Provenance_ How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art - Laney Salisbury [46]
Fisher & Sperr sat on a corner of Hampstead Heath in the quaint neighborhood of Highgate, an area dotted with splendid seventeenth-and eighteenth-century residences. The building’s white-stucco-and-beam design dated back to the 1670s, as did some of its inventory. It had been an inn and then a bakery until the 1930s, when Sperr’s now-deceased partner turned it into a trove of rare and secondhand books.
Over the past month Drewe had set off the alarm half a dozen times. He would come in and work his way around the bookcases to the small clearing where Sperr sat reading the trade journals behind a walnut desk on a raised landing, a black rotary telephone in front of him and a space heater at his feet. Even in the summer, he wore an old blue cardigan beneath several layers of fleece.
The old man had been buying and selling books from the same landing for four decades, after apprenticing at sixteen at the art bookstore across the street. Over the years he had done little to upgrade the shop, which was dark and drafty and too cramped even for a spare chair for the customers. The aged leather spines and delicate vellum had become a comfortable cocoon. Real estate in this fashionable part of London was worth much more than his inventory, but he never once considered selling, even though he could have retired on the proceeds. Instead of closing up, he had paved over the garden between the store and his apartment behind the lot and built an extension for even more books. Fisher & Sperr, with its forty thousand titles, was a bibliophile’s paradise.
These days most of his customers were a nuisance, bargain hunters who ignored the first editions of Coleridge and the signed Bertrand Russells in favor of secondhand guidebooks and novels. Drewe, on the other hand, liked to linger on the old volumes and seemed to admire the artistry that went into them. Sometimes, when Sperr had forgotten that Drewe was there, the professor would reappear with something interesting and ask various questions, though he never bought anything valuable. He had asked Sperr to find some obscure eighteenth-century German math texts for him, but so far Sperr had had no success.
This morning Drewe came in with his usual greeting. “And how are we today, Mr. Sperr?”
“Very well indeed,” Sperr replied with a throaty scratch. “Nothing new for you this week, I’m afraid.”
Drewe browsed the shelves and pulled out a little-known work by the twentieth-century mathematician and philosopher Kurt Gödel. He didn’t buy it, and then he turned down a nice New York edition of Das Kapital, whose author, a bookworm himself, was buried a few blocks away in Highgate cemetery. Karl Marx had spent his happiest time in the reading room of the British Museum, and had died in London surrounded by his books.
Sperr noticed Drewe admiring a thirty-five-volume set of an eighteenth-century French encyclopedia, each volume with a pea-green cover and copper engraving. Sperr explained that it was a seminal work of the Enlightenment whose contributors included Voltaire and Rousseau. In its time it was widely considered subversive. After it was banned by royal decree, its editors were chased from one printer to another, and it had taken twenty years to complete. The Encyclopédie had played an important role in the ferment leading to the French Revolution.
Drewe seemed interested, but not quite enough to make an offer.
A week later, as Sperr was going for a tea break, he saw Drewe standing behind one of the bookshelves, holding the back cover of a very large book. He seemed startled and embarrassed.
“I was just coming to see you,” Drewe told the old man. “I’m terribly sorry, but this must have fallen off. I’d be more than happy to pay for it.”
Sperr told him not to worry, that it was not a particularly valuable book, but the professor insisted on paying for it; he liked the cover and thought