MY EFFICIENT EDITOR at Houghton Mifflin has just sent me an e-mail informing me that finished copies of a new book I have written will come off the press on May 31, with books to be shipped to bookstores on June 6, after which I shall receive my author’s shipment of–if I remember correctly–twenty copies. The physical object, the artifact, the commodity, the actual book at long last will appear. This ought to be a pleasing moment, and for the vast most part it is. But in smaller part it presents complications. First among these is the question of to whom to give my author’s copies. Some go to members of my family, some to close friends, some to those writers who have sent me copies of their own books. The risk of hurting some people’s feelings by not sending them a copy is worrisome. But there is also the risk of sending copies to people who, harsh truth to tell, can live quite nicely without them. Sending a person a free book is not always an unmitigated good deed. “You know, my dear Epstein,” the late Arnaldo Momigliano, the historian of the ancient world, once told me, in his strong Piedmontese accent, “the cheapest way to acquire a book remains to buy it.” I puzzled over this Zen koanish-like statement for a good bit, until I realized that what Arnaldo meant was that if you buy a book at least you don’t have to read the damn thing. But if you are given a book, or even lent one, you are stuck–under an obligation to read it and comment upon it. I know that when I give someone a copy of one of my books I feel that they are under the obligation to read it and only under a slightly lesser obligation to like it rather a lot. Writers, as perhaps you may not be aware, are swine. “I have never known a writer who was not vain and egotistical,” writes the German critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki in his recent book “The Author of Himself,” “unless he was a particularly bad writer.” By this standard, I turn out to be quite a good writer. Viewing things the other way round, I am generally pleased to be sent a copy of someone else’s book. True, I prefer that the book be of fewer than 400 pages–fewer than 300 pages is even better–and not on the subject of, say, the Haymarket riots, organ transplantation, or the scandal of preschool education. I check the index of all the books I am sent for my name; also the acknowledgments for the same reason. (Did I mention that writers are swine?) Once I was sent four copies of the same book by an astonishingly prolific author and discovered, lo, the book was dedicated to me. The dedication noted my wit and wisdom, though, oddly, failed to mention my appealing humility. Although I didn’t much care for the fellow, I was, momentarily, touched. Then I remembered that he was said to have written and edited more than 250 books, and thought: Being the dedicatee of one of his books was perhaps less than a thunderous big deal; I mean, it wasn’t as if he had lent me twenty bucks. (Swine, I tell you, writers are utter swine.) People given books by the author prefer them signed. I don’t at all mind doing so. A signed book cannot be returned to the bookstore. Book signings are also a way of stimulating the sale of a book, of course, and if the author is someone popular enough, which usually means someone known from his or her regular appearances on television, people line up in large numbers to acquire the book with the author’s signature. The other side of this is the sad story of the unknown author. I recently attended a book-signing for a former student of mine where eight people showed up, and I didn’t stick around to find out how many of these actually bought the book. I have had people I don’t know send me books for my signature. There are two reasons for their doing this, I suppose: They think a signed copy somehow or other talismanic, producing magical effects; or they believe a signed first edition of a book may one day be extremely valuable. What they cannot know is that the really valuable copies of most of my books are the second editions–valuable because, alas, they don’t exist. Signed books can leave a trail. Ten or so years ago I was browsing in Powell’s used bookshop in Hyde Park in Chicago and discovered, with a smile, that Saul Bellow had sold books inscribed to him by the then still living critic Irving Howe. I failed to smile when, a few years later, I discovered a signed copy of an early book of mine on the shelf of another Chicago used bookshop. The book was inscribed to a woman writer who is my contemporary: “To dear X, in friendship.” To this day I wish I had bought the book, and returned it to the now much less dear X, with the amended inscription: “[Still] in friendship[?]” Swine, as I say, real swine. –Joseph Epstein
