On the island of Samoa, in a house perched on a cliff beneath a smouldering volcano, a dying Robert Louis Stevenson labours over a new novel. It is rumoured that this may be the author of Treasure Island’s greatest masterpiece.
On the other side of the world this news fires the imaginations of the bookaneers, literary pirates who steal the latest manuscripts by famous writers to smuggle them to a hungry public. But a changing world means the bookaneers will soon become extinct.
Two adversaries set out for the south Pacific: Pen Davenport, a tortured criminal genius haunted by his past and Belial, his nemesis. Both dream of fortune and immortality with this last and most incredible heist.
The Last Bookaneer thrillingly depicts the lost world of these doomed outlaws, a tropical island with a violent destiny, a brewing colonial war and a reclusive genius directing events from high in his mountain compound.
Matthew Pearl is the internationally bestselling author of The Dante Club, published in more than thirty languages and forty countries. His other books include The Poe Shadow, The Last Dickens and The Technologists. Pearl is a graduate of Harvard University and Yale Law School and has taught literature at Harvard and at Emerson College. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
This novel features some underhanded, nefarious members of the publishing field, but luckily there are none on this list. From the earliest version of the story, Suzanne Gluck and Ann Godoff guided my creative goals with insight and respect. I’d like to thank all the others who helped from William Morris Endeavor Entertainment, especially Eve Attermann, Raffaella De Angelis, Tracy Fisher, Ashley Fox, Samantha Frank, Alicia Gordon, Clio Seraphim, and Elizabeth Sheinkman; and from Penguin Press, especially Matthew Boyd, Emily Graff, Sofia Groopman, Darren Haggar, Sarah Hutson, Juli Kiyan, Kym Surridge, Claire Vaccaro, and Veronica Windholz, as well as Stuart Williams and his colleagues at Harvill Secker. Gabriella Gage helped my research get off the ground. I owe thanks to my usual readers and encouragers for key feedback and moral support: especially Kevin Birmingham, Joseph Gangemi, Benjamin Cavell, Scott Weinger, Marsha Helmstadter, Ian Pearl, Susan Pearl, and Warren Pearl, and, of course, my wife, the ideal partner and my ideal reader, and my children, whose pecking at the keyboard is responsible for all mistakes (and anything avant-garde).
The Dante Club
The Poe Shadow
The Last Dickens
The Technologists
When Robert Louis Stevenson moved his family to Samoa, he indeed styled himself as a kind of chief of Vailima. As much as possible, the characteristics and details of the Stevenson family and the natives associated with them derive from history. As shown in this novel, Stevenson’s role in island politics, particularly his opposition to the German consular and commercial activities, provoked both respect and animosity. Of her stepfather’s various tangles, Belle Strong later remembered that authorities “attempted to deport him from the island, to close his mouth by regulation, to post spies about his house and involve him in the illicit importation of arms and fixed ammunition.” Toward the end of his life, Stevenson believed his book on the Samoan situation, A Footnote to History, would have an impact, and to some extent it did—placing a magnifying glass on the actions of the German Firm and prodding the American and British governments to make changes in the leadership of their sometimes corrupt and complacent consulates. But the conflicts and civil wars still escalated.
In 1900, the Germans would claim Vailima as the residence of their colonial governor. It is currently a museum and still the only house in Samoa with a fireplace. One of Stevenson’s short stories, completed in Vailima, became the first original piece of literature ever printed in Samoan.
Stevenson’s hand-drawn map for Treasure Island really was lost, though it is my invention to suggest a bookaneer swiped it. Still, Stevenson, like all popular authors of his day, was affected by literary piracy throughout his career, and was keenly aware of that. “I have lost a great deal of money through the piracy of my works in America,” he wrote, “and should consider it quite fair to use any means to defeat the lower class of American publishers, who calmly appropriate one’s works as soon as they are issued.” Rudyard Kipling, a younger contemporary of Stevenson’s, who at one point planned to visit Vailima, merged the two senses of pirate when he put the situation this way (paraphrased in the letter recited by Fergins): “The high seas of literature are unprotected, and those who traffic in them must run their chance of being plundered.” Stevenson’s writing habits also set up a uniquely vulnerable scenario, with a British visitor to Vailima later recalling how the novelist’s compositions often “were flung on the floor or allowed to drop into the waste paper basket; indeed a rummager in this sun-baked little room might have culled many riches from the scraps of paper carelessly flung aside and forgotten.” At the time of his death, he left behind several unfinished and abandoned novels, including one of those mentioned here, The Shovels of Newton French.
