The Adventures of a Treasure Hunter: A Rare Bookman in Search of American History

xvi, 264, [1] pp. 1987 reissue of the 1951 original, with a new introduction by Jack Matthews. "Charles P. Everitt happened to be a rare book dealer and authority on Americana, but he could have been a character out of Mark Twain. The stories he tells in 'The Adventures of a Treasure Hunter' about the grand old days of wheeling and dealing in the first half of the 20th century, are unfailingly vivid and colorful. They reveal Everitt in manifold ways: a pungent, devil-may-care, salty character with a flare for gossip, tactlessness, honesty, greed, brashness, generosity, and last, but far from least, a sort of bouncy, cynical wisdom - bookish and otherwise - harvested from fifty years in the rare book business. He developed an interest in Americana when he witnessed a transaction in which a bookseller bought some pamphlets for $1 and sold them in a few days for $250. They were Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanacks, which later brought $3200 at auction. He found one of the four or five existing copies of the first edition of Edgar Allen Poe's Murders in the Rue Morgue - 'the grandfather of all detective stories.' As he states with great satisfaction, 'I picked up my pencil and lightly marked our price in the corner: $25,000.' Within a few days it was sold to a private collector. He once turned down an almanac signed by Button Gwinnett, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, even though the autograph was extremely rare. A day later came a phone call from another dealer who was very pleased with himself. He had just paid $2 for an almanac signed by Gwinnett and Thomas Lynch, another signer of the Declaration. 'Frank,' Everitt said, 'the last time I saw that almanac it was worth half as much. It didn't have the signature of Lynch on it yet.'"