I got an inheritance. Yvonne, a woman unknown to me, determined that after her death I could browse through her collection of books and take whatever I wanted. “I have many favorite books,” read the card I received from her posthumously. ‘Also books that you despised. Then I always had to laugh.’
Yvonne’s house turned out to be around the corner from me. It was full of books. An uncivilized greed took hold of me, but Yvonne’s relatives assured me that I could really do anything I wanted, yes I had to! take.
My literary taste is great and varied, so I put aside all trepidation and began to rummage openly. There was an old print of that Kees the boy and, also from Thijssen, The tough inconvenience with orange-gold cover, there an early 20th century Uncle Tom’s Negro Cabin with a beautiful linoleum cut on the front.
A book by Cissy van Marxveldt that I didn’t even know, her debut novel from 1917, Game and set!with art deco tennis rackets on them, just about everything by the naturalistic bestseller writers Cornélie Noordwal and Jeanne Reyneke van Stuwe (the wife of poet Willem Kloos, about whom colleague Boutens once said that she had helped Kloos both drink and poetry).
Knut Hamsuns How it grewa title that always disgusted me, but the book turned out (albeit rather Blut and Boden-ish avant la lettre) wonderful. Hamsun was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920 for this. How the katjangs got to Buikie’s boarding school from the thirties, but still delicious…
My shopping bags creaked at the seams. ‘Are you sure?’, I asked the next of kin again, but yes, they were really sure, because what was left had to go anyway and the antiquarian booksellers, strangely enough, were not interested.
It seems strange, but the latter is true. Especially for well-known books that sold well at the time, however beautiful (and beautifully designed), you get next to nothing. They have appeared in large numbers and reprinted so many times that there are simply too many copies in circulation.
People who have their dead great-grandfather’s entire 19th- and 20th-century library appraised often expect to get thousands of dollars for it, but they are usually happy if they can leave it for free. A first edition of a famous novel can sometimes be worth something, preferably with a dedication or a historical curiosity, but even then it is usually only a few tens.
“Don’t ask how it’s possible, take advantage of it,” an old advertising slogan roared through my head as I The brace boy in my bag, a surprisingly modern title for a nearly hundred-year-old children’s book, but the braces in question were not on the teeth of a 21st-century snot, but on the polio-deformed leg of an ‘unhappy’ child, as it was then called.
At home I proudly displayed my loot on the table, but The brace boy I took to my woman caveand soon I was completely absorbed: “Maybe it’s a privilege to be a brace boy,” said Paps. ‘That’s what the wife of Vechten, Wiesje’s mother, said to me recently,’ Beugeltje mused. Doctor ten Hemert nodded wistfully. Wiesje had an incurable heart defect and Van Vechten’s wife knew that her daughter’s days were numbered.’
Downstairs I heard my sons’ humming voices. ‘Does mommy have new old stuff again? We already have so much…’
Yes, so much, but never enough. Worth nothing to someone else, but a great treasure to me: perhaps that is a definition of happiness.