Did bookaneers really exist? A few years ago, I stumbled on a stray detail indicating that nineteenth-century publishers would hire agents to obtain valuable manuscripts that were fair game under the laws. Because of their shadowy place in history, I could not find much else about this group, but I was intrigued. Building on this fragment of legal and publishing history, I tried imagining more fully these freelance literary bounty hunters—the history of their profession, what they might be called on to do, who they were, their backgrounds, how their lives would bring them to this unusual profession and how the profession would shape their personal lives. As far as historical fiction goes, it fit one of my ideals: a bit of gray-area history that cannot be explored very far without the help of fiction. In this case, it seemed to me to call for informed speculation—what I’d refer to as research-based fiction—plus plenty of imagination. I applied the term bookaneer, one I had noticed had been used in a generic sense in the nineteenth century about literary piracy (the earliest use I find is in 1837 by poet Thomas Hood). I cast a few bookaneers in supporting roles in an earlier novel, The Last Dickens, in which we encounter Pen’s mentor-lover, Kitten, and hear about Whiskey Bill.
I realized I wanted to see more of these and other bookaneers, and reader feedback on this front encouraged me. This led me to create Pen Davenport and his assistant Edgar C. Fergins, whom I decided to follow on a journey that would test them professionally and personally. I envisioned my fictional characters crossing paths with a number of prominent authors in history, but my compass pointed them to Stevenson. I had been fascinated by Stevenson’s time in Samoa. It was intriguing and mysterious to his contemporaries to think of a European author at the far reaches of the known world, and I had to imagine it would have been an irresistible quest for my bookaneers—a kind of moment of destiny for both sides in the (still raging) battle over creative property.
CLOVER
Some books are to be tasted, others are to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.
FRANCIS BACON
No, I suppose you never heard of such a creature.
E. C. FERGINS
BACK IN MY salad days laboring for the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad Company, I would always keep an eye out to see if he would enter our car before the hour of departure.
“Expecting some pretty lass, are we?” the cook, grumbling with sarcasm, would ask me as I was scrubbing a table or polishing silverware to a blinding shine.
The man I would look for was given no more attention inside the cars than the bootblack or the traveling baker balancing his bread tray over his long arms. I suppose most people probably never looked at him long enough to take in his appearance. Middle-aged, middle-height, shaped like a plum, he had white metal-rim spectacles and a sharp nose and chin. His substantial and intelligent mouth was always busily readying itself for a smile, a song, or a whistle, or a shape of surprise. He would maneuver his bulky cart down the aisle of the train, a striped umbrella and his soft felt hat tucked above the top shelf of books. Reaching our dining car, he would push his bright green cart to me. Both of us had found the only man on the train who appreciated the other.
“My favorite customer,” he would cheer me on; then, leaning so far over his cart it might tip over: “What catches your fancy today, Mr. Clover?”
My fellow dining car waiters liked to read novels about poor boys who become rich, or rich men who were secretly criminals. They turned the pages so rapidly the words were scenery, like the fields and farms that passed our windows for long stretches at a time. I was looking for something else in books. I could not really say what, but I think I can say why: a notion started in my own brain was probably wrong, but an answer read in a work of literature would be right. That was my conviction at nineteen, and only in later years would I come to trust myself over a book.
Despite Mr. Fergins’s kind words, I did not really qualify as a customer. My pockets were so empty I was the only one living in New York City who did not fear thieves. But the generous old bookseller would leave me a book of my choice before continuing through the cars. If the tables were cleaned and set early, I could read until I felt the floorboards shake underfoot with the rumble of the engine. Then I’d hurry to return the borrowed volume while helping to carry his cart off the train. As he stood on the platform when the train began to run, Mr. Fergins waved his handkerchief as if he were seeing off his son.
In the village where I was born we did not have the variety of books that is only made possible by a bookstore or a circulating library. The local minister would give my mother books for me to read—black, thick, drab volumes meant to educate in menial or spiritual ways. Literature? I hardly even knew the word. My eyes were opened by an old, weathered copy of Milton I found when I was thirteen and the minister invited me to use his library. The poem was religious, but there was something new about it. The stories that I had heard so often in sermons were transformed by the poetry. They were made flesh and bone. It seemed I felt the tingling breath of Lucifer on the back of my neck, the light touch of Eve grazing against my arm, the expulsion not only of our first parents but of all the provincial boredom of my life. I cannot recall what questions I asked about Paradise Lost, but it must have been clear to him I was interested in the poetry over doctrine, because the book disappeared. Five years later, when I accepted the first job that brought me away from country life, I think I knew however much I tried I would never truly feel at home in mammoth, steam-filled Manhattan, with its incessant gallop, but the books consoled me. They were everywhere you looked, in the front of shop windows, displayed on tables along the sidewalks, in brand-new public libraries as big as castles. Even inside train cars.
