Backlist: Cage Match: The Notorious RGB vs Black Spider-man
First published on January 31, 2022 on another platform
The library of the Notorious RBG (the late Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg) sold at Bonhams last week [January 27, 2022—ed.] for $2.4 million. That might be the second highest total at auction for a woman’s library (the record is held by Estelle Doheny, one of the last private individuals to own a Gutenberg Bible).
There’s been a lot of chatter that the prices were divorced from reality and that the books won’t be worth much in the future.
The late Justice Ginsberg was not a book collector. The lots in the auction were selected from her private library, with many of the books inscribed to her. It is hard to imagine that anyone will ever pay $52,800 again for a copy of Gloria Steinem’s My Life on the Road, no matter who it’s inscribed to.
So in that sense, the naysayers are right that the majority of these books will not be good investments. But most things people buy for their houses are not good investments. Index funds are good investments. Commercial real estate is an investment. Books are objects we imbue with meaning—personal, political, historical.
I wondered aloud to a friend that perhaps many of the bidders for RBG’s books might have been women. I hope so. My friend said maybe the high prices would make women look stupid for paying so much. I don’t think so. The winning bidders had the money to spend and they felt a strong connection to a feminist icon, and they paid what they wanted to pay.
If book collecting (and bookselling) is going to expand beyond its core audience of middle-aged white men, we have to expect that these new collectors are going to want different things, and that they will have a different perspective on the pursuit of books. They are not going to buy all those Norman Mailer proofs that were so hot in the late 1980s and early 1990s and are so hard to sell now.
Whatever you think of the prices paid for RGB’s books, here’s some perspective.
A couple of days before the RBG sale [January 13, 2022—ed.], a one-page manuscript from short-lived comic book series called Secret Wars sold at auction for $3.36 million, the price of all the books in RBG’s library combined plus the cost of a decent house in most American cities.
Secret Wars was published by Marvel in partnership with Mattel in order to sell action figures and games. One of the comic books also provided an origin story for Peter Parker’s black Spider-man suit (creating a new character cleverly named Venom). The writing is unbelievably bad. Here’s how it starts:
Well, I’ll be an eight-ball’s uncle! That glob just--just spread out and became a costume--and dissolved away the tatters of my old one in the process! Not bad! Different... but not bad!
In Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing (which I recommend), he says, “You are allowed no more than two or three [exclamation points] per 100,000 words of prose.” The one-page Venom origin story has eighty-four words, ten exclamation points, three question marks, and no periods. It also has two illustrations of Spider-man wearing black, and that apparently explains everything.
If some middle-aged white guy (I’m assuming) would pay $3.36 million for that, the women (I’m assuming) who spent a combined $2.4 million for Ginsberg’s books seem pretty smart in comparison. In the scheme of things, which one has had a greater impact?
—Scott Brown