billions is the scariest thing about them.
The Exorcist
is a truly scary book because it only asks you to believe one thing—that Satan does exist. There are no talking dogs or curses lingering from antiquity: there’s no literary sleight of hand, no metaphorical bullshit. Accept the guy’s premise (and who can totally deny it?) and he’s got you where you live. All it takes after that is talent. The trouble today (do I begin to sound like Mel Brooks’s two-thousand-year-old man when I get on one of these soap boxes?) is that show biz is often mistaken for talent. Get to the end, though, and ask yourself what it all meant, what was it all about? The answer’s usually nothing. Relieve the author from the obligation to make sense, and what’s there to be afraid of?
I have come to the conclusion that the people who buy these books don’t care much about books at all. You will seldom see a King guy or a Koontz guy browsing in a bookstore. I’ve been in Ruby’s store and watched the action myself. A guy opens the door. He doesn’t even come inside. He stands on the street with his head sticking in and asks his three questions. Got any King? got any Koontz? got any Barker? If the answer’s no, he’s gone. Ruby points him up the street, to Jerry Hark-ness, and later learns that the guy dropped two grand with Jerry. Unbelievable! What else can you say but absolute around-the-bend insanity? “All a guy needs to make it in this business,” Ruby says, “is an unlimited amount of Stephen King.”
Jerry Harkness had started in the book business as a teenager. He had worked for Harley Bishop and had learned the ropes, but had gone on to do things his own way. He knew his market and his people. His shop contained many items of general interest, but it was his horror, fantasy, and sword and sorcery sections that drew people from all over the country. Harkness had the only copy I’ve ever seen of the signed, very limited edition of King’s
Firestarter
, a $3,000 piece.
Twenty years have passed since Harkness worked for old Harley Bishop. He must have been young then, full of dreams of this—his own business. I looked in the window and wondered, not for the first time, how the reality matched the dream. I might like it myself, if I wasn’t a cop, if I hadn’t been born a cop. Where’s the truth in that, I wondered: was I really born to wade through guts and mop up blood every Saturday night? Suddenly I had the strangest feeling of my life, almost what they call deja vu in the superspook trade.
I have been here before. I have walked these paths and done these things
. I’ve missed my calling, I thought for the second time in ten hours. I’ve been a book dealer before, I’m a book dealer now, I already know more about books than ninety percent of the bozos in the trade. I’ve always thought I might be a book dealer someday, maybe when I retire. I had begun to put some things in storage for that distant day. Maybe it ain’t so distant, I thought for the first time ever: maybe I’ll just chuck all this crap and do it. I had already made one incredible buy, an act of good judgment that I’d be hard-pressed to duplicate. Almost fifteen years ago, I stumbled across John Nichols’s
Milagro Beanfield War
on a B. Dalton’s remainder table for ninety-nine cents. I read the book in a weekend and loved it, and I went all over town, to every Dalton’s I could find, buying them up. They were all unmarked first editions. At the end of that week I had seventy-five copies. I was twenty-two years old when I did that. I’ve run into Nichols a few times over the years and he’s always been happy to sign books. I had gotten about half of them signed. The book now goes for $150, probably $200 with a signature. I had at least $12,000 worth of books sitting in storage for my $75 investment. Maybe the time had come to do something with it.
Jerry Harkness was long and lean and still fighting the good fight against middle age. He
The Exorcist
is a truly scary book because it only asks you to believe one thing—that Satan does exist. There are no talking dogs or curses lingering from antiquity: there’s no literary sleight of hand, no metaphorical bullshit. Accept the guy’s premise (and who can totally deny it?) and he’s got you where you live. All it takes after that is talent. The trouble today (do I begin to sound like Mel Brooks’s two-thousand-year-old man when I get on one of these soap boxes?) is that show biz is often mistaken for talent. Get to the end, though, and ask yourself what it all meant, what was it all about? The answer’s usually nothing. Relieve the author from the obligation to make sense, and what’s there to be afraid of?
I have come to the conclusion that the people who buy these books don’t care much about books at all. You will seldom see a King guy or a Koontz guy browsing in a bookstore. I’ve been in Ruby’s store and watched the action myself. A guy opens the door. He doesn’t even come inside. He stands on the street with his head sticking in and asks his three questions. Got any King? got any Koontz? got any Barker? If the answer’s no, he’s gone. Ruby points him up the street, to Jerry Hark-ness, and later learns that the guy dropped two grand with Jerry. Unbelievable! What else can you say but absolute around-the-bend insanity? “All a guy needs to make it in this business,” Ruby says, “is an unlimited amount of Stephen King.”
Jerry Harkness had started in the book business as a teenager. He had worked for Harley Bishop and had learned the ropes, but had gone on to do things his own way. He knew his market and his people. His shop contained many items of general interest, but it was his horror, fantasy, and sword and sorcery sections that drew people from all over the country. Harkness had the only copy I’ve ever seen of the signed, very limited edition of King’s
Firestarter
, a $3,000 piece.
Twenty years have passed since Harkness worked for old Harley Bishop. He must have been young then, full of dreams of this—his own business. I looked in the window and wondered, not for the first time, how the reality matched the dream. I might like it myself, if I wasn’t a cop, if I hadn’t been born a cop. Where’s the truth in that, I wondered: was I really born to wade through guts and mop up blood every Saturday night? Suddenly I had the strangest feeling of my life, almost what they call deja vu in the superspook trade.
I have been here before. I have walked these paths and done these things
. I’ve missed my calling, I thought for the second time in ten hours. I’ve been a book dealer before, I’m a book dealer now, I already know more about books than ninety percent of the bozos in the trade. I’ve always thought I might be a book dealer someday, maybe when I retire. I had begun to put some things in storage for that distant day. Maybe it ain’t so distant, I thought for the first time ever: maybe I’ll just chuck all this crap and do it. I had already made one incredible buy, an act of good judgment that I’d be hard-pressed to duplicate. Almost fifteen years ago, I stumbled across John Nichols’s
Milagro Beanfield War
on a B. Dalton’s remainder table for ninety-nine cents. I read the book in a weekend and loved it, and I went all over town, to every Dalton’s I could find, buying them up. They were all unmarked first editions. At the end of that week I had seventy-five copies. I was twenty-two years old when I did that. I’ve run into Nichols a few times over the years and he’s always been happy to sign books. I had gotten about half of them signed. The book now goes for $150, probably $200 with a signature. I had at least $12,000 worth of books sitting in storage for my $75 investment. Maybe the time had come to do something with it.
Jerry Harkness was long and lean and still fighting the good fight against middle age. He
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