Mr. Fergins may have been uninteresting to others. A relic of a time much slower than 1891; to them, he was as ordinary as his clothes. But they could not see the real man: amiable and unassuming, humble; there was a meaningful quality to his reticence, something unspoken. He endured the usual rudeness and impatience faced by salesmen. Perhaps this explained his patience toward me. Just as he would never dismiss the tastes of the waiters who wanted their fill of “sensation books,” he never questioned my worthiness for steeper paths. Books could function in two different ways, he told me one time. “They can lull us as would a dream, or they could change us, atom by atom, until we are closer to God. One way is passive, the other animating—both worthy.”
“I am just a railway waiter,” I said once while lifting his cart down from the train. “No book in the world will change that.”
He gave such a friendly, all-consuming laugh that I found myself laughing without wanting to, my heart sinking to the bottom of my chest as my eyes fell to the tulips painted on the cart. I suppose I’d hoped he’d argue.
“Forgive me, my young Mr. Clover. I laugh only at your formula. Literature will not change our profession or the quality of hats on our heads, heaven forbid—by change, I mean another thing entirely.” He fiddled with his white spectacles. “Another thing …”
But he did not finish speaking before the engine began to run and drowned him out.
Being a railway waiter means standing in place while the world moves around you. Because of us, instead of noticing that they had trapped themselves inside the belly of one of the most remarkable mechanical inventions of modern times, moving at speeds never before achieved, travelers could pretend that they were sitting in a dining room similar to their own. One evening around seven o’clock, on a popular route, our dining car teemed with people. There were frequently men and women of distinguished character, wealthy, well known, respected. On this occasion, there was a table on the far end of the car attracting stares that turned into stage whispers. I was too busy with my passengers to pay attention until Rapp, the waiter assigned to the table, grabbed my elbow. His skin was darker than mine, and he had greasy hair and a slight mustache waxed into crude points at each end, in imitation of our head cook.
He said: “You’re a bookworm, Clover.”
“What about it?” I was in no mood for his teasing.
“No offense. Sensitive one, you are. Just that I’ve noticed that grim half-breed face of yours perks up when you’re talking to that queer peddler.”
Rapp was just as much a half-breed as I was, as were all the railway waiters back then, but I was more annoyed by how he spoke about my friend. “Mr. Fergins is no peddler.”
“Rambles through the cars hawking books, don’t he? Ain’t that a peddler? Besides, that ain’t what I wanted to say. Thought you’d fancy a look.”
He gestured with a nod toward the table. There was a passenger, back facing me, his hair worn long with strands of white and silver. He sat at a forward angle over his meal of boiled leg of mutton with Parisienne potatoes as though he were driving a team of horses.
“Mark Twain—Twain, the writer. Don’t you even know about the things you know about?”
I had never seen an author in the flesh. I had never considered seeing an author in the flesh long enough to think what I would do.
Rapp’s half of the car remained busy, but my tables had begun to clear, and the chief cook called me over to help. After I was charged with a smoking tray of food for one of my tables, the cook opened the ice chest in the floor and pulled out a bottle of wine. It was for table sixteen.
I took a few deep breaths and crossed to Rapp’s side, where I turned to face one of my favorite authors, a half-dozen witty and clever sayings at the tip of my tongue. From under a wig of silver hair, a frightful old woman looked back up at me, flicking her long tongue over the white blur of her false teeth. “Heavens, what are you standing there for?” exclaimed the lady. “You can see I’m thirsty, boy. What kind of waiter are you?”
My hands moist with hot sweat, the bottle slipped through my fingers. Shattered glass and splattered wine: the greatest fear of the railway waiter. All the occupants of the dining car were gaping at me and it seemed every last one joined Rapp’s laughter.
I could not bring myself to tell Mr. Fergins what had happened. A few days later, he was rolling his books through our cars and calling out his newest titles. I still felt the sharp sting of humiliation. Even minor embarrassment lingered a long time with me. I fell off a horse when I was seven years old, and some mornings in New York City, waking on my hard cot in a closet-like room, the shrill laughter of my former playmates rang in my ears.
The bookseller must have heard something of the practical joke, because he spoke to me in such a way that he might have been visiting my sickbed.
“There is no keeping a secret on a train,” I said, my eyes falling to my hands.
He tried an innocent smile, then frowned at himself for giving himself away. “Come. Any man could drop something on a moving train.”
