[78-L] Autographs

[Taylor Bowie]

Friend fnarf  hits it right on the head.  Although I have sold many hundreds 
of autographs in my time,  I own very few,  and the ones I truly treasure 
are the ones which were either inscribed to me or to a family member by 
someone we knew.

The De Voto he mentions with the long letter has much more merit,  in my 
eyes,  than would the 1929 signed limited edition of A Farewell To 
Arms...although the latter would fetch much more money.

Somewhere I have a post card of the World's Greatest Jazz Band which Bud 
Freeman signed for me after we'd had a nice twenty-minute chat.  I'd never 
sell it,  but was only to happy some years ago to broker a Sioux City Six 
Gennett which had a clipped Bix Beiderbecke signature glued to the label.

Taylor


>
> This kind of thing is extremely common. Some ridiculously high percentage 
> of "autographed" or otherwise "associated" copies of books are fakes, 
> ranging from real signatures tipped into a book that they were never near 
> in the writer's life, to out-and-out forgeries (which are not hard to do, 
> but are often hard to spot). John Dunning devoted one of his excellent 
> "Cliff Janeway" books, about a detective-cum-bookseller, to the subject, 
> "The Sign Of The Book".
>
> I've never understood the appeal, myself. A simple autograph -- what does 
> that do for you? It's celebrity-worship, I suppose; the glow of proximity; 
> but unless there's some content to the inscription, like one of Vladimir 
> Nabokov's famous butterfly drawings (which add tens of thousands to a 
> book's price) or a long personal inscription to someone (I have a novel by 
> Bernard De Voto with a several-page-long letter to a friend in the front 
> matter), I don't see the appeal. A cancelled check? Does that increase my 
> understanding or appreciation of Gershwin's music any? How much would you 
> pay for a pair of his socks?
>
> -- 
> Steve
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