John Dunning and the Bookman
Have you ever read a book so good that when you finished you didn't care if you ever read again. Well I have finished just such a book. The Bookman's Wake by John Dunning is one of the best books I have ever read.
John Dunning writes about Cliff Janeway, a bookman by trade, a detective by circumstance. A bookman is a buyer and seller of used and/or rare books. The more knowledgable the bookman, the better he does in the trade.
I saw Dunning interviewed on Good Morning America several years ago, promoting his newest book at the time. Dunning is himself a bookman. When I learned this I was immediately drawn to his series. My dream is to own and operate a used book store. For myself, I'll probably be one of those who can be taken advantage of by experienced bookmen because my motivation is to own books and to try to make a little money selling the books I am not interested in keeping. I would rather own used books than new because they have history.
I was fascinated by the information set forth as to determining whether a book is a first edition, what makes it valuable, what actions of the owners that take away from the book's value. He explains the codes used by different publishers to denote a first edition.
Bookmen everywhere are probably gasping and holding their chests when I explain that I put a book plate in all of my books. Doing so reduces the monetary value of the book. For myself, I am not interested in the monetary value of my books. I just love owning them. Dunnning explains many of the finer details of book value.
Dunning portrays Janeway as a shrewd business man with great knowledge of the subject who distributes nuggets of information throughout the book, about book selling and collecting.
In The Bookman's Wake Janeway, and ex-police officer in the Denver Police Department, is approached by a former and somewhat less than savory colleague to perform a bounty hunter job which seems so easy as to be suspicious. A young woman, whose name is Eleanor Rigby has broken into a house in New Mexico and absconded with a book which apparently does not exist, but for which the owners would pay any amount of money to get back.
There were two brothers, Richard and Daryl Grayson (please excuse any misspellings of names as I "read" this book on tape), who were book printers and binders from the mid 1940s until their deaths in 1969 in a fire in their print shop. Daryl, the genius of the pair, would make limited runs of books in the public domain, such as Edgar Allen Poe's The Raven.
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