The impossibly rare book that I found is the first, self-published book by Opal S. Whiteley. She was a child prodigy, a nature mystic, and a literary genius. She died in a mental hospital in London in 1992, where she had been locked up since 1948 for being paranoid schitzophrenic. Also possibly the first hippie in Eugene, Oregon. Her childhood diary, THE STORY OF OPAL; THE JOURNAL OF AN UNDERSTANDING HEART, was a best seller in 1920, for a few months, anyway. The circumstances of the book's writing are shroud in mystery and controversy. Shortly after publication, it was claimed that she wrote the diary as an adult, not a child, and it was branded a hoax. Personally, I feel it was written as a child and embellished as an adult. That's all a long story. Anyway, in 1918, before the diary was published, she self-published her first book, THE FAIRYLAND AROUND US. It's a compilation of short stories, essays, diary excerpts and poems on the subject of nature. It was meant to be used in educating children. She couldn't afford to have the many color plates of animals and plants printed so she bought up old plates that were left over from other books and hand-wrote captions on them. The book is heavily illustrated, so this involved a huge amount of labor by her. She also included a few of what I call "picture poems" -- nature prints on which she has hand-written her own poetry. These are beautiful works of art. There were somewhere between 100 and 300 copies printed. It's believed the printer may have destroyed some of those copies. Her diary is world famous, but FAIRYLAND is practically unknown. The text is available online, but as far as I know it's never been reprinted. I wanted a copy of the actual book because I plan to reprint at least some of it, and I was disatisfied with the web version. There were about 10 or 11 copies known before I found mine, mostly in libraries. Because it's rare and valuable, access to those copies is limited. I doubt they'd let anyone throw it on a copy machine or scanner. I set out to find my own copy of FAIRYLAND about 1995. I really believed I would find it and searched regularly. If I went into a used bookstore, I'd always look for it. I did a lot of searching online as well. Early one morning in 2005, I found it offered for sale on a website for a mere $6. I won't say exactly what website (it's a great source for me and I'm keeping it a secret), but it wasn't eBay. It's a place where you wouldn't expect to find a rare book at a low price, and therefore it seems nobody else had noticed it before I came across it that morning. Obsviously, the seller was clueless. It was incorrectly described as being only a few pages long. No image, no details. I bought it instantly. I thought maybe I was buying the book's prospectus, which is also very rare, and I'd be happy to have that, although I wanted the book more. It took two weeks to arrive by media mail, during which I almost went insane with anticipation. Finally it came, and it was the real thing, in decent condition, with her handwriting in Inda ink on all of the prints, the captions and picture poems. A miracle, and yet it happened. I don't think it was luck alone. I think I put out a homing signal for the thing and it more or less crawled through time and space towards me. This method has worked for me with a couple other very rare books, but Opal's FAIRYLAND is the best example. It sounds like woo-woo, the idea that I somehow "willed" it to come to me, but if you dip into Quantuum theory, you'll find that -- in fact -- it's quite likely that's how the universe actually works. You can draw good things to you if your intentions are pure. Here's a spooky aspect. I found the book only a couple weeks after my mother died. I was writing a letter to a close friend, telling him about her death, and decided to write it on some paper that had the name of the book across the top of each otherwise blank sheet. I was in a highly emotional state when I wrote the letter, and wasn't sure why I wanted to use that paper. A week later, I found the book. Weird, huh? By the way, Opal is an author Buk would surely have hated. He'd have had no patience for her convoluted baroque style and her sentimentalism. Her third (and last) published book was a collection of poems, FLOWER OF STARS (1923), self-published. It's almost universally disparaged, although I think some of the poems are good, some are even excellent. I'm looking for a copy. I'll find it. The manuscript of her complete diary (only a fraction of which was published) was sadly lost by the publisher. I have a feeling it'll turn up someday. FAIRYLAND would bring, I'm guessing, $5,000 to $10,000 on eBay, possibly more. I don't plan to sell it. It's not about the money; that's not why I wanted the book. Bringing this back to Bukowski, I think WRITE can be found, but it will be very tough because of the title. "Write" is a very common word, making computer searching unproductive, and the fact that it's labelled as amature writing means most copies will have been tossed out over the years as junk. But a few may be hiding in basements or attics. Let's just hope that whoever comes across a copy recognizes Bukowski's name and saves it from destruction. The films may help there.
David
