The late collector Tom Garner, who I profiled in my previous Dispatch from the Rare Book Trade, didn’t set out to amass a noteworthy Stephen King collection. A friend of his recently described him to me as a “rabid” for a number of writers. Stephen King wasn’t on the list.
Today’s New Arrivals catalog is devoted to selections from Tom’s almost accidental collection of more than 40 signed Stephen King books. These books, with their interesting provenance, tell a singular story with extraordinary results.
In the mid-1990s, Tom made his only significant acquisition of Stephen King first editions. Shortly after that, he changed his collecting focus to writers he could know personally. He saw himself as a patron who supported the book world by collecting newly published works from small presses and living writers.
Stephen King was never going to become his friend, so Tom moved on. But what a first-and-only purchase he made. He bought seven key books from a single dealer, and he paid serious prices for books that were just ten to twenty years old at the time:
Carrie, inscribed to an SF fan: $900 (about 120 times the cover price);
Night Shift, inscribed to Walter Shirley: $925;
The Dead Zone, inscribed to Walter Shirley: $275;
Christine, inscribed to Walter Shirley: $225;
and signed, limited editions of the first three books in the Dark Tower saga,
The Gunslinger, #75 of 500 signed: $1,200;
The Drawing of the Three, #450 of 850 signed: $700;
The Waste Lands, #1125 of 1250 signed: $450.
All seven books have the same bookseller markings.
Tom made his major King expenditure sometime between 1991 (when the third Dark Tower book was published) and 1997. That year, he acquired subscription rights to copy #1124 of the Dark Tower series from Donald Grant Publishers. Grant had a special policy: if you owned the most recent Dark Tower book, you could purchase future volumes with the same copy number. So when the fourth book, Wizard and Glass, was released, Tom continued the sequence with number 1124 of each new volume in the series.1 You can see Tom’s Dark Tower set here.
Among all the King books, I find the three titles from Walter Shirley’s collection to be particularly interesting.
Shirley was the son of a real estate developer who spent his father’s fortune on books2 and booze. The bookseller Glenn Horowitz memorably described him as “a ne’er-do-well playboy out of a Preston Sturges movie.”3 Shirley died in 1992, and his collection was dispersed.4
With the purchase of Shirley’s books, each of which came in a wonderful custom clamshell box by Mark Thomsett,5 Tom’s active pursuit of antiquarian King books concluded. But this apparent ending reveals something deeper about collecting: sometimes our most remarkable acquisitions don’t come from careful planning but from being in the right place at the right time and having the gumption to say yes to an opportunity.
Tom’s knack for spotting potential—or perhaps his passion for backing risky publishing ventures—led him to purchase a lifetime subscription to Cemetery Dance (CD) in the 1990s. For twenty years, until his passing in 2016, Tom received copy #20 of every limited edition book CD issued, including many signed Stephen Kings.6
Tom also supported many other small science fiction and fantasy presses and acquired lots of limited edition anthologies signed by King through them.
In addition to his fortuitous investment in a lifetime subscription to Cemetery Dance Tom also gambled on another unknown publisher when he placed an advance order for the first book from Centipede Press. In 2004, months before any books had been printed, Tom sent $1400 to reserve a copy of both the Arabic and Roman numbered versions of a planned limited edition of ’Salem’s Lot. Those two books are now worth nearly 20x his original investment.
What began with the purchase of seven good books ended up filling an entire bookcase at my shop. Tom may not have set out to build a Stephen King collection, but his willingness to recognize and seize opportunities created something remarkable. His legacy lives on not just in these books, but in the publishers and artisans whose early work he championed.
—Scott Brown, Downtown Brown Books
P.S. I still have eBay auctions running, with no reserve. A number of the lots come from the Garner collection (books in black clamshell boxes, group lots of signed books, the John Nance Garner autographs, and the book from Countee Cullen’s library among them.
Stephen King asked to reduce the number of copies he had to sign for the most recent book set in the Dark Tower universe, The Wind Through the Keyhole, so collectors like Tom who had numbers higher than 800 had to settle for an unmatching lower number for that book.
Bits and pieces of Shirley’s collection are available for sale online and turn up periodically at auctions.
Quoted in Tad Friend’s New Yorker profile of Horowitz.
Another of Shirley’s King books sold at auction in December 2024.
A bookseller who also commissioned clamshells from Thomsett identified him for me.
As I explained in my previous Dispatch, I acquired many other Cemetery Dance titles from Tom’s library six years ago. In total when he died, Tom had about 100 books signed by Stephen King.