Bluffing Texas Style: The Arsons, Forgeries and High-Stakes Poker Capers of Rare Book Dealer Johnny Jenkins by Michael Vinson (review)

Oscar Wilde once said that "a mask tells us more than a face," and John H. Jenkins III (called Johnny by his friends), the subject of Michael Vinson's excellent biography, wore many masks in his life. The personas he wanted to project were of a successful businessman, Texas historian and bibliographer, expert rare book dealer, and high-stakes gambler. He was all of these things, but much more, according to Vinson, who gives readers a preview in his title of the arsonist and forger as well as the poker player. Vinson argues that Jenkins was the literary Great Gatsby's "huckster cousin" (181), a man who feared exposure of his many crimes more than the crimes themselves because it would reveal the weak character behind his good-old-boy mask.

Jenkins was born in 1940 in Beaumont, Texas, the only child of John Holmes and Sue Chalmers Jenkins. He often told people that he was "born a trader" (7), and his penchant for coin collecting and selling at a young age bears this out. He was also bookish, keeping lists of books that he had read and his thoughts about them as early as junior high school. He loved history, especially of Texas, the Confederacy, and his family. On the day he graduated from high school, he published his first book, the edited memoirs of his great-great-grandfather, John Holland Jenkins. As a college student at the University of Texas, he dabbled in selling rare books and coins, and stepped over the line "from poor judgment to larceny" (29).

Although Jenkins became the president of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of Amercan, he was also a risk-taker. This quality solidified his reputation as a creative and successful book dealer when he engineered the largest rare book deal of the twentieth century, the 1975 purchase of the Eberstadt inventory of Americana, which was reported by the New York Times. Risky behavior also cemented his public persona as "Austin Squatty," world-class professional poker player. But taking risks also got him into deep trouble. He sold and was implicated in the selling of numerous forged and stolen documents, including the Texas Declaration of Independence, misrepresented and lied about the quality of items in his catalogs, cheated his customers, amassed more than $1 million in gambling debts, and probably committed arson to help pay them off. He was in over his head and close to indictment for arson of his warehouse and office when he committed suicide by shooting himself at the Colorado River near Bastrop on April 16, 1989.

Vinson's book is well written and exhaustively researched and documented. He scoured Jenkins's personal papers and the private collections of book dealers across the country. He also interviewed Jenkins's supporters and detractors, sleuthed in newspaper and magazine archives, and visited the sites of Jenkins's life. Vinson is the ideal person to write this book. He has worked as a librarian at the DeGolyer Library at Southern Methodist University, which specializes n western Americana, and has been buying and selling Texas and western history documents and books for twenty-five years. In short, he knows the rare book trade inside and out.

Many people in the Texas State Historical Association knew Johnny Jenkins—or at least thought they knew him—and they will want to read this book. It will open their eyes to a man who could be both charming and deceitful. If I have one nit to pick about the book it is that Vinson psychoanalyzes Jenkins at times, saying that he suffered from "histrionic personality disorder," whose symptoms include "excessive attention seeking and deep need of approval from others" (31). While Vinson is practicing psychiatry without a license, I do think that he is absolutely right.