan) presented his object of affection, lip-biting doormat Anastasia (Dakota Johnson), with an entire set of first-edition books. Sure, that was a plot point in the E.L. James novel Fifty Shades was adapted from, but wasn’t it so much more fun to read that moment as a trash-camp homage to The Boy Next Door? 2015 was off to such a rip-roaring, weirdly specific start, where it seemed like every movie sexcapade would first be kicked off by the ceremonial giving and receiving of classics you read in high school.

Well, if three examples confirm a trend, then we have officially reached Peak First-Edition, because in this weekend’s The Age of Adaline, there’s an early scene where handsome stalker Ellis (Michiel Huisman) presents his love interest, honey-tressed immortal Adaline (Blake Lively), with … yeah, you guessed it, even more first-edition books. What the hell is happening here? Has someone been sprinkling torn-up Thomas Hardy pages into Hollywood’s drinking water? Is there a romantic-drama Mad Lib slowly making its way from studio to studio? Or is all this first-edition worship just some elaborate attempt to sink the Kindle?

Of course, this is nothing new. In A Pound of Paper (St. Martin's, 2002), John Baxter wrote of his days in Hollywood:

The book market was changing as new players took an interest. Once it had been rare for showbiz people to be interested in books, but the Eighties saw a stampede. Whoopi Goldberg was one such collector. She joined Tony Bill, actor James Spader, actor/director Danny deVito, director George Pan Cosmatos and scored of others in investing in the market (The latest of Hollywood's major collectors is Sarah Michelle Gellar, alias Buffy the Vampire Slayer). Celebrity interest pushed up prices of the year's fashionable hits, even though, on past performance, it's not best sellers that become collectors' items but books which accumulate a following over decades...

The film industry began to include first editions in its Christmas round of internal gift-giving. People who once got a watch or a pair of platinum cufflinks received a signed Hemingway instead. Harvey Jason supplied first editions to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as gifts for Oscar presenters like Julia Roberts who, by tradition are not paid.

(Jason, a character actor who made a packet selling first editions of books made into movies to film folk, gets a fascinating chapter in Ryan D'Agostino's Rich Like Them: Mt Door-to-Door Search for the Secrets of Wealth in America, Little, Brown, 2009). Baxter continues:

Some of this celebrity collecting was discriminating, most not. Nothing had changed fundamentally since Lana Turner had that first edition of The Postman Always Rings Twice preserved in something more like a handbag than a binding.

Movies and TV began to depict booksellers as figures of more glamour. In the film of Russell Hoban's Turtle Diary, Ben Kingsley played a bookseller who quixotically joins with children's book author Glenda Jackson to kidnap sea turtles from London Zoo and release them into the ocean. After Hugh Grant played the bookseller who marries film star Julia Roberts in Notting Hill, top-level London dealer Simon Fitch, launching a new shop in the same area, persuaded Grant to spend the opening day serving behind the counter. Reflecting the new direction of the trade, Finch stocked both first editions of J.D. Salinger and Fender electric guitars that once belonged to Jimi Hendrix.

It was probably not a stretch to expect, a decade on, to find celebrity collectors now have private librarians (or, the cynical might remark, Henry Bemis Books seeking its own patrons longing for the well-dressed book-case). L.A. personal librarian Michael Tuttle has done libraries for restaurateur Peter Morton, The Police's Any Summers, and the late Gore Vidal;  Kinsey Marable's clients include Oprah, Donna Karan, former New Jersey governor Jon Corzine "and others of stature and taste," Forbes reported, channeling Mr. Collins.

Kurt Thometz claims the late Brooke Astor, Si Newhouse, Fran Liebowitz, Sid Bass, Diane von Furstenberg and Calvin Klein; Thatcher Wine has big photo spreads of his Academy Award green room thematic bindings.

We are, however, inclined to agree that first editions made excellent gifts. So do autographed copies.

Here at Henry Bemis, we're more like Sam Spade, helping unite people with "the, uh, stuff that dreams are made of." And what does Hollywood do better than that? Let the movie first editions keep coming!

April 24, 2015