A pound of paper: confessions of a book addict

Enter a world of gimlet-eyed, detail-crazed obsessives in this totally addictive memoir about book collecting. By the 1960s, a copy of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock without its dust jacket was worth about $1,000. But with its dust jacket, more like $4,500 -- if you could find one. The last copy with a perfect jacket to come on the market changed hands at over $100,000. And then there were signed copies, foreign printings, limited editions, numbered and signed… John Baxter caught the collecting bug in 1978 when he found a rare copy of Greene’s children’s book The Little Horse Bus. It was going for 50¢. It would also be the day that he first encountered one of the legends of the bookselling world: Martin Stone. At various times cokehead, pothead, alcoholic and professional rock musician, he would become John’s mentor and friend, and a central figure in this book. In this brilliantly readable, stylish and funny book, John Baxter introduces us to the world of the fanatical book collector: not only the kind who buys from catalogues or at auctions, but also the sleuth, the one who uses bluff and guile to hunt down his quarry. Along the way we meet a cast of eccentric characters like Driff Field who only collects books about suicide or by writers who have killed themselves. We meet the completists, the condition freaks, the rich and famous -- from Barry Humphries and Harvey Weinstein to Sarah Michelle Gellar. The literati will adore this very entertaining memoir.