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There's nothing like specifics to bring things to life, and the same is true of flashpoints. One of my favorite passages from Robert Pirsig's 1974 classic "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" concerns a student who comes to her English teacher and announces that she wants to write a 500-word essay about the United States:
"He was used to the sinking feeling that comes from statements like this, and suggested without disparagement that she narrow it down to just Bozeman. When the paper came due she didn't have it and was quite upset. She had tried and tried but she just couldn't think of anything to say. He had already discussed her with her previous instructors and they'd confirmed his impressions of her. She was very serious, disciplined and hardworking, but extremely dull. Not a spark of creativity in her anywhere. Her eyes, behind the thick-lensed glasses, were the eyes of a drudge. She wasn't bluffing him, she really couldn't think of anything to say, and was upset by her inability to do as she was told. It just stumped him. Now he couldn't think of anything to say. A silence occurred, and then a peculiar answer: "Narrow it down to the main street of Bozeman." It was a stroke of insight. She nodded dutifully and went out. But just before her next class she came back in real distress, tears this time, distress that had obviously been there for a long time. She still couldn't think of anything to say, and couldn't understand why, if she couldn't think of anything about all of Bozeman, she should be able to think of something about just one street. He was furious. "You're not looking!" he said. A memory came back of his own dismissal from the University for having too much to say. For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses. The more you look the more you see. She really wasn't looking and yet somehow didn't understand this.
"He told her angrily, "Narrow it down to the front of one building on the main street of Bozeman. The Opera House. Start with the upper left-hand brick." Her eyes, behind the thick-lensed glasses, opened wide. She came in the next class with a puzzled look and handed him a five-thousand-word essay on the front of the Opera House on the main street of Bozeman, Montana. "I sat in the hamburger stand across the street," she said, "and started writing about the first brick, and the second brick, and then by the third brick it all started to come and I couldn't stop. They thought I was crazy, and they kept kidding me, but here it all is.""
When I first started buying books, I looked for opera houses, not individual bricks. If there were 10 opera houses in a box at a garage sale and the price was right, why, I bought 10 opera houses and marched home to sell them. After all, I was an opera house dealer, and this was now my job. Buy low, sell high. It wasn't long, of course, before I saw problems developing from this approach. Opera houses take up space, and, if you try to sell them, time; and as we all know, there are opera houses, and there are opera houses. Some are the celestial equivalent of black holes, sucking in huge chunks of time in our attempts to get them sold. Many never sell.
It wasn't until I started to look at individual bricks that I began to "get" it. It wasn't the opera house (or book) itself that determined value, nor a single wall (the front cover) or even the sign over the door (the title). Bricks are what brought it home. Individual bricks - or to use my terminology, flashpoints.
When you look at the following picture, quickly, as though you were looking at an opera house, what do you see?
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A dull building indeed. A dusty, monochrome exterior with distinctly ho-hum ornamentation, if you could even call it that. If you were walking by it on that street in Bozeman, you'd probably keep right on walking, and any music being performed inside would doubtless be off key.
However, if you were a veteran brick watcher, I guarantee you'd stop in your tracks. Why? In less than an instant I see 4 interesting bricks or flashpoints, all from the sidewalk.
- The title "As To Polo."
- A period font style.
- Gilt lettering and ornament.
- A slender book.
Any one of these bricks standing alone wouldn't necessarily interest me to a great extent (with the possible exception of "polo"), but together they begin to build a very interesting wall in this very interesting opera house.
When I go through the door (open the book), I see five more bricks:
- "Headquarters 4th Field Artillery" stamped on the front pastedown.
- "Copyright, 1919" on the copyright page.
- "Dedham Country and Polo Club" & "Manila Polo Club" on the bottom of the title page.
- A table of contents that includes a chapter on the use of the mallet.
- 25 color plates in the back of the book
Why are these bricks/flashpoints important? Books on polo, especially vintage titles, aren't especially common, and yet there's serious demand for them among collectors. Further flashpoints are needed than the title, of course, to determine if this is truly a book about polo, a good book about polo. The font style suggests that this might be a vintage title. The fact that the lettering and ornament is gilt suggests that it's more likely this is a non-fiction title, as does the plainness of the ornamentation, as does the slenderness of the book. Obviously huge numbers of exceptions exist to these assumptions, and they need to be verified, but a coalescing of flashpoints has already begun.
Once the door/book is opened things become clear in four short steps down the hallway. This was originally kept in an artillery headquarters library, and polo was a popular sport among mounted military officers a hundred or so years ago. The copyright date confirms that this is a vintage book. The mention of polo clubs on the title page almost confirms that this book is a guide to polo; and finally, a glance at the table of contents verifies this absolutely.
The illustrations at the back only enhance value. The fact that they are color illustrations occurring in a book published in 1919 is significant because color wasn't common then and usually only present, if at all, in the frontis.
Suddenly this book almost becomes a buy, but only almost because there are also some crumbling bricks here, details I referred to as "extinguishers" in a previous article, which diminish value. All of them in this case are condition issues. The front joint is split and worn; the board fabric is partially loose from the spine and badly worn at the extremities - in fact, there's some loss at the top; the corners are bumped, and the front interior hinge is intact but loose. Furthermore, this is a third edition, which suggests that the book isn't as uncommon as it appeared to be at first glance.
In this particular case, since the book in intact and depends significantly on content as opposed to condition for value, this still remains a buy if the price is right. Even third edition polo books aren't common. Certainly $1 is fine. $10, and I might waver. $20 is a no, unless there's an opportunity to research it first.
Brick by brick, this is how I build a "buy" or "not-buy," arrive at buying decisions. It's not a science. It depends hugely on assembling a long, long list of flashpoints in my mind and bringing them to bear on individual books, quickly, almost as quickly as I can glance at them. In the next article in this series, I'll discuss how to build this list as efficiently as possible and also provide what could become the first nuggets from your own book scout gold mine - a starter list of flashpoints.
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