“You know, if you really want to move these books, you need to bring along someone who can’t read, “ the gentleman who had sold me three or four thousand books genially told me. He watched me pausing, contemplating, planning, reading a bit here and there while I should have just been packing.
The books have been moved now (for the most part), but the phrase loiters in my mind each time I pick up one of those four thousand volumes to assign it a value and get it sold. For instance, as I wrote the listing for Rothstein—the story of Arnold Rothstein who fixed the 1919 World Series and was the model for The Great Gatsby’s Meyer Wolfsheim and Nathan Detroit in Guys and Dolls—my mind wandered to a photograph I had made in the fall at the high school production of The Great Gatsby.
The actor had nailed the accent, or at least what we expect the accent of such a guy to be.
If Fitzgerald had really modeled Meyer Wolfsheim on Rothstein he took some trouble to tidy him up a bit as Wolfsheim, no doubt a crook, had some redeeming qualities. Of course Rothstein had yet to be murdered in 1925 when Gatsby was published so perhaps Fitzgerald’s characterization was an act of self-preservation.
Setting the price on this one was easy—$19.19—it sold four days after listing and gave me a great little mental tour. May each of the 4000 be so.
