From Bookseller to Billionaire: The Life and Fate of the Quaritch Bookshop

Dear bibliophiles, good day.

By Alcide Raturon, perpetually provisional secretary of the Guild, in charge of awkward comparisons, defensive enthusiasms and statistics consulted with a frown.

Hélène Vasseur is a forensic physician (and a police commissioner). She files her cases with the Guild on a regular basis, which gives our two services a family likeness that neither she nor I asked for.

And she took a day off without telling her institute what for: she accepted my invitation with the air of someone accepting a drink so as not to argue. She does not believe in time travel; she believes even less in desk hypotheses, which she calls desk hypotheses.

I needed her for that double incredulity. When you have frequented binders’ workshops as long as I have, you see moroccos, raised bands, finishing tools, and you no longer see the room. I needed someone whose trade is to walk into a room where a man has died and to understand, before anything else, what happened in it.

The cover of the Petit Parisien had been lying on my desk for weeks. A workshop under a timber roof, scraps of leather and paper scattered over the floor, a machine with a flywheel, and across the machine a man in a brown jacket, his head resting on the bed of the cutter, the blood running in orange-red sheets over the wood; at the door, a gentleman in a boater holds out an arm and restrains a young man by the shoulder.

Beneath it, in capitals: UN RELIEUR SE GUILLOTINE AVEC UN « MASSICOT » [A BINDER GUILLOTINES HIMSELF WITH A “MASSICOT”, the guillotine paper cutter]. Inside the issue, the news item gives the names. The proprietor, M. Stanislas Ruffin, a bachelor, was found by his two workmen, Philippe Cordebaigt and Antoine Lassouche, at 37 rue de l’Amiral-Roussin; the paper says he was frantic over the poor state of his affairs, and the police commissioner of the Necker district, M. Cœuille, carried out the customary findings.

The dailies of Saturday 4 June, which the Guild keeps in a bundle, already disagreed among themselves: Le Journal reported a proprietor of 53 panicked by his affairs, Le Matin and Le Figaro a workman of 52 suffering from neurasthenia, who worked there “as a rule” among “the other workmen”. Two deaths to choose from in the same workshop. I followed Le Journal, because the Supplément followed it. We were five months after the January flood, which had put so many cellars under water and swollen so many stocks of paper and leather; the hypothesis of a craftsman strangled by a payment deadline stood up. I have no figures on the ruined binders of 1910 and do not claim to have any: my hypothesis was worth what the hypotheses of a statistician without statistics are worth.

We arrived on Friday 3 June 1910 at 7:05, by the usual route, which the Guild’s rules forbid me to describe and which I would be hard put to explain.

The Supplément did not give the day, it said “a few days ago”; the dailies of Saturday the 4th said “yesterday morning”. So Friday it is, a day like any other for dying. Hélène looked at her watch, then at the street, then at the horses, and said “right” in the tone she uses when she is told of a body. She opened a black-covered notebook that she did not put down all morning, and wrote the time. We were received in the courtyard as, on such a day, two well-dressed people are received: as relatives or as creditors, and we were both, depending on who was asking.

The rue de l’Amiral-Roussin smelled of coal and flour paste. The workshop occupied the back of a courtyard, and the body had not been moved. I shall not describe it, the cover shows it well enough, with a care that the draughtsman, who was not there, owes to a reporter’s account.

The two workmen stood near the door, hats in hand, repeating one after the other the same sentence about how they had stepped back. A third man stood with them, very upright, a boater on his head: M. Anatole Pradel, bookseller of the quai Voltaire, who had come at opening time to collect a volume entrusted to M. Ruffin for binding.

Commissaire Cœuille arrived shortly afterwards with an inspector and a notebook of his own. He looked like a man who had been promised a short case. He listened to M. Pradel, he listened to the workmen, he read the paper found on the workbench, three lines in ink, “Je n’en peux plus. Pardonnez-moi. S. Ruffin” [I can’t go on. Forgive me. S. Ruffin], and he pronounced the word the press was going to take up. Suicide. I nodded. Statisticians without statistics nod when what they hear confirms what they read the day before. I hold nothing against the commissaire: he had before his eyes a proprietor in difficulty, a farewell note and a machine, and he did what one does in front of that.

Hélène, for her part, had gone round the room without touching anything, hands in her pockets, which is the first gesture of her trade and the last of the binders’. She introduced herself to the commissaire as a doctor of medicine. He took this for a family eccentricity, and let her approach the body because the district doctor had not yet arrived and the commissaire was hungry. She laid the back of her hand on the jaw, lifted an arm, put it down, looked at the other. She wrote a line. “Dead since last night,” she told me in a low voice, “between seven and ten. Not this morning.” I pointed out that the workmen had found him this morning. “They found him this morning,” she answered. “But he died last night.”