“One of the other waiters played a dirty trick. Said Mark Twain was in the dining car, and I believed it. I stupidly believed it.”
“No, but Twain wouldn’t be traveling that route this time of year,” he began, then stopped himself, excusing the strange digression by clearing his throat. “Mr. Clover, you believed your unworthy associate’s statement because you are an honest man, and you expect honesty reflected back from the world. I have been known to be the same way.”
“The worst part, Mr. Fergins, was not Rapp’s joke. It was how I felt when I saw it was not really him.” As I finished the statement, I realized with shame that there were tears in my eyes.
“You are always better off to read a book, anyway, than to meet the person behind it.”
“Why?” I asked of the peculiar reassurance. By the time he held out his handkerchief I had forgotten my own question.
“Do you know why you are so upset?”
“I don’t, sir,” I admitted.
“Let us think about it. Maybe it will come to you.”
“No. I haven’t a clue why I have turned into such a baby over a silly prank, some broken glass, and an author who was never there to begin with. New York City is too hard, just as Reverend Millens warned.”
“Millens?”
“My father,” I explained, telling the bookseller more in two words than I would ever reveal to the other waiters or the fellows in my tenement. “Well, I never knew he was, until I was thirteen. His church helped bring my mother to the village when she was a girl during the war, and then she assisted him in the work of arranging for others to come there. We could not be in his congregation, of course, but he would leave me books when I was a boy and, later, would let me pick them for myself. Sometimes I could hear his sermons from inside the library, which was above the chapel. When I told him I wanted to leave, he warned me the city would be too much for me, that it would be hard enough for a white man.”
“New York is hard for everybody; that is what makes it what it is. You know, Mr. Clover, when most people read a book, they take from its story happiness and strife, good and evil, morality and sin, so on and so on. That is not what is most important. It is always in the parts that we cannot fully understand—the holes in a story, the piece missing—where the real truth of the thing lurks.”
I shrugged, not seeing the point.
“There may come a day when you will understand what you are grieving today. Then the story you just told about Mr. Rapp’s loathsome prank will have another meaning, and be more important to you than an actual encounter with a so-called genius. Then you will think back and say, ‘Mr. Fergins was a true friend.’”
He seemed to guess I was most concerned at the moment about whether he would judge me for crying; he patted my arm reassuringly, which helped, and I sat back and listened to his wonderful descriptions of the latest books, as if he were offering up new and better lives. He even read me part of Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” with all its stormy rhythms. We were the first that ever burst—as I listened, I felt as though his words were the winds and they were driving us on—into that silent sea. In later years, this would be one of my happiest memories of my time as a railroad man.
New York City was so expensive that on only six or seven dollars a week (depending on gratuities) my chief amusement besides reading had to be to walk the island from end to end and watch. Watch the wealthy families stepping up into extravagant four-horse chariots, watch the vendors in the crowded quarters of hardworking Chinese or Germans. Everyone, the wealthiest or poorest, seemed to be in a hurry, but not I, not when I was away from the railroad. My mother’s cousin had a stable for police horses, so I saw him once every few months, but mostly he would have me help tend to the horses. From time to time I would encounter the bookseller in the city. I was so accustomed to seeing Mr. Fergins on his rounds through our train, I marveled the first time I saw the man with the roar of the city around him—but there he was, bent over his green cart, pushing it through the streets as though he had done so for all eternity. On one particular day, I was passing through the uneven streets of the lower portion of the city, studded with mansions of bygone eras that had turned into warehouses as the wealthy were building estates closer to the park. It was growing late, the brick buildings tinted a peaceful orange by the sun, when he appeared, struggling over the dents and breaks in the sidewalk. I rushed to help.
“My poor legs rejoice for you, young Clover,” he said, his face wet and pink with effort. “I purchased this cart from a florist—that is why there are tulips painted on one side—and sometimes I think of what it would be like filled with bouquets. Nothing in the world—not a ton of bricks—feels as heavy as books being moved.” He pointed our way into a boardinghouse. It was a modest wooden structure near the slow, dark river that separated New York from New Jersey. Well-dressed and well-bred gentlemen boarders occupied the sitting room. Pushing the cart into Mr. Fergins’s chambers on the ground floor, the umbrella tumbled from the top shelf.
As I retrieved it, I noticed it was misshapen, with the general form of a banana, and there was a stain on the striped fabric of the umbrella, a dark red, perhaps rust. The bookseller seemed embarrassed by its condition and tucked it back into the cart. “Always rolling off …” he apologized.
