"Can" B. Worth - Feeding the Birds - Part Three - The Large Inside - Part Two

"Can" B. Worth

Feeding the Birds - Part Three

The Large Inside - Part Two

            The sensation that I most confronted and …this continued to expand its front line before me… was my ACKNOWLEDGEMENT to myself that I lagged behind on the learning curve of where Dead Can “was at”.  I was always, it seemed to me, just behind in enlightenment as to …how sophisticated this rare booker was, how sophisticated he had been and, within the office contents I OWNED, STILL WAS… IF… I did not destroy his boxed messages in …the traditional dealer – commercial rape and pillage frenzy that IS THE NORM in estate lot purchase and distribution and… THAT THIS TOO… was FINE with Dead Can; a “what” HE “expected to happen”.

            Therefore… when during the actual office clean out, I found two smaller old cardboard boxes TOGETHER packed full of copies I quick scanned as “Hawthorne and Longfellow”, not only did I quick chuck them on to the dolly but I also …did not keep them together… in addition to “blowing them off” as of any commercial value.  It was not until I exhumed the larger box within the …six foot deep gravesite of its “bottom of the stack” burial within the cemetery of the full storage unit that was… Dead Can’s “stuff”… THAT I …vaguely… connected a dot… to a dot that caused an “Oh wasn’t there a SECOND smaller box WITH that one TOO?”.

            This was followed by a stand up straight all alone in the current dark hole of the exhumed from burial grave to …over view the whole cemetery… and say… “Oh shit.  I wonder where THAT box is”.  That moment of self-brilliance was a result of a first dot; a single shelved …REFERENCE… book… I had already found.  And blown off.

            That book was the commercially redundant Tryon and Charvat “THE COST BOOKS OF TICKNOR AND FIELDS…”, (Bibliographical Society of America, New York, 1949).  It is SUPPOSE to be “good” for …how about fifty bucks.  True street corner market is, AT BEST, ten bucks with, in fact, a “FOR SIX BUCKS” offering being “sluggish”.  WHEN I found Dead Can’s… “he bought this when it came out” “I know he liked Hawthorne” “He has the Hawthorne bibliography TOO” “He couldn’t afford Hawthorne” to a final “Look at the (shelf) dust on this sucker; it hasn’t been touched in forty years at least” …copy I’d further “Huh” to I KNOW that Ticknor and Field are in addition to being a “THE” American Renaissance publisher from the ye old Boston bookstore’s 17^th century building as their office’s location …that their –brown publisher’s cloth- bindings ARE …THE… symbol of American Renaissance publishing.  So are, therefore, appreciated for THAT quality ALONE… AND THAT appreciation is “NO MONEY” in the market but does created a lot of bibliographical “states and issues” principally involving their (Ticknor and Fields) inserted DATED catalogs AND / OR “binding states”.  AND that all of this WOULD attract Dead Can’s roving eye onward to him actually “doing something with that” to continue to a final:

            “OH MY GOD THIS IS HIS TICKNOR FIELDS COLLECTION” in these two boxes.  “Yep” and I did find the other box and I did NOT destroy the boxes and I did VERY carefully inspect the boxes, review the books and… put them all back just the way I found them and …concluded:  That there was “nothing great” (commercially valuable) in the boxes but that they truly were Dead Can’s hand assembled …by finding one book at a time, two box COLLECTION of his personal FLIRT with… Hawthorne, Longfellow and Ticknor Fields… “in original publisher’s cloth”.  He bought the original reference book.  He, TOO, found that to be useless.  He still liked the wholeness of the publishing and the bindings.  He did not have any money.  He lucked into (found them by chance) the books in the collection.  He gathered them over, perhaps… forty years (?).  He kept them together, eventually boxed them up in the two boxes as a “completed” flirt and… buried them with the rest of his collection.  And… that’s just the way he did these things… after he “came to rare books”.

            He didn’t give a “rat’s ass” WHAT ANYONE did, said, peeked at, thought of or even COLLECTED.  This was a “MY WAY” guy, with NO MONEY, staying in the fight.  Although my eye could pass back and forth over the accumulated spine ends and poke a tome free to …title page it.  ALTHOUGH I did see old book seller’s notes saying such as “first edition first issue”.  ALTHOUGH I did “that’s not a bad copy” and/or “Huh” and/or “these too?” to the inclusion of the Field family published memory tomes… that he did actually read (?)… there was but one inclusion that really has stuck with me as being “so Dead Can”.  That’s his …singular inclusion of a  “yellow back”:

            His inclusion of a …beat up… “NOTHING” copy of Hawthorne’s SCARLET LETTER in the English cheap edition “yellow back” soft cover format:  Do not for a minute did… I… think that this was a chance, an accident or a “nothing”:  HE KNEW that… Melville’s “THE WHALE” is “a first” in this format.  HE KNEW he’d “never own that”.  HE KNEW that THIS was HAWTHORNE in YELLOW BACK.  And… he noted JUST as I DID that this actual copy was …ink stamped on the title page… by a Constantinople bookseller… so:  “Wow, cool” to that too.  And…through all of this… I came further to be enlightened as to how “only Dead Can would do that” (make up the collection of ‘junk copies’ over forty years, box it up and bury it after tossing his SINGLE ONE HE OWNED “yellow back” in… too).