Rhonda was sitting in the reading chair of her father for the first time in her life, and she looked very small in it. The green volume lay open on her knees. The note from the dealer was in my hand, and I read it three times. A first edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 1885, in the original cloth, with an offer of $14,000 for that one item alone. I had seen a damaged copy sell for that price on an auction website only last week. I knew then that the man was not offering a fair price. He was offering a hurry.
Rhonda explained in a rush. The dealer had called her six times. First he said the offer for the whole library would rise to $2,500 if the top shelf by the window was included. Then it was $9,000 for that single volume. Then fourteen. “I got suspicious, Mom,” she said. “I looked it up on my phone in a parking lot. I found three copies like this sold in the last two years, and every one went above thirty five thousand. He was trying to buy it from me for a third of its price.”
She held up the business card that had been tucked between the pages. On the back, in blue ink, he had written and underlined a reminder to himself: Do not let the mother see the top shelf. Rhonda said it had been sticking out of the volume, where he must have left it the day he came to look. I thought of the man standing in my den, smiling, promising to take everything away for $200, and I felt something very close to pity.
Rhonda put her face in her hands. “Mom, I was so sure that those shelves were just dust. The truth is I could not stand to walk in and smell Dad, the paper and the pipe tobacco and the leather. I thought if I cleared it all away, it would stop hurting.” I got down on my knees beside the chair, as much as my knees would allow. I told her that grief does not clear like a shelf. It moves in like a boarder, and in time we learn to set a place for it.
On Monday we drove together to the special collections office at Knox College, where a gray bearded librarian named Dr. Whitcomb put on cotton gloves and examined the volume under a lamp. He checked the binding, the gatherings, the points of the type, the fragile cloth at the spine. His eyebrows rose slowly, like a drawbridge. He said it was a true first issue in the original binding, remarkably complete, and that at auction it would likely bring between $40,000 and $55,000.
Rhonda gripped my arm. Dr. Whitcomb looked at me over his glasses and asked how a nickel yard sale find had survived fifty years on the top shelf of a den in Galesburg. I told him the truth. My husband had never let a grandchild touch it, and he had never once told me why. The librarian smiled. “He knew,” he said. “A man does not guard an object that way unless he knows exactly what it is.”
Knowledge kept on a shelf and loved is worth more than any price a stranger will offer.
We talked it over at my kitchen table that night with a pot of tea. I could have kept it locked in a drawer. But Leonard never kept anything locked up in his life. He lent every title he owned to every child who asked. I decided it would be sold through a reputable auction house in Chicago, with Dr. Whitcomb as an adviser, and that the money would be divided three ways: a third to Rhonda for her children, a third to me for the roof, and a third to the school library at Churchill Junior High, in the name of Leonard.
The dealer from Peoria called twice more. The second time, I told him very politely that I knew what the volume was, that I had the appraisal in writing, and that I would be happy to share his note with the state association of antiquarian dealers if he wished to discuss it. He did not call again. I did not enjoy it, but I will confess to a small satisfaction in setting the telephone down gently.
The hammer fell in March at $52,000, and I watched it on a screen at the house of Rhonda while the grandchildren ate popcorn on the floor. Nobody screamed. Rhonda held my hand so tightly that my wedding band left a mark. After the sale, the buyer, a university library in Texas, wrote to say the volume would go on public display. I read the letter aloud twice. Leonard would have said that was the best price of all.
The empty shelf by the window did not stay empty. Rhonda and I filled it with paperbacks from the farmers market, titles Leonard would have approved, and one new volume, a child illustrated edition, for the grandchildren. They are allowed to touch it. In the evenings Rhonda sits in the reading chair of her father with her feet tucked under her and a western on her knee. “Dust,” she says, and laughs. “Mom, I was so wrong.”
On Saturdays I still set up my table at the farmers market, with the coffee can and the hand lettered sign. Two dollars apiece. The boy who loves the Hardy Boys has read his way through twenty three titles now. The trucker comes by for his westerns. And in the pocket of my coat, where I can feel it, I keep the ticket stub from that Cardinals game, the one Leonard used to mark his place. I do not know who won. I know that he was reading to the very end.