I was amazed by the sheer number of volumes of all kinds of bindings, colors, and sizes wherever my eyes traveled. Every conceivable space on any table or shelf and much of the floor was claimed by piles about the height of a tall man’s knee, with a wobbly wooden ladder that could be wheeled around. Mr. Fergins, his energy restored, mounted this with an athletic step that propelled him to the tops of the highest peaks. There were strong fumes of oil, too, though not nearly enough light to read the titles of the books without putting your face against them.
“Now I see how you can boast such a wide selection in your cart.”
“Oh, 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.”
“Oh?”
“These 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.
“Have you ever read it?”
I was looking at about half a dozen books with the same title: editions of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
“Read 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?”
“After 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.”
“There 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.
“Try.” 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.
“Excellent. 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 scruff.”
It was a small, worm-eaten thing. He waited for my assessment.
“It appears to me to be a collection of poems,” I said. “It is in tatters, I’m sorry to report, Mr. Fergins. It is missing a title page, which I suppose ruins the ability to resell it. And on top of that, it has been defaced—there is writing in pencil on many of the pages.” Words had been circled, underlined, drawn over with arrows into the margins, where there were illegible markings.
“Good, good. That is a volume of John Donne’s poetry. It is not a first edition, nor a rare one, and the thing presents no particular features of bibliographical interest. Yet, in my estimation, that would be worth in today’s market more than a thousand dollars.”
“Why?”
“Because this copy belonged to Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Those marks you noticed written in pencil are the notes Coleridge made on Donne’s poems. Imagine! It is the real power of a book—not what is on the page, but what happens when a reader takes the pages in, makes it part of himself. That is the definition of literature. It reminds one of the quote from Francis Bacon about books.”
I did not know the quote, never having read Bacon. But I was too timid to ask that or much else as he paraded me through the rest of his temple of books and excitedly showed me his favorites. He taught me what “signatures” could be used to identify a first edition, and how to most efficiently compare editions of the same books for changes and imperfections. He showed me books that other collectors or sellers had tried to repair only to further injure the edges of the papers, a problem, he explained, that booksellers referred to colorfully by saying the book had been “bled.” He discussed prices of the books, contrasting what he paid with the actual or current value. I was flattered because his tone suggested I, too, could learn a trade in books if I desired. But it was disorienting to hear these names—Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Scott, my own sacred Milton—coupled with the crude sounds of numbers. “Now, if you remember only two things from my lessons, promise me it will be these: do not follow the latest fashions of Parisian collectors, and never pass up the chance to buy a book of English poetry dated before 1700.”
“I promise, Mr. Fergins.”
Through all of this, a small but persistent clicking sound could be heard, then another simultaneous clicking over the first. The bookseller let out one of his sudden laughs. Imagine an old wolf howling for the last time before lying down to die, and there you have his memorable style of laugh. “You are looking around for a clock, I take it. No, there are many things that have become dearer to me since the day I left London, young Mr. Clover, but time is not among them. In fact, I have no use for it outside the timetable for your railroad. The sound you are hearing comes from inside there.”
He led me to a large glass case and pried open its iron cover. The floor of the case was filled with pine and buttonwood leaves. On top of this soft bedding were elaborately constructed compartments with strips and squares of various materials—leather, cloth, paper. There were two ventilation windows on the sides of the case, and a petroleum lamp burning hot, with a saucer of water over it that created a mist you had to squint through. I stepped back, startled by an unexpected movement. The case was filled with an assortment of translucent worms. He told me a professor of one of the city colleges had loaned him all of it in order to observe the creatures inside. Then he handed me a magnifying glass to look through.
“What are they?”
“Bookworms. Well, that name itself has always been wrong. There is no actual species called a bookworm. We who have an interest in books imagine these pests all fit into one type of category because it grants them unified purpose. We prefer a villain we can’t see to at least have a name. They are not even worms, actually, but the larvae that become certain types of insects. There are types of moth and deathwatch beetle, for instance, that feed in the larval stage on all the materials used to make a book—glue, cloth, paper, leather. Take Anobium bibliothecarum. They produce the clicking you heard. These little creatures range from one twenty-fifth to one quarter of an inch and bore holes from cover to cover. Once they grow into adults, they have no use for these sorts of food. Think of it. They are raised on our books, then must leave them behind forever. The mouths of these little fellows are the most terrible things you’ve ever seen—all teeth and muscle. Observe for yourself through the lens. But make sure none get out—imagine the Judgment Day that could come of that, in this little room of all places on earth.”
He showed me sketches he had made of each type of larva and indicated which ones the book hunter should most fear.
