Born: 1913, in Stockholm.
Died: 28 July, 2008, aged 95. WHEN the manuscript of Louis– Ferdinand Céline's Journey to the End of the Night turned up for sale in 2001, no-one in the world of antiquarian bookselling needed to
ask who had discovered this rarity, missing for decades. It could only have been Pierre Berès, the king of French booksellers, friend to Picasso and Éluard, publisher of Barthes and Aragon, a man renowned for his taste, connoisseurship, vast financial resources and ruthlessness in the pursuit of the rare and the beautiful.
Berès had staged a memorable exit from the world of books in 2005. Closing the store he had run since the late 1930s on the Avenue Friedland, near the Arc de Triomphe, he put his collection of 12,000 books up for sale. In six sales at the Drouet auction house, over two years, records fell as bidders lined up for treasures such as the first edition of Rimbaud's Season in Hell, inscribed by the author to Verlaine.
The sale realised more than 35 million. Berès headed off to retirement in his modern villa in St Tropez, but not before making a final grand gesture. Unexpectedly, he removed from the sale and donated to the French nation an edition of The Charterhouse of Parma that included Stendhal's revisions, undertaken after he read Balzac's criticisms of the novel's opening pages.
Berès excelled at creating a personal mystique. "I do not seek, I find," he once proclaimed, cryptically, about his uncanny knack for turning up rare editions. His own background, which he deliberately kept vague, only added to his allure. Born in Stockholm in 1913, he bore the surname Berestov, but throughout his life he remained silent about his parents. He grew up on the Left Bank, attended the prestigious Lycée Louis-le-Grand and in his teens began collecting autographs and haunting Paris bookstalls in search of periodicals with authorial inscriptions.
Early on, he displayed nerve and charm, two qualities that would carry him far. At 13 he knocked on the door of Georges Clemenceau, the former prime minister of France, presented him with a notebook and asked for his autograph. Captivated, the old man complied, unaware that the supplicant on his doorstep had approached every other member of the French Academy to gather a complete set of autographs.
While still a student, Berès set up as a dealer, buying new first editions and reselling them later at a small profit. André Gide, who lived a few doors away on the Rue Vaneau, entrusted him with three of his manuscripts to sell.
Precisely how Berès, within a few years, parlayed his early sales into a shop of his own, Incidences, on the Rue Lafitte, remains puzzling. A 2004 profile of Berès in Le Temps states that after being offered some stolen books, he sought out their owner, a down-at-heel aristocrat, whose library he then sold, and whose extensive contacts he took full advantage of.
In any case, he navigated the turbulent economic waters of the 1930s with surprising ease, exhibiting a sharklike appetite for opportunities like the distressed state of American millionaires. A quick trip to the United States in 1938 netted the collections of Mortimer Schiff and Cortland F Bishop.
Berès returned to France with first editions of Cervantes and a trove of French Renaissance books once owned by François I. He sold a few volumes to cover his costs and put the rest in storage for several decades, during which time their value increased exponentially. This strategy served him well throughout his career.
Rivals found him unscrupulous. In one celebrated instance he advertised in his own catalogue some choice specimens that belonged to a competitor. When a client expressed interest, Berès told him to wait while he fetched the required volumes from his warehouse. Instead he raced to his competitor's shop, bought the books and resold them.
After entrusting his assistant to open a New York branch of his bookstore in 1937, Berès moved to new premises on the Avenue de Friedland in 1939. He survived the war unscathed. The German writer Ernst Jünger, in his wartime Paris journal, described buying several volumes at the Berès bookstore, and not at a discount, either.
It was during this time that Berès, often accompanied by the writer Raymond Queneau and the photographer Brassaï, would drop by Picasso's studio. After the war Matisse selected Berès's bookstore to exhibit Jazz, his collection of prints based on cut-outs.
Berès's circle of artistic and literary friends broadened after he acquired Éditions Hermann, a publisher of science books, in 1956. Over the years he developed a distinguished catalogue of books on mathematics, physics, philosophy and literary criticism, with a stable of writers that included Aragon, Barthes and Queneau. He also branched out into limited-edition art books and began collecting art.
These were the beginning of the glory years for Berès; they lasted more than half a century. Combing the death notices of French newspapers with an eye to hidden links that might lead to great finds, he courted the great and the small. He coaxed an annotated Stendhal from Proust's maid. Wrapped in a red shawl, often with a Siamese cat perched on one shoulder, he would turn up at magnificent châteaux, talk his way inside and emerge with treasure.
Competitors referred to him, enviously, as a "seduction machine". Women found him to be one. He married three times and fathered eight children, of whom seven survive.
He never took on a business partner, routinely outbid rivals for choice merchandise, showed no deference to grand clients and in general operated as if he were the sun in his own solar system.
Over the years Berès's collection included a 1670 edition of Pascal's Pensées, a 20-volume edition of Balzac's Comédie Humaine inscribed "to my dear mother from her devoted son Honoré" and a first edition of Madame Bovary sent to Alexandre Dumas by the author with a note, reading: "The homage of an unknown, Gve Flaubert."
As he acquired, he also gave. He donated the archives of Pierre and Paul Curie to the Bibliothèque Nationale and, after giving the archives of the composer Paul Dukas to the library in 1959, he was awarded the Légion d'honneur.
On the other hand, the library had to organise a subscription campaign in 2000 to buy, for what Berès called "a friendly price," the nine-volume manuscript of Charteaubriand's Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe.
A year later, the library paid 1.8 million for the Céline manuscript. When asked how it came to him, Berès answered: "Through the door."
The full article contains 1137 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
