HOWEVER, back in 2001 it was like a treasure hunt. I found none for sale but that Princeton University had one in their library. Public libraries here in the U.S. won't sell any specific book to a patron. That patron would have to wait and see if the book they want shows up at the annual book sale, where the libraries shed certain books that haven't been borrowed in years, possibly decades. [Of course some these old books they keep for credibility.] Some university libraries are a different story. They view your offer as a contribution or donation to the University. Yale has some great early Maugham firsts.
Princeton was not one that accepted 'donations' for rare books. So, back in 2001 I drove all the way down to the University one night. I had a casual female friend at the time who was getting her master's degree there. She had convinced me to steal the book with her help - she said people do it all the time. [She would have taken the book out, then at the end of the semester would say that she had lost it.] But I backed down, embarrassed by my obsession with this book. We had a fancy dinner then I had a very long snowy commute home that night.
There is nothing on the front cover of the true first. My copy is a bit rough at the top of the spine. The adverts and the All Rights Reserved notice in parenthesis is what you should look for on a first from T. Fisher Unwin. Note that they didn't capitalize the word Reserved.
A moral dilemma that happened too often. I never carried it out either. Several times I passed through security without triggering the alarm, but it wasn't a deliberate act, just forgot, and I took the books back of course. Yes, certainly, we have been taught well...
ReplyDeleteOnce I did lose a book, left it on the bus. Fielding's Amelia, and the library wouldn't buy a cheaper copy and insisted on getting a copy from the same publisher. Don't be surprised if they make you pay for a copy from an antiquarian seller if you loose a first edition.
Did they make you pay for the Fielding book? Was it a public library? I thought about what Princeton may have done to my friend had we gone through with it. But then they were charging so much money for post-graduate tuition that I suppose if it was her fist offense they would've let it slide. She was confident of that.
ReplyDeleteAnd yeah, did I say "loose," great, the firsts are surely beasts...
DeleteGosh, I had to pay £35 (see how well I remember it?) and that was in 1997. And it was MY university library. Yeah, love won't do. (They probably would have put her on the rack, by the way.) Certainly don't count on them letting it slide.
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