Confessions of a Literary Archaeologist

Confessions of a Literary Archaeologist is the book that turns Apollo Kagwa’s interest in rare books into a vocation. Given to him the summer before college, Carlton Lake’s story of collecting offers Apollo a model for making a life out of books—and a decisive reason to leave Queens College behind.

A Graduation Gift and a Collector’s Story

In 1995, during Apollo’s senior year of high school, he was accepted to Queens College. Before classes began, one of the dealers who had mentored him gave him Confessions of a Literary Archaeologist as a graduation present. The gift arrived at the point when Apollo had a college place but had not yet settled on the life he wanted.

Lake’s book traces his life as a collector of rare and valuable books, manuscripts, musical scores, and letters from the Napoleonic era. Its early chapters dwell on the habits that preceded serious collecting: Lake read widely and browsed secondhand bookstores. The book presents collecting not as an aptitude appearing fully formed, but as a practice growing from repeated encounters with printed things.

Lake’s first major acquisitions were works by nineteenth-century French poets, including Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé. His decisive discovery came at a New York auction, where he bought a copy of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal and found the poet’s own corrections in its margins. That physical trace of the author’s hand transformed an old volume into evidence of a particular literary life. For Lake, the find marked the beginning of a calling as a literary archaeologist.

Apollo’s Recognition

The story’s effect on Apollo is immediate. By the time he finishes reading about Lake’s discovery, he knows he will not attend Queens College in the fall. Lake’s account gives a shape to an ambition Apollo had not yet fully tested: that a person could build a life by finding, studying, and selling books.

Apollo sees the gap between Lake’s circumstances and his own. Lake had an indulgent grandmother who financed his collecting; Apollo does not have a comparable source of money, and he is still unfamiliar with the distinction between Baudelaire and Beatrix Potter. Those differences do not dissuade him. Instead, Lake’s example makes the career seem possible without making their paths identical. The book’s influence lies in this recognition: Apollo understands himself as a prospective book dealer before he has made his own great discovery.

A Vocation Put to Work

Apollo’s later career gives the choice prompted by the book a material form. He becomes an estate-sale dealer, traveling to inspect everything from water-damaged books in a basement in New Rochelle to carefully preserved first editions in Sugar Hill. The suspense of not knowing what an inspection might yield becomes part of the work, alongside the prospect of profit. Although he finds his calling early, he does not have his own defining discovery until he is thirty-four.

That breakthrough comes at an estate sale in the basement of a Bronx apartment building, where forty-two containers hold a collection of books on magic and the occult. The collection belonged to Domenico and Eliana D’Agostino, who died within months of one another; their books had unsettled their four children and eleven grandchildren. Apollo makes a low offer and secures the sale partly because he is the first dealer willing to travel to the South Bronx. After renting a van to bring the books home, he spends a week cataloging them. The scale of the collection and the labor of recording it show the professional practice that Lake’s story had helped him imagine.

The discovery also echoes Lake’s account of finding an author’s marks inside a book. While examining the D’Agostino volumes, Apollo notices marginal notes in two different handwritings. A postcard addressed to the couple slips out of a third-edition folio of Witch Hunter Manual of the Blood Council. Dated 1945 and signed by Aleister Crowley, it makes the book’s history extend beyond its printed text into the lives of its former owners. Apollo verifies Crowley’s identity and reads the note, encountering the kind of unexpected archival trace that makes an ordinary inspection into a discovery.

From Literary Example to Rare-Book Practice

Apollo’s eventual expertise also appears in his recognition of a signed first edition of To Kill a Mockingbird. He identifies it as a true first edition with its original cover and in Fine condition, estimates its value at five thousand dollars, and explains that its value could at least double after its owner’s death. The book is signed by Harper Lee on the title page to someone named Pip, whom Apollo identifies as her childhood best friend, a writer in his own right. The scene places physical condition, signature, recipient, and market value together: the same kind of material and biographical attention that had made Lake’s account formative for Apollo.

The two collectors’ defining finds are distinct. Lake discovers Baudelaire’s corrections in a copy of Les Fleurs du Mal; Apollo builds a career in which books can yield marginalia, a postcard, an inscription, or a valuable edition. Confessions of a Literary Archaeologist matters because it gives Apollo a precedent for treating such marks not as incidental blemishes but as traces of human history. Its influence is not merely that it inspires him to collect. It helps him recognize the work—and the way of seeing—that he will make his own.