Rain woke the city after a cool and still night the one other time I chanced to meet the bookseller in the streets. Walking through City Hall Park, I noticed my friend among the sea of faces. I had to look twice, because he was without his book cart, because he held up that poor umbrella of his, and lastly because he was partially blocked from view by a man in a heavy wool coat and a beaver hat. I had previously supposed Mr. Fergins was fifty-odd years old, as a sort of average of his saggy eyelids, his elastic mouth, his delicate porcelain skin, his sturdy head and limp body, each of which, on its own, suggested a slightly different age. This time, his posture seemed more bent than I had noticed before, and as the raindrops rolled off the warped wings of the umbrella, onto his shoulders and hat, and filled his lenses with drops of water, he grew older before my eyes. The two men were standing midway up the white marble steps to the magnificent courthouse.
I hailed my acquaintance once he was alone but he did not hear; as he climbed toward the massive columns I called again. He turned to look for the source. For a moment, an uncharacteristic sternness came over him.
“Mr. Clover,” he said to me, his customary cheer creeping in. The other man had just departed, marching down the steps. I wondered if he could have been a lawyer discussing some sort of trouble. Even with his easy smile in place, the bookseller seemed pensive.
“I could help push your cart today. I needn’t report to the station for hours.”
He tucked the umbrella under his arm and was rubbing his gloved hands together for warmth. “Believe it or not, I’ve left my cart behind in my rooms today. I must look like a mermaid absent her fish tail without it. I fear I must excuse myself, for I need to go in the courthouse. Pray come if you like, Mr. Clover.”
I knew the invitation was probably made out of politeness, but having only ever seen the outside of the building, I accepted anyway.
We walked through the gallery in front and down the corridor, where there was some commotion at the entrance to one of the rooms. A throng of people jostled each other and talked loudly, reminding me of the time I had visited the horse races outside the city between trains. The big double doors to the room had just been opened and the crowd flowed inside.
“What’s going on in there?” I asked.
Mr. Fergins peered up at the clock above the end of the hall. “Ten minutes to spare. Very well. Let us enter the madness.”
The room was filling with men and some brave women, most in fine clothes and holding expensive hats in their hands or under their arms, away from the crush of bodies. The bookseller’s hands and umbrella were more effective tools for clearing a path than I could have guessed. The room suddenly seemed to hold its breath, then exhaled with even greater excitement. I positioned myself at a height to see the source. A prisoner had just been brought in at the front of the chamber. He had irons around his wrists and a bailiff steered him toward the front table. There was a man near us, evidently a physiognomist, who stood on a bench and dictated observations to an assistant: “Head and brow, showing an excess of animal passions … Jaw and high cheeks, a force of nature … In profile, a fearful intellectual capacity is revealed in the front lobes—have you gotten that down?”
Turning away, I suddenly felt a hand on my head.
“Nice, quite nice,” I heard.
“Pardon me!” I cried out, brushing the intruding fingers off.
The physiognomist pulled back. “Very sorry there, boy.” Then, to his assistant, he said in a quieter voice, “take this down. As previously observed in my notes of their race, the present mulatto contains features of the Caucasian in the cerebral area, explaining the greater capacity for intellectual growth over the common Negro.”
“See here—” Fergins began, getting between us, but the eager scientist had already pranced away to try to get closer to the prisoner.
There were jeers and mutterings, and soon rough epithets tossed from all sides of the crowd. “Scoundrel” and “traitor” could be made out; then, louder, “Pirate!” This last word was taken up by other voices in the room.
The man in question, in the brief intervals in which I had an unobstructed view, appeared unmoved by the near riot. He was tall, a full wave of dark hair on his uncovered head, with handsome features, a grim half smile that never showed his teeth, and a slightly crooked jaw that might have been broken. I could not help but feel a touch of admiration for his imperviousness to the noisy hostility. I moved closer to the front of the room, pulling Mr. Fergins along, even as I began to sense hesitation seize him. Then, as the prisoner passed near us on his way to the dock, his eyes locked on—me.
No, I realized almost at once, he stared over my shoulder at my companion. The prisoner stopped. He opened his mouth to speak and the room fell hush. Then the words pulsed and popped from his mouth like the sounds of a drum. Words I could not understand at all. It was a language I had not heard even while strolling the docks of New York City—which to me meant it was not a language.
Ooot-malla malla-malla-malla ma!
The articulate gibberish of Babel, as my father used to say in his sermons on the signs of the devil’s language. That was how it sounded to me. As the prisoner spoke, the color of blood filled his face, while all color simultaneously drained from the bookseller’s cheeks. The audience seemed to take the man’s burst of nonsense as taunting toward them. The jeers increased. I wrapped an arm around Mr. Fergins, using my other arm to battle our way back to the gallery and then to the staircase.
