On what would have been VN’s 80th birthday (using the traditional date), April 23rd, 1979, I bought my very first “first edition” at that year’s New York Antiquarian Book Fair. No, not a VN book, but John McPhee’s A Sense of Where You Are, his profile of Bill Bradley as a basketball player at Princeton, for $75. I have no idea if VN ever read anything by McPhee or if McPhee has ever said anything about VN. But I sense an affinity between the two writers: their passion for the precise use of language.

Almost thirty years later, on Friday afternoon, I wandered the aisles of the New York Antiquarian Book Fair at the Park Ave. Armory at 67th St. My McPhee shelf is essentially complete. But I am always looking for more VN.

Among the more than 220 dealers from across the country and Europe were several dozen dealers in modern literature or “first editions” offering, among their McPhee’s (not too many) and their VN’s (not too many either), very expensive cornerstone mysteries, very expensive popular novels that became landmark movies, very expensive high points in 20th century writing (it’s too soon yet to find any from this century), and very expensive dust jackets dressing up mere thousand dollar books into high society swells. And, yes, many were offering for the rest of us $25 and $50 books.

But it is the big boys who catch our eye. I’ve been peeking into the booths of this show for several decades and still know little about its behind-the-stalls goings-on. I still wonder where these dealers find some of their gems and how they have the gall to charge what they do. And then I think of how many times I would have laid down the cash I didn’t have just to posses one of their volumes. It’s a slightly awry world.

As far as prices go, VN was holding his own very well there. Some of the quality green Olympia Press Lolita’s were bumping up against the five-figure mark. (The following descriptions of condition are idiosyncratically my own and are not the terms dealers usually use.)

• A 1955 Olympia Press Lolita (Juliar A28.1.1) at Buddenbrooks (Boston), worn and a bit banged up, for $4850.
• Another Olympia Lolita at Ken Lopez (Hadley, MA), in very nice condition at $9500. An absolutely beautiful and bright 1958 Putnam Lolita (Juliar A28.2) for $5000. And an unpublished August 28, 1960 letter to Pyke Johnson Jr., an editor at Doubleday, returning a $2500 advance given to him for Pale Fire and asking that he be freed from his contract, at $4500.
• Another very nice Olympia Lolita for $9000 at Between the Covers (Goucester City, NJ). Also a 1938 Bobbs-Merrill Laughter in the Dark in green cloth and a fine dust jacket (Juliar A14.2) for $7500.
• A fine 1959 Weidenfeld and Nicolson Lolita (Juliar A28.3) at Crawford Doyle (New York, NY) for $500, bought by a fellow Nabokov collector who takes only the best.
• A 1969 Weidenfeld and Nicolson Ada at Thomas Goldwasser (San Francisco, CA) with corrections in pencil by VN scattered about the book, $5000.

More

I made notes and took photos of a bunch of inscribed Russian editions. I’ll post that next in “VN at the NY Book Fair (2): Inscribed Copies”.