We just did the M.A.R.I.A.B. ( Mass. & Rhode Island Antiquarian Booksellers ) book fair at the Cyclorama on Tremont St., near Back Bay Station. It’s only the second fair we’ve done, and we’re pleased with how well it went: we sold enough to cover costs and buy more books.

Of course one always has to haul back home the titles not sold, and that’s heavy work, but there were three books that I’d priced and brought to help make a prettier booth at both fairs that I’m very glad we didn’t sell. Now I know I’m going to keep them. All are available pretty cheaply if one looks at www.addall.com, so if one sounds interesting to you, it’s gettable. I find only four copies of the first, all cheap ( $12-15.50) and two have jackets, so it’s not common, just under-priced.

It’s Behold Me Once More, the Confessions of James Holley Garrison, Brother of William Lloyd Garrison, edited by W. M. Merrill, published by Houghton Mifflin in Boston in 1954. This Garrison was a sailor and self-described "confirm’d drunkard" in the early 19th century ( 1801-1842 ) who penned this memoir to warn others about alcohol and ports, including Boston. W. M. Merrill has edited the text and surrounded it with useful apparatus: explanatory footnotes, index , bibliography, introductions and illustrations, including panoramas of Boston and a facsimile page of Garrison’s excellent handwriting.

"My first commencing to drink was at Lynn" he starts, at 13 as an apprentice cordwainer (shoemaker and leatherworker). At 16 "we drank upon an everage a quart of rum a day apiece. We were allways apparently sober and worked hard." He fled Lynn criminally in debt to the rum shop, tramped to Baltimore and thence to sea on merchant ships at 18. He shipped aboard a British Navy schooner on anti-pirate duty around 1822, combatting among others "Lafette a notorious pirate". (Jean Lafitte’s previous piracies had been pardoned by President Madison for Lafitte’s role at the Battle of New Orleans in 1813, combatting the British after refusing their substantial bribe, but he continued his trade on the Spanish Main until his death in 1825.)

In Cuba in 1823 Garrison and his mates deserted while drunk, stumbling in the woods. Hung over, they awoke to no knowledge of the country and no provisions, most especially no water. " Comeing to a damp place, we dug down about 4 feet for water, and found the skeleton of a man. Under his bones the water oozed out so gentle, it took 20 minuets to fill a small needle case full. It was yellow, putrid, and stank horribly. This we sucked through our teeth, but it only aggravated, instead of allaying our thirst, and we gave it up in despair." They drank salt water, and some their own urine.

The deserters climbed into the trees to evade searching bloodhounds, but were tricked into thinking pursuit had sailed away. They descended, found a creek of fresh water, then a town with food and rum. Armed with clubs, they started walking to Havana and were surrounded by Spanish soldiers with muskets. The shipmates fought and lost and Garrison escaped, but gave himself up to be punished with his fellows. He got 150 lashes.

About half an hour before the lashes "I drank nearly a case bottle of brandy with four cartridges of gun powder and was not drunk, although I remember but little about the first 35 lashes."

But it’s not until he joins the U.S. Navy , from 1824 to1839, that the editor titles the section "Hell Afloat". Garrison reports that First Lieutenant Matthew Perry, the future Commodore who opened Japan, forced the sailors to buy jackets and vests from his brother the Purser, then sent the clothes ashore. And he was brutal: " I have seen him come along the gangway and knock down men , giveing them a black eye, and then punish them for haveing the same. The man told him he gave it to him, when he called him a liar, and ordered him 13 lashes." And Garrison stayed in the Navy for 15 years.

In the fall of 1839 he had what his four years’ younger brother, then editor of the most prominent abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator, called "a fistulous abscess, of a cancerous nature, situated at the base of the back bone" . So William Lloyd Garrison procured James a medical leave by writing a pleading letter to the author of 1836’s very pro-slavery Slavery in the United States, Secretary of the Navy James K. Paulding.

And the drunken sailor brother rested for a while, abstaining at the eminent abolitionist’s house in Cambridgeport (this was before William Lloyd bought his mansion still standing near Fort Hill in Roxbury) and started writing these cautionary memoirs there.

But he was uncomfortable, and ashamed, and was soon moved to his brother’s brother-in-law’s farm in Brooklyn, Connecticut. There he planted and hoed corn and potatoes in the summer of 1840, received his brother’s pious letters, and pined for the sea and sailor company.

In the spring of 1841 the farm was sold and his host family moved and he was well enough to travel to New Brunswick on an inheritance matter. En route, he fell to drinking again, and upon returning to Boston caroused with old ship-mates, sleeping on wharfs and in jail. He was foiled at suicide with laudanum in Roxbury, drank some more, rested at his brother’s, and died in October, 1842, 41 years old.

And my copy has a very nice, excellently designed dust jacket. I’ll describe the other two titles I’m glad we didn’t (and won’t) sell next column. Go in used bookstores; see what you can find that you didn’t know existed. Or, if only one title will please, go on line to www.addall.com and judge descriptions and shipping policies. Anything I mention is available that way.