Signed by the author: a bonus of buying secondhand
Signatures, inclusions, and annotations all add to the pleasure of reading
I bought my copy of Gillian Clarke’s 1978 poetry collection The Sundial from a secondhand bookshop. From the moment I opened it, before I’d even got to the dedication page, I knew it was going to be a keeper. Because it was signed by the author.
My day job is online editor for Fine Books & Collections magazine so I spend a goodish portion of the working week writing about rare books, manuscripts, maps, comics and related ephemera such as Ernest Hemingway’s typewriter or Jane Austen’s cup and ball game. But I still get a little buzz whenever I type the words “signed copy” in an article. In monetary terms it’s obviously a marker of higher value (the signed Tolkien set of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings at the top of this newsletter was sold this week at RR Auctions in Boston for $61,000 ).
But it’s more than that, it’s the feeling that the copy in your hands has passed through the hands of the author too. The Cardiff-born major Welsh poet Gillian Clarke has an attractive signature, legible but stylish, and has added in my copy “with best wishes” which is nice. Originally £1.50, similar signed copies are going for £15 at the moment. Not that I’m interested in the monetary value, you understand.
She’s not the only person who’s written in it. Mine is the 1982 Third Impression but JM Hindley bought it a little later, not only writing their name on the first page but also adding the date, 1984. This would appeal to writer and publisher Nicholas Royle who in his marvellous book Shadow Lines explains how his general scouring of secondhand bookshops is at least partly motivated by the search for ‘inclusions’, the odds and ends people leave behind in books, and inscriptions such as these. He goes so far as to track down some of those who have written in their books and offer to send them back to them for free (Shadow Lines is the second in his bibliographic trilogy which started with the equally delightful White Lines: Confessions of a Book Collector in 2021 from Salt Publishing, and concludes, I assume, with Finders, Keepers which is out late 2025).
So far I’ve had no luck with JM Hindley, though I like to think it’s the same person who gave the film Sharkenstein only two stars on Amazon, commenting: “A terrifying story of a Nazi inspired bodged up shark and its adventures – parts of the film seem a little far-fetched.”
What would have bumped up the value of my copy of The Sundial – just to be clear, I’m not upset that it’s not worth a bit more – is if Clarke had inscribed a dedication to one of her children on that title page too. It’s not that unlikely since many of the poems in this slim collection are about them. That would make it was is known in the biz as an “association” or “presentation” copy. As an example, my nice hardback of Song at the Year’s Turning by R.S. Thomas (1955) has been annotated in pencil by a previous owner who methodically went through and translated all the Welsh names in the texts. Sadly, it’s not the copy Ted Hughes bought for Sylvia Plath and inscribed “To Sylvia on her birthday with love from Ted, Oct 27th 1961” which sold at Bonhams in 2018 for £2,375.
A recent purchase dedicated by the writer to two people who I haven’t been able to identify, seems to be a proof copy that includes a post-it note which I think is by the author to the publisher indicating a correction required to the text. It makes me smile to own this.
“In getting my books,” wrote Edgar Allan Poe, “I have always been solicitous of an ample margin; this is not so much through any love of the thing in itself, however agreeable, as for the facility it affords me of penciling in suggested thoughts, agreements, and differences of opinion, or brief critical comments in general.” I feel the same. I like light annotations, with the emphasis on “light”. I have a copy of JRR Tolkien’s translation of Gawain and the Green Knight which is virtually unreadable as somebody has inserted an almost word-for-word translation in the line gaps between the text. But a few notes here and there adds to the copy’s journey. In my copy of Thomas’s poetry collection, the unknown annotator limits himself to marking half a dozen poems in the contents pages, presumably favourites, with no additional comment, simply a little note for me, the unknown future reader. I liked feeling part of that chain.
And it’s a chain that has no boundaries. My copy of Bernice Rubens’ 1983 saga Brothers chronicling a Jewish family having a rotten time over several centureies is an 1988 Abacus paperback copy which came from a local secondhand bookshop. Once again, by chance, it contained some inclusions from a previous owner. In this case it was several lined notecards which contained addresses of people with Jewish surnames in Hendon, Stanmore, and the city of Hod Hasharon in Israel. You don’t get that kind of emotional postscript reading on a Kindle.
