Rick Gekoski's Guarded by Dragons offers stories from the worlds of second-hand and antiquarian bookstores

Rick Gekoski. Photo / Supplied

Guarded by Dragons: Encounters with Rare Books and Rare People
by Rick Gekoski
Hachette, $38

"Confessions from the book trade" have always been a surprising genre of bestsellers. Over more than a century, quests for rarities, bibliographic obsessions, auction machinations, and the characters and incidents found along the way have consistently been published – and just as consistently read. Rick Gekoski's Guarded by Dragons is the latest.

There is still a romance about second-hand and antiquarian bookstores, even in an era where Amazon has succeeded in sucking much of the joy from the process of book-buying. There is also a high-end trade where rare and desired books sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars and passions run equally high. This is the world Gekoski has known and inhabited for 40 years.

By searching out individual rarities or whole libraries, first editions and association-copies, manuscripts, signed limited editions and author's letters, Gekoski has made bibliographic desire his business. Guarded by Dragons contains a polished selection of contained tales from the front lines, with characters including novelist Graham Greene, former Poet Laureate Ted Hughes, and Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling.

Each chapter has the feel of a rounded whole – sometimes with a sting in its tail. Gekoski is a breezy and urbane storyteller, whether it is in his own initial discoveries and perusals of D.H. Lawrence first editions in a seedy car park in the north of England, or a strange lunch meeting with an opinionated Nobel Prize awardee demanding a fortune for a manuscript with a shaky relationship to the truth.

Graham Greene and his long-time partner, Yvonne Cloetta, want to quietly put their own romantic letters for sale and so they contact Gekoski. The true colours of respected publishers, Faber & Faber, are revealed when a deceased former board chairman's heirs sell his private correspondence but the firm chooses to sue Gekoski for their recovery in the wishful belief they are company property.

Gekoski acquires poet Sylvia Plath's own valuable underlined and annotated copy of The Great Gatsby, but then the deal seems in danger – with substantial losses – when there is a possibility that the book may have been stolen … Then there is the heart-stopping moment when nine rare copies of early blue-covered limited editions of James Joyce's novel Ulysses worth $250,000 do not seem to have made it from an aircraft hold to the baggage carousel.

Guarded by Dragons is not simply stories of individual obsession and discovery. There are unsuspected insights. Gekoski finds John Fowles, the respected writer of The French Lieutenant's Woman, giving full vent to his anti-Semitic prejudices in his later-published diary record of his seemingly polite meetings with Gekoski, where the word "Jew" is used with unpleasant virulence. The story, again, has a fine conclusion.

Guarded by Dragons is more than a memoir. It is an exposé of human desire and its valuations. Gekoski is an engaging narrator but he also throws light on our perceived needs, their focus and the lengths we will go to obtain the objects of our often-obsessive longings.

Reviewed by David Herkt