She raised her eyes to the ceiling. A transmission ran under the roof timbers, a long iron shaft, and from this shaft a belt came down to the cutter, which the newspaper says is driven by motive power. Hélène asked me where the belt was. I looked: it had been moved onto the loose pulley, the one that turns idle and leaves the machine at rest. “He kills himself,” said Hélène, “the blade falls, and afterwards he disengages.” I defended my hypothesis for ten minutes: he had disengaged beforehand. “Disengaged beforehand, the blade would not fall. Disengaged afterwards, he was no longer there to do it.” She closed her notebook on that sentence.

The commissaire handed me the paper as one hands a receipt to a man who looks as if he knows about such things, which is the only advantage of my face. I saw in it what he had no reason to see. The paper was no ordinary sheet. It was a flyleaf, laid paper, yellowed, with the tip of a watermark at the edge, torn out of a book. The book was on the workbench: a small duodecimo in its vellum wrapper, from which the first blank leaf was missing. Le Pastissier françois, Amsterdam, Elzevier, 1655; a cookery book, and one of the Elzevirs that collectors have always chased. The sale records have made it one of the dearest of them all: a copy found for 6 sous by Fontaine de Resbecq in 1856, another knocked down at 2,910 francs in the Potier sale of 1870, a third pushed to 3,255 francs at the Benzon sale in 1875; Willems counted only about thirty. In 1910 a fine copy came to something like two years of Cordebaigt’s pay. It was M. Pradel who had brought it in for binding.

I felt offended before I felt enlightened. A binder who wants to die has every reason in the world; he also has, on his shelves, reams of ordinary paper, and he does not tear the blank leaf out of an Elzevir that a client has entrusted to him. The very idea is foreign to his trade, which consists in not doing that. Hélène, to whom I showed the tear, put it otherwise: “Whoever wrote that is not from the trade.”

She took Philippe Cordebaigt aside, on the threshold, and I let her, because a workman does not have the same things to say before his commissaire as to someone who listens while taking notes. She put her questions in the order of the morning, minute by minute, the way one unwinds a thread. The workmen had the key to the back door; they had arrived a little before seven, at the same time as M. Pradel, who was waiting in the courtyard; M. Pradel had taken hold of the handle before them, said “Don’t come in, gentlemen,” and held them back with his arm, as in the drawing. “Did he say that before or after he had seen?” Hélène asked. Cordebaigt thought for a long time, with the conscientiousness of people who are asked for an exact order of events. “Before,” he said. “The door wasn’t open an inch.”

The order book was under the elbow of the machine. Nobody had opened it: commissaires read farewell letters, and it is binders who read order books. Hélène opened it with a handkerchief, at the last written page. The last line, in the proprietor’s hand, the same as that of his labels, as Cordebaigt, who read it every day, confirmed before I did, said: “Pastissier de M. P. Un exemplaire fait de deux : cahiers du milieu d’un autre, marges refaites à la pâte sur dix feuillets. Refusé de signer la reliure. Écrire à l’acheteur.” [Pastissier for M. P. A copy made from two: middle gatherings from another, margins remade in pulp on ten leaves. Refused to sign the binding. Write to the buyer.]

For those who do not frequent Elzevirs: the book is judged by the height of its leaves, and margins remade in pulp make it taller without the eye suspecting. A gilt signature at the foot of the spine vouches for the rest (or not, it is true, but we are in mourning, so let us be nice to the binders).

Between the copy made from two and the copy tall in the margins and signed, the gap was counted in years of wages; between the signed copy and the letter Ruffin meant to write to the buyer lay, for a bookseller of the quai Voltaire, the criminal court. M. Pradel needed Ruffin’s name as one needs a character witness, and he had brought to a man whose name carried weight two books to make one. The man had refused, which was the only thing M. Pradel had not foreseen, and had announced that he would write to the buyer, which put him, at the hour that Hélène’s notebook gave for his death, under a blade that awaited only a click and a witness who disengages the belt.

“It is a murder,” said Hélène. She said it in the courtyard, without raising her voice, her back to the workshop, as she no doubt tells her interns that the coffee is cold. I had been wrong. I told her so; she replied that she had heard worse from people who were right.

“One rarely kills for a book,” she added. “One kills for money. And when there is a book, the money is never far.”

I then invoked the Guild’s rules, which are clear: the time traveler observes, does not interpose himself, and does not explain to the police of 1910 that they are mistaken. She looked at me the way she would look at a void. “Then you will report,” she said. That is what I am doing. She wrote, for her part, a ten-line report that no one will read and that she refused to show me, which I understand.

M. Pradel, on the threshold, was adjusting his boater. Commissaire Cœuille carried out the customary findings, as the newspaper says, and the Petit Parisien printed the article on the Sunday, for five centimes. As for the Pastissier françois, it left the workshop bound by a successor, with Ruffin’s name gilt at the foot of the spine. A catalogue of 1924 gives it as tall in the margins and signed. It is signed: Ruffin had refused to do it.

GUILDE · AR/MASSICOT