Found Book

Once or twice, like any person who buys and occasionally sells books, I have  found a book on my shelves that I did not know I had.

But only once have I found a really valuable one that I had no recollection of buying, and still don't. It happened about two "book culls" past, when I literally had books stacked two deep on some shelves. In the densely- packed Asia section, I saw the spine of this book:

It is Charles Vaurie's Birds of the Himalayas. Now this is not an unnatural book for us to have: I have some other good regional ornithologies, and the Himalayas were Libby's stomping grounds in her youthful Guiding days. She even had that slender pb bird guide published in Nepal in the seventies that many trekkers had back then-- I think I threw it out in a fit of critical thinking, because the illos were so dreadful, every damn species  sort of blue and black and  crested and about the same size. Now I'd be likely to keep it, just for that reason.

But Vaurie was something else. First, it was a beautiful book, with plates of various Himalayan pheasants and such, including my favorite non- raptorial bird, the Satyr tragopan, But the book is better  than that. Although it was published in 1972 it has the  air and feel of something like Beebe's Pheasants,Their Lives and Homes, published in 1926 in two volumes, or one of Meinerzhagen's expensive productions. But it is not an arty or coffee table book , like some "collectors'" editions published today; it is a sort of Golden Age standard ornithology.

My interest grew as I looked through it. A page illustrating the mythical Garuda bird was marked by a hand- painted card of the creature, a much better illo...

And then I see the bookplate, of the former owner, and the letter, and I am even more amazed, for I know who both of them are. Despite their aristocratic European names, they, like Will Beebe and Roy Chapman Andrews, worked for the American Museum of Natural History in New York, the institution that has done more to shape my view of the world than any other, from when I was reading Beebe and Andrews at the Ames Free Library in Easton or at Jeanne d'Arc Academy in Milton (which happened also to be the childhood mansion of another old influence and in that case a friend as well, Frances Hamerstrom, who was Aldo Leopld's only female student and who started her relationship with me by damning me for writing Rage for Falcons , fearing my "tough Sportswriter's style"- HER words, in the Auk no less, would end up with falcons being commercially exploited, and ended up drinking brandy with me and the cowboys in the Golden Spur, in a near- ghost town where, in 1914, her mentor gave a talk on conservation to a crowd bigger than the entire population of the town today.

That thread will wind through collecting specimens and the Peregrine Fund and widowhood the Congo pygmies and even the David Letterman show, but it is a western one mostly and not the one here, which leads to Asia and Father Anderson Bakewell and the Explorers Club; to Libby and three trips to Mongolia and Kazakhstan and three books so far; and who knows what else to come?

None of this would have happened without the AMNH, and Libby knows this so I assumed she, the seasoned Himlayan guide,  had bought it for me.

But she had never seen it either...

Road Books

My thesis for years has been that there are three great 1950's "Road" books. Two are obvious to the literate: Jack Kerouac's On the Road, and Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. The other  may be MORE obvious to naturalists, many of whom miss one or the other of the first two; Wild America, by Roger Tory Peterson and his late English buddy James Fisher. It is the most handsome book of the three, with scratchboard illos of every habitat in North America you can think of, and many of its inhabitants.

Given their time scheme, it is easy (and temporally possible) to imagine a motel in eastern Colorado or maybe Kansas, early in the morning, with Roger and James out in the yard contemplating a Scissor- tailed flycatcher on a wire, Volodya and Vera chasing a blue butterfly around a bush, he clad in unsuitably European shorts; and, in another room,a shirtless, sleepless  Kerouac typing manically on a roll of paper while Neal Cassady fills his ears with an endless speed rap. If I were, say, Tom Stoppard I could write a play about it...

I have a good first edition copy of Wild America, inscribed to me-- I'll tell the gratifying story of how Peterson came to sign my old copy one of these days. Out of curiosity I thought I would see how much comparable copies of the others would cost. It was a lesson in the comparative value of "nature" and "Lit" books.

Here is my copy and the inscription:

You can find several like it, signed, for $50.

Here is a copy of the original 2 vol Olympia Press Lolita . It goes for a cool $8,875.

A Putnam US first is more modest at only $20, but it is an eleventh impression-- not my idea of a "first."

This nice first edition, second printing, of On the Road goes for $475 with a later jacket.

And here is a London first with an odd jacket for  $516. Is that supposed to be Allen Ginsberg in the glasses?