Hardboiled Bookselling
My Life in True Crime, part I, plus new arrivals
FBI Days
Four years ago, I re-opened Downtown Brown Books in northwest Portland, Oregon. I had registered the URL downtownbrown.com way back on November 30, 1996, adopting as an online handle a nickname I picked up because my first jobs were in downtown revitalization. I used the name for bookselling until I bought Eureka Books in 2007. When we moved to Portland and I rented my first space, in August 2019, I returned to my roots, but with a twist.
I called myself a book detective because of the arcane research that is part of my job as a bookseller (example). That began to seem too pretentious, so I dropped the tagline and simplified the logo. Little did I know how much actual detective work I had in my future.
In 2023, I have been involved with three book theft cases investigated by the FBI. I plan to tell you about them all in coming “Dispatches”, but for now you can read about one active case, which is one of the largest thefts of a private library in US history.
It’s the story of a reclusive collector named James Strand, a career printer at The Oregonian newspaper (he was a second-generation printer, following in the footsteps of his father).
Strand kept the depth and breadth of his collecting from everyone. His only living relative had no idea that he was a collector at all, and his only friend for the last 30 years had just the haziest notion of it.
Each of the dozen or so dealers he worked with knew about a narrow part of his collection—Stephen King, H. P. Lovecraft, Arkham House, Edgar Allan Poe, Golden Age comics, or pulp magazines. But no one knew everything. Strand bought top-notch pieces in every field and kept them in a bedroom of a small house on a derelict street in a part of Portland that neighbors call Felony Flats.
The modest house was perfect cover for some $2 million in books, at least until Strand died in the place over the summer. His body was found by police on what would have been his 89th birthday. Soon after the coroner left the premises, people started breaking into the house to take a look around. Within days, horror fiction highspots and unbelievable comics started being offered by sketchy sellers all over Portland.
Steve Duin, a comic book collector with a forty-year career as a journalist at The Oregonian newspaper, often talked about comics with James Strand at work. But Strand only let on about the collecting interests they had in common. When I showed Steve some photos of stolen comics he said, “Jim had much better taste than I realized.”
Duin’s story about James Strand, the theft of his collection, and the efforts of booksellers (like me) and comic dealers to recover some of the stolen material and catch the thieves ran in yesterday’s Oregonian (September 24, 2023). I plan a fuller account when law enforcement gives the okay.
Old Business
Two Dollars
A while back, I wrote about a contest I was in with a few other booksellers. We each bought a book with two dollars scrounged from our cars. The contest was to see how much money we could end up with after one year of flipping books, starting with whatever we could buy with that initial $2 grubstake..
I won the contest, selling a direct descendant of that first $2 book for $4800. Near the end of the 12 months, I took the $4,800 and put it into collections of book and manuscript leaves issued in the 1920s by the Foliophiles (example). Reader, I am proud to say that I sold the Foliophile portfolios recently to a local institution.
Invoice Total: $6,725.
Not bad in 13 months, starting with just eight quarters and a trip to my local thrift store.
To Kill a Mockingbird
I had quite a few (private) comments on my essay about whether Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep would overtake To Kill a Mockingbird as the most valuable novel of the 1960s.
In the story, I calculated that TKAM had appreciated over the last 20 years, but only at the rate of inflation. Several commenters argued that meant the book was losing ground and that the coming generation of book collectors would not find it so compelling (in fact, it was argued, future readers might well find Mockingbird’s depiction of race relations hard to stomach).
Those doubters may have a point, but the novel is still extremely popular with readers. On Amazon, it averages 4.7 out of 5.0 stars, with 132,000 ratings. It fares less well on Good Reads, with 4.3 out of 5.0 stars, but 5.8 million ratings. That’s a lot of fans, at least some of whom will become collectors. Of the big novels of the 1960s, Dune has the next highest number of ratings. Its average scores on the five-point scale are exactly the same as TKAM, but with 50,000 fewer votes on Amazon and 4 million fewer on Good Reads.
Great issue. Looking forward to “the rest of the story” sooner than later, I hope!