A HAIRLESS HORSE, A CRAZY DIAMOND, A GAY TRAITOR ...

single pulp paperbacks priced individually from a few pounds to large collections of wild Oriental
antiques, Pop art, and so on, for much more money. He was a Mickey Mouse type, seemingly in two
places at the same time, for he travelled constantly and bought from everyone – the bouquinistes
on the banks of the Seine, a laid back A-frame dwelling hippy dealer of California, a bohemian
Parisian poster dealer in a converted garage, an auteur photo galleriste, the retro soft porn dealers
of Lyon, the psychedelic specialist of Greenwich Village, a hip bookshop in Notting Hill, Timothy
Leary’s archivist, a Beat books vendor in an Islington basement and the big auction rooms of the
Western World. In the latter, he arguably drove the price way up for ‘funky’ stuff by the Marquis de
Sade, Hans Bellmer, Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire, and others. He even, from time to time,
bought books at an old bookshop in Mayfair called Maggs Bros. He also began to get to the source
of the stuff from the sometimes ancient and venerable old longhaired hippies and Lower East Side
punkers. He was at various times part of a number of scenes around the Stones, Warhol, Johnny
Thunders, Max’s, The Lower East Side of Basquiat and Haring, etc.
Most importantly, perhaps, he bought massively off Ebay at the very moment that the Englishspeaking
world was emptying its garages and attics onto the internet. Then there was the rare book
portion of the internet that he bought hugely from; he had people dedicated just to following up
his want matches on ABE, I think. So, the shape and direction would probably have been very
different if that lift had been summoned from below rather than from above. He was, of course, not
alone in this great passion for collecting the counterculture, there are other great private collectors
such as Philip Aarons and Richard Prince but his buying in overlapping areas surely affected their
book hunts, their goals, the availability of material and the way that it was presented and, indeed,
priced in dealers’ catalogues. He was a very superstitious man, and a dead dog, like the albatross to
the maritime explorers of old, or a crow to the Norseman, could have been a very bad omen for him
indeed.
Aside from these ‘butterfly’ sort of effects, how does a book become collectable, a good book to
collect? I’ll model very crudely how it happened for some books in the twentieth century, in the
hope that this will illuminate the collecting of counterculture. On occasion, books that became
collectable were tested or ‘made’ first by the primary market, they had saleability, they were
popular. People bought the book, it became scarce or, rather, it went out of print, and they started
to look in the second-hand market for other copies. This was the case with Ian Fleming’s Bond
series of novels, and also TE Lawrence. You might equally ask how a theory becomes a truth in
science; ideally, there is a theory that is tested through experimentation and observation. So, for
example, Einstein’s theory that light was deflected by the gravitational field of large planetary
bodies was proved by Eddington’s observations and measurements of a solar eclipse. You might call
this the inner truth of how a book becomes collectable and in parallel how a hypothesis is proved.
Then there is the external bit, it is not enough to have a theory proved in the lab or the field. It
has to be disseminated and tested through peer-reviewed journals, conferences, popular science
books, lobbying and, of course, it has to be given funding to become ‘true’. Similarly, enterprising
rare book dealers, auctioneers and some collectors catalogue books and produce books about books
to bring out their nuances, create a sense of connoisseurship and thereby make them more
desirable and, in the process, create bigger markets. Film adaptations are made, Fleming and Bond
again, further stimulating the market and increasing the pull, the shelf appeal, and adding noughts
to the price. Examples of very important collector catalogues that drove markets include Printing
and The Mind of Man and Martin Parr and Gerry Badger’s two volume history of photobooks. These
became shopping lists for collectors. You could say the same for learned journals and magazines
such as Nature and New Scientist which drove funding to exploit scientific discoveries.
You may well also have a stratum of wealthy collectors who all hit the demographic bend at the
same time and create an even richer market for the books already at ‘critical mass’, exploding them
into the realms of super collectability. You might call this the ‘external’ way that books become
collectable and truths become true, i.e. both are partly determined by society and not the quality of
the text or the conclusions of an experiment. Most importantly, a good book can be determined by
how much money and effort is put into marketing it. The amazing publicity machine used by the
big auction houses is one example of money and marketing. In a rather too perfect example of this
parallel between science and book collecting, a wealthy vice president of J.P. Morgan called Gordon
Wasson believed that the ancient drug Soma of the Sanskrit Rg Veda, was in fact the red and white
fly agaric mushroom of European fairytales. He kept the idea in vogue by printing his books in fine
bindings, beautifully laid out with great typography, in limited editions and on good paper printed
at the Stamperia Valdonega in Verona.
In 1973, a Russian scholar noted this ‘bling effect’ in a letter to the late John Brough, the
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