The Last Bookaneer Read Free

putting your face against them.
    â€œNow I see how you can boast such a wide selection in your cart.”
    â€œOh, no. These are not books that I sell on the train cars or in the street, dear boy. I have a pair of storage rooms two streets away for inventory.”
    â€œOh?”
    â€œThese are books and folios I collected, starting long before I had my own stall in Hoxton Square in London. Much of it was purchased from the stock of bankrupt publishing firms, private libraries, auctions, sometimes junk dealers who were too ignorant about books to know what they had in front of them. Go on, do look around for yourself. These books have witnessed life and death.”
    I laughed at the grave proclamation until I saw he was contemplative and serious. I made my way through the great maze of books, careful not to brush any binding with my coat. Interspersed with the familiar names of literary greats lurked mundane, interchangeable titles such as Manual of Bibliography , Bibliographers’ Manual , and American Bibliography . There was a shelf of humorously titled books such as Drowsy’s Recollections of Nothing and History of the Middling Ages that were not books at all, but rather imitation volumes Mr. Fergins had purchased from a public auction at the country home of the late Charles Dickens, who commissioned the false books to conceal a door in his library. I stopped to examine some books resting above these.
    â€œHave you ever read it?”
    I was looking at about half a dozen books with the same title: editions of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein .
    â€œRead Frankenstein ? No, sir. Reverend Millens would have barred it from coming near his library. I have never seen it with my own eyes, actually. Is it a proper book?”
    â€œAfter Sir Walter Scott read it, he wept, for he knew that even he , the finest writer in the history of Scotland, could never write a romance as original as a twenty-one-year-old girl had done. Does that answer your question?”
    I was not sure it had. “Scott I’d borrow from a friend and smuggle it inside my house. That and Stevenson.”
    â€œThere is nothing as lovely as a borrowed book. Those two Scottish geniuses’ books share a particular quality—I mean Scott and Stevenson. When you begin to read them, you feel like a boy again, and when you close the book you’ve turned into a better man.” Mr. Fergins went on, smiling and extending his arms wide, as though to embrace the room: “Now that you have made a closer inspection, what do you think is the single most valuable book in here?”
    I told him I could not guess.
    â€œTry.” The warmth of the room made his forehead bead with sweat and his spectacles slip down the bridge to the pointy tip of his nose.
    He seemed so pleased at the idea of me picking out a book. Not wanting my ignorance to shine through, I took my time to weigh my choices, then I selected a large volume bound in heavy black calf leather.
    â€œExcellent. That is one of the first folios of Shakespeare, but it is sadly incomplete. You see?” He brought it to a desk—where there was just enough free space between stacks of books to open the big volume—and showed me that pages were missing before pointing out other imperfections that remained invisible to me after he described them. “I purchased this for just two hundred shillings from the estate of a deceased lawyer in London some four years ago, and it is worth at least three hundred and fifty. Can you believe that? More remarkable than any original edition of Shakespeare is the fact that today for a shilling you can buy a fantastic modern edition of Shakespeare’s greatest plays. No, this is not one of my gems, but it is a clever guess, Mr. Clover. Now, hand me that one, if you please—yes, the second shelf down, two-thirds of the way across, the one that looks like a scared kitten who has been dragged from a river by its