During the recent Codex book fair, the couple of mornings spent in Berkeley before the show started were all we had for trawling the local bookshops. Standing in a storage room, flipping through boxes filled with old dealer catalogues and miscellaneous ephemera, the deckle edge of a pamphlet at the front of a pile caught our eye. It looked like nice paper. The self-cover showed it was some kind of historical reprint, done in 1961 by Grant Dahlstrom. Not exciting stuff. But the paper, and Dahlstrom...
Taking it out to have a look, the meager light in the room raked across the page and through part of a watermark, a backward D A disappearing into the fold. It couldn't be... Removing the sheet to see the full mark, sure enough, it read DARD HUNTER. The thing was printed on some of Hunter's handmade paper! Yawza! And best of all, it was in a 50% off bin, so instead of being $10, it was only $5. A major score. But we should have anticipated Claudia Cohen's snatch & run response, and been more circumspect about showing it off. Easy come, easy go.
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