A pound of paper - John Baxter

By the 1960s a copy of Graham Greene's "Brighton Rock" without its dust jacket was worth about #500. But with its dust jacket more like #2000 - if you could find one. The last copy with a perfect jacket to come on the market changed hands at #50,000. "Brighton Rock" was a high-point, but first editions of other early Greene books weren't much less valuable. And then there were signed copies, foreign printings, limited editions, numbered and signed...;John Baxter caught the collecting bug in the winter of 1978 when he found a rare copy of Greene's children's book "The Little Horse Bus" while browsing in a second-hand market in Swiss Cottage. It was going for 5p. It would also, fortuitously, be the day that he first encountered one of the legends of the bookselling world: Martin Stone. At various times cokehead, pothead, alchoholic, international fugitive from justice and professional rock musician (said to knock Eric Clapton into a cocked hat), he would become John's mentor and friend, and a central figure in this book.;John Baxter introduces us to his world, the world of the fanatical collector: not only the kind who buys from catalogues or at auction and takes away the booty in bubble wrap to store in metal filing cabinets - but also the sleuth, the one who uses bluff and guile to hunt down his quarry. Along the way we meet a cast of eccentric characters like Driff Field who only collects books about suicide or by writers who have killed themselves; we meet the completists, the condition freaks, the rich and famous - from Barry Humphries and Harvey Weinstein to Sarah Michelle Gellar.