He was walking ahead of me as I peppered him with questions about what we had seen and what had happened. “Ah, here we are,” was all Mr. Fergins said. We had climbed one floor up and now reached a door, painted crimson, that ended a long corridor. The bookseller rapped the point of his umbrella high on the door, and when the door was opened, with an abrupt farewell he left me standing alone. I waited as long as I could but he never returned.
The next few occasions Mr. Fergins passed through our cars I was busy, or he was, and there was no time to discuss the strange turn of events at the courthouse. Another week passed. Then there came an occasion when engine problems disabled a train on our track, and the waiters sat around in the fashion of the leisurely class, wrinkling our fine liveries, alongside the darker-skinned dishwashers and porters. The bookseller, whose grin was wider than usual as his books were snatched at a brisk pace by stranded travelers, brought over an armful of volumes he said he had chosen for me, to which I replied, “No time today, Mr. Fergins.”
His mouth formed a long o and his large brown eyes appeared sad beneath the thick lenses I now noticed were etched with elaborate scratches. I asked him to take a table with me in the empty car.
“Excuse my rudeness, Mr. Fergins. But you left me standing there in the courthouse, and you ignored my questions.”
“Quite right!” he said, shaking his head. “You are right about everything. My only excuse is that I was unusually distracted that day. What shall I answer for you?”
“Who was that prisoner we saw being brought into the courtroom?”
He seemed startled by the question. His shoulders relaxed, but he did not speak for another moment until he asked, urgently: “Have you ever heard of a bookaneer?”
I shrugged at the queer word, then shook my head.
“No, I suppose you never heard of such a creature.”
A passenger knocked into the book cart and the slender umbrella tumbled down. Mr. Fergins seemed so proud when he caught it that he might as well have stopped a baby’s fall. As though to explain his pride, he added one of his peculiar asides: “This homely thing saved my life, you know.”
“The umbrella?” I replied with a quizzical stare.
“Did you know, Mr. Clover, that there are more patents filed by people set on improving umbrellas than for any other object? Yet they hardly ever change.”
“What has been pricking my curiosity was that you seemed to understand what the prisoner said—that mixed-up balderdash he called to you.”
“I?” His howl-laugh started and then broke apart into smaller, self-conscious giggles.
“Yes.”
“Who am I? Whatever makes you think that? Youthful imagination. I sell books and try to make people happier doing it: that’s my life in a nutshell. Let me show you a new novel from London.”
“I know what I saw,” I insisted, blocking his hand as he reached for the cart. “He was looking right at you when he began to speak in that strange tongue, and whatever he said troubled you. Mr. Fergins, I was there!”
The bookseller sighed, the bottom of his spectacles fogging for a moment, then clearing again to reveal pained eyes. “That was the first day of the man’s trial. I had been asked by the judge, because of long years of examining handwriting and the qualities of paper and ink, and so on, to review some documents related to the case. It is rather a tedious service, but I felt I should agree to the request. I suppose that man you saw is rather cross with anyone who might be asked to assist against him. He is a dangerous sort. I do not know the words he spoke, but I hardly like to think of what he is capable of.”
“Why is he so hated? Did he commit treason? Murder?”
“Murder!”
“Something infamous, I’m sure. Why else would all those people come just to leer at him?”
“No, he is not a murderer, not of men, at least—of books.”
“Books, Mr. Fergins?” I responded, too incredulous to complete my thought. “You don’t mean … A book cannot be …”
“The details of this narrative, in which I played a small part, will throw sufficient light on the subject, Mr. Clover, and should you suffer me to tell the story, you may well come to see what I think you have suspected these past months, that books are not dead things.”
That was how the last case of the bookaneers, the existence of which is known by so few, the specifics by none who walk the earth, came to be told to me.
FERGINS
Robbery of a publisher—I said that if he regarded that as a crime it was because his education was limited.
MARK TWAIN
You meet all kinds in the black arts—I mean printing.
A PRINTER’S DEVIL AT THE CROWN
IF YOU SHOULD ever meet people who tell you they know something about the bookaneers, be skeptical. They probably deal in myths and fables. That most people have never heard of the bookaneers and never will stems from the bookaneer’s unique position in that long, twisty, and mostly invisible chain of actors that links author to reader. It will be the bookaneers’ collective fate to have appeared and disappeared with only traces left in our atmosphere, like so many meteors. The story I have to tell is about a particular bookaneer of the most extraordinary skill—the last true representative, some might say, of that name and tribe. My account is true in all particulars, because I was there.
