"Can" B. Worth - Part Five

"Can B. Worth"

Part Five

            My extending hand, scrutinized by four eyeballs, passed the center drawer, dipped below the desktop edge and, with left handed sweep, reached, gripped, pulled upon and opened …the smooth sliding far left top drawer.  Out it came, back to my left.  The four eyeballs ceased tracking the hand and halted in expectation examination of the rapidly exposed shallow drawer’s contents.

            Paper clips, stapler, scissor, pen, pencil, partially eaten roll of old wintergreen Life Saviors, eraser, Kleenex packet, old Kit-Kat candy bar and a single glove occupying the fore drawer and thinning toward the back to expose empty drawer bottom… THERE FINDS… one old book upon a handful (3) of pamphlets.

            The hesitation of finding the visual end of the reach-pull-open-see… drawer… and that drawer’s open sea of… nothing-to-see… but another old book butted against the rear of a drawer otherwise filled with… no treasure… and only… “unworthy of comment”… iota DID NOT stop my eyeball pair from disregarding the other eyeball pair and message-send-me “OLD BOOK PICK IT UP”.

            This my left hand, in retreat from the drawer handle, did.  A CRISP and “FINE”  in blind stamp decorated brown publisher’s cloth, “6mo” “not too thick”, was the hand’s purloining.  With this hand retrieving and rising my eyes did a rare bookman’s spine end glance; “gilt title read DEXTER”, within the sliced AND DICED second of time to allow the eyeballs to skip-back to the pamphlet stack top TOO to see the word “PICKLE” revealed at the top pamphlet’s title head… .

            Am I crazy or “NO” for I am attempting to convey HOW VERY FAST the rare book “of value” appraisal has taken place AND IS ALREADY moving on to “totaling it up” (“Can B. Worth”) while my idiot companion’s second set of “he doesn’t know” eyes falters and has “fallen back”.  I knew the books; the one in my hand and the top pamphlet; “OH”.  I said.

            The historian did not know.  He stood there staring at… the Kit-Kat Bar?  “Dexter” I said to the spine end of the octavo and… title paged it without more than a flutter glance for I KNEW THAT title already but “CONDITION” was my actual “TAKE IT” for it was a “FINE CRISP” of a tome usually found “ratty” and worn.  My eyeballs continued to take-action-eyeball-speak to ME saying “NICE” and to “PICK UP” to my left hand roving toward the pamphlets.  Several old postcards spilled from the flat space between the tome’s title page and the front cover of the… “old book”.  Seeing them to be “old Dexter’s mansion” well known to me my right thumb pushed them back into the book.

            The three pamphlet stack of “PICKLE” rose in my left while the “DEXTER” remained suspended in my right.  My eyeballs READ the top pamphlet’s imprint date (the publisher/printers  “date at the bottom”) “1848” as my left thumb tucked in and pushed the “each” pamphlet below DOWNWARD just enough to show “title” and “imprint” WITHOUT displaying this effort “to gain knowledge”.  The result?  Two “same title” “PICKLE” with “1847” and “1838”.  All three, therefore in summary being, LATER editions of Timothy Dexter’s “A PICKLE FOR THE KNOWING ONES” with the “old book” being the classic 1858 “LIFE OF” Timothy “Newburyport” and “Boston”.  Therefore:  A rare book collector’s “CLUTCH” of the “Eccentric”.  How “eccentric” is STILL debated.

            BACK into the drawer’s BACK and butted BACK went the left handed pamphlets followed by the right handed “LIFE OF” and the drawer …left handed… gracefully… CLOSED.  “Done” in MY rare bookman’s “MOVE ON” “ten minutes left” (?) time slot because “I KNEW”.  I give a paragraph now, between drawers, so those reading may “know too?”.

            Timothy Dexter IS the historic “eccentric” “writer” and “wealthy” “successful” sailing ship era “merchant” of Newburyport, Massachusetts.  The internet will supply a reader with ALL.  Quickly:  Of low and poor “largely uneducated” origins he married well enough to capitalize a merchant start that took off due to the perpetual reversal of should-fail-and-bankrupt-him trades that, remarkably, ALWAYS turned HIS WAY for “large gain” so creating him to be a “one of the very successful merchants” of the village IN SPITE OF LOATHING and class dismissal by the other… mostly NOT as successful merchants.  Shunned, excluded and “a buffoon”, he, through his singular perspective of his… self taught not educated vantage… went on to build his grand mansion, write his legacy memoir “A PICKLE” and stride the Newbury street in fine garb with his little doggie (the HE DESIGNED woodcut illustration on the copies of pickle in the photographs).  He revenge of legacy is a classic Old New England fixture.  It began while he was alive, continued after his death and has silently become permanent ever since with the classic support of those who “like” assuring and those who …do not… further assuring… by assuring… that they DO NOT “like”.  Today, he has long and largely “distanced” ALL other of his Newburyport merchant peers.  The designation of “eccentric” be but a… quoting Dexter in a different context… “peper and solt it as thay plese”.  I have long been with Dexter.  To be a “not with” I feel may be a personal peril.

            The little quote above is a choice morsel of Dexter’s merchant minding.  His first and excessively rare edition of “PICKLE” not only was written as the quote’s spelling suggests but …had no punctuation.  His shunning fellows latched upon THAT.  Dexter, in his second and ever after editions, changed and corrected NOTHING but added two pages of punctuation at the end of the pamphlet so that the reader may “peper and solt it as thay plese”.  That charm of merchant genius extends throughout ALL of Dexter’s legacy and… “rare books”.