The Bookman's Tale: A Novel of Obsession (Easton Press Signed Collector's Edition)

LOVETT, Charlie. The Bookman's Tale: A Novel of Obsession. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 2016.

Octavo. Full brown leather. Spine with four raised bands, 22-carat gilt accents. All edges gilt. Moiré silk endpapers. Satin ribbon page marker. 352 pp. Signed Collector's Edition. Part of the Easton Press Signed Modern Classics series. Signed by the author on the special title page. Includes signed Certificate of Authenticity, edition card, and bookplate adhered to front endpaper.

Charlie Lovett is a former antiquarian bookseller. He collected rare books for decades, specialising in Lewis Carroll, and served for more than ten years as writer in residence at a school in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, before his first novel became a New York Times bestseller in 2013. The Bookman's Tale is in every sense a novel written from the inside: its procedures are accurate, its atmosphere — the particular quality of light and dust and anticipation in a good second-hand bookshop — is precisely rendered, and its central mystery is one that only a genuine book person could have conceived.

Peter Byerly is a young American antiquarian bookseller, nine months a widower, who has come to Hay-on-Wye hoping that the bookshops of the world's most famous second-hand book town might offer some shelter from grief. In a watercolour tucked inside an eighteenth-century study of Shakespeare forgeries he finds the face of his late wife, Amanda. He becomes convinced the painting cannot be a coincidence, and the novel follows his pursuit of the book's history backwards through time: from 1995 to the Victorian era, to the Restoration, to the Elizabethan period itself, and finally to the question of whether the document at the heart of the chain is what it appears to be — a piece of writing in Shakespeare's own hand.

The novel is structured across multiple time periods, with each section centering on a different owner of the same book as it passes from hand to hand across four centuries. It is at once a love story, a bibliographic mystery, and a meditation on the peculiar attachment that rare books inspire — the sense that in handling a very old book one is handling something that has passed through many pairs of hands, each of them vanished, each of them leaving some faint trace. For those who work in the rare book world the novel has an additional pleasure: its details are right. Lovett knows what he is writing about.

Fine. Presenting as new.

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Catalogue Number: HH000493