The story has no beginning—I mean no single obvious starting point—but stories ought to try to begin somewhere. London will do, then. My bookstall in Hoxton Square was near the corner of Bowling Green Lane. I grew it, cultivated it, and—excuse my sentimentality—loved it for years to the exclusion of almost everything else. My stall backed onto a fence, the iron spokes of which were clothed with moss in every variety and shade of green and brown from two hundred years of growth. A church bell tolled periodically from one end of the street, a fire engine clanged from the other, and my books were situated comfortably between these sounds of spiritual succor and earthly warning.
Around people who enjoy books, the bashful disposition of my youth grew into a sociable one. Strangers talking over piles of books do not remain strangers for long. Had I never learned to like books, I would have become the dullest sort of hermit. When I was younger than you, Mr. Clover, I set myself for the law, persuaded that a profession in which books were carried about and consulted at all times would have to be agreeable. But the harder I tried, the more that discipline’s endless doctrines made my head ache. I quit with no plan in sight.
I’ve never been able to bear asking for help when I need it most, and I needed it then. What a spot to be in, with no prospects and no sympathetic family member. Fortunately there was a bookshop. Every young man’s story should have a bookshop. This one was not far from where I was boarded. I spent so much of my time inside—hiding, I suppose, from my friends and my parents’ friends, from my landlord, from having to justify my decisions and, high heaven forbid, make new ones—I might well have been counted as an employee. Soon enough I was. Stemmes, the book collector who owned the place, probably felt he had no choice but to invite me to apprentice. For more than three years I slept in a windowless chamber beneath the shop. I packed crates, pushed brooms, and tried to avoid falling from old shop ladders while wielding my duster, but I also learned about book values and imperfections, about which auctions to attend and how to win the best volumes, about how to search for the right book for a customer and, when necessary, the right customer for a book. I enjoyed every minute of the work. Well, that is not quite right. I disliked being closed up in dark rooms all day and growing unused to sunlight while trying to please a gloomy, stubborn man who would spout maxims such as “exaggeration is the octopus of the English language,” which I assumed must mean something. When I learned that an outdoor bookstall in a leafy square was shuttered, I gathered every cent I had in this world and purchased the municipal license, its shelves, and its stock.
My natural gifts for salesmanship may have been lacking, but they grew with the delight I had in my humble enterprise. I kept five sets of stacking compartments of shelves, with my chair in the middle, and an inventory tailored to the enduring loyalists who came by several times a week. Unlike other bookstall keepers, I never chased anyone away for wanting to read a chapter or two under the shelter of my awning on a hot or rainy day. In fact, readers too poor to make a purchase had been known to come to my stall every afternoon for two weeks until a novel was finished.
My parents never recovered from my dropping out of the law. Once, I overheard them speaking in their garden, my mother remarking to my father that at least I had my books—I will never forget how these words sounded in her voice. “At least he has his books,” as though without them I was nothing. They always blamed my reading, you know, for my having fewer friends than my brother and for my weak eyes, never thinking that because I had weak eyes and because I was shy, having a book at the ready rescued me.
I should mention that in the course of having the bookstall, I met a few handsome women now and again who were as interesting as they were affable. And my thoughts turned to starting a family whenever I would see Veronica and Emily, my beautiful little nieces, who lived in the country and kept me on my toes during my visits. But books are jealous mistresses. As soon as I was back in London my time was consumed to the point that the pursuit of anything more than cordial friendships was always cut short. Before long, I had lost my youth and my patience for indulging others. Books were everything in life; books were better than wine.
Yes, you could say I had all I ever hoped for. Before the age of thirty, I was blissfully self-sufficient, earning enough to live on and attracting notice for skills that carried special value in our trade. For example, I was unusually adept at deciphering handwriting that was deemed illegible scrawl by others, even though my own eyesight was never better than mediocre, and that only by being glued to spectacles. My abilities were useful in identifying markings made inside books by previous sellers or readers and by authors themselves on proofs or in rare first editions. I could imitate a particular person’s handwriting, as well, so that samples of the style and appearance could be mailed outside of London to potential buyers instead of waiting for photographic reproductions. I always had a penchant for remembering what I read, and for reading a wide range of subjects in literature and history alike, which allowed me to date proof sheets or other materials discovered unbound and waiting to be priced. It helped that I spent long days at my stall dipping into every sort of book imaginable in between serving customers. The worthy bookseller must know not only the details of Spencer’s childhood but also the history of papyrus in ancient Egypt.