Make Me an Offer. By Wolf Mankowitz. (Andre Deutsch. 7s.
6d.) THE realm in which antiques are bought and sold and shown off is as cluttered with rum customs and rummer customers as that of horse-trading. Its citizens range from impeccable young men with impeccable accents and impeccable stock to human ferrets with bits of questionable brit a brae and a moral code about which there is no question whatsoever. Mr. Mankowitz, him- self a dealer, and a writer of highly personal quality into the bargain, tells in this engaging little book what would seem to be a partly- true, partly-fancied anecdote of a sortie into the shadier frontiers of the trade, with dubious dealers double-crossing each other on their way jo a country sale. The dealer- hero of the sale—and, like Mr. Mankowitz himself, he deals in Wedgwood—comes out of it with the Wedgwood vase he was after, and a commission or two for not having bid for what he never intended to bid for. It is all told with considerable skill, in a cynical-sentimental-comic idiom that has something of the shrewdly humorous hum- anity of the Brooklyn school of New Yorker writing and something, too, of the philo- sophy of the decent dealer who genuinely cares about the beauty of what he sells. It can be read in an hour, and an hour made all the pleasanter by Leonard Rosoman's
Previous page
