It isn’t easy being a bookseller these days. We are
being assaulted from every side, by what seems to be progress, or at
least that’s what people call it. A few years ago I referred in print
to the current explosion of instant world-wide communication technology
as the Electronic revolution, comparing it to the Industrial revolution
of the 19th century. I continued by pointing out that just as people
living in the midst of that industrial explosion of mass manufacturing
could hardly have foreseen the long-term effects of that major
cataclysm (the regimentation of the assembly line with all its droning
boredom, industrial pollution, unions, the nouveau riche, etc.), so was
it unlikely that we could see the implications for the future in a
world where Tokyo or Timbuktu are, in a technical sense, right next
door. The book trade today, along with lots of other long established
systems, is now in a very precarious situation. Everything is changing
and while we don’t know where it’s all going, we do know it’s out of
our control.
There are so many changes occurring, and so quickly, with only
slight hints as to the directions we are heading, that it’s hard to
know where to start, but some things are quite clear. The used book
business is in great peril. If the rare book trade seems less
precarious, the implications for it are just as ominous because the
used book business is the base of the pyramid, of which the rare book
is the apex. If the traditional used bookstore survives it will be in a
very different form from now. About the only used bookstores that seem
to be operating successfully are those where the proprietors seem to
know virtually nothing about books. Nor care. They buy for a buck and
sell for five, and seem to me entirely lacking in discrimination or any
sense of quality. I suspect that even they can only exist by owning
their building. I drop in to some of them occasionally, but they are so
boring I can seldom force myself to look long enough to find something.
I hope they are not the future, but I fear they are; at least in the
cities.
Rents in the rejuvenated centres of most North American cities have
outpaced a bookseller’s ability to pay them. Used bookstores need a lot
of space and they need it cheap. After all, used bookstores dealing in
recent books at half price, or out-of-print books which are still
fairly cheap, need, by their very nature, browsers to seek them out.
That means ample space and time, for the books must wait for the person
who wants them to come in and find them.
I should here explain the difference between new and Used & Rare
books. Used & Rare was once a generic term for anything not brand
new, although in recent years it has been superseded by the designation
Antiquarian (another futile attempt to confer respectability.) Used
bookstores in the past would usually contain the leavings from the
previous hundred or hundred and fifty years – from last year’s
bestsellers to the reprints of the works of famous writers, the purged
books of people moving, and the libraries of the deceased. While the
bulk of the stock in a typical used bookstore would consist of such
books, in the last 60 or 70 years the space which paid the rent was the
area in front, which sold used paperbacks, the common reading of the
young and the impecunious, which heavily outbalances hardcovers in
sales. Paperbacks in our time have fuelled the used book business,
while the larger general stock of hardcovers gather dust, sometimes for
many years, until the right person finds them. It should be clear from
this that used bookshops, because of those long periods between pricing
and sale, often contain what we call “sleepers,” books which time has
rendered grossly underpriced. Another of the many reasons to frequent
used bookshops.
Our new bookseller friends and our publishing friends, may not be
aware that in the early 19th century and before there were no such
categories. The Bookseller was everything. He published, then sold new
books, but he also sold old books, so the entire world of bookmaking
was often incorporated in one firm.
In the 20th century, with publishers already a separate entity, new
booksellers and Used & Rare gradually split into two camps as well.
In Toronto, for instance, Roy Britnell would be the last to actively
participate in both fields, although the Beggs of Contact Editions kept
their hand in with new books until they recently moved to a smaller
store when they pretty much dropped the new books.
We have now evolved to a situation where almost all new booksellers
and publishers ignore the antiquarian book trade, and often demonstrate
their abysmal ignorance of our side of the trade by blaming used
booksellers for all their missing books. It is not uncommon to hear
accusations from the new book trade about the sleazy used bookstores
who buy books stolen from their stores. While there are such sleazy
bookstores, just as there are crooks and thieves in any human activity
which uses money as a means of exchange, in my experience, the
percentage of crooks in the used book business is much smaller than in
just about any other business I have experience of. Most used
booksellers go to enormous lengths to avoid buying stolen books, and in
fact, we have a very successful network world-wide devoted to just
that. Every day we read new stories about the bankers and investment
dealers who steal millions but I have yet to meet a wealthy used
bookseller. There’s an old joke in the Antiquarian book trade that the
only way to get rich in bookselling is to be already rich when you
enter it. But the truth is that such sadly ignorant accusations really
only accentuate the further splintering of different aspects of a
trade, which once was unified.
And sadly, the current situation, which seems to me to threaten the
whole trade is also eroding the already thin line between used and
rare. Essentially used books would be all secondhand books from the
last 100 years or so, while rare or Antiquarian would refer to those
books which have rapidly become desirable because of their importance,
for literary, scientific or historical reasons and, of course,
scarcity. A couple of instances; called in to appraise the collection
of a Biologist whose specialty had been genetics, myself and the other
appraiser thought we were in for a quick job when we first surveyed the
books. A third of them were in the familiar green bindings which
denoted they were all original editions of Charles Darwin’s books, all
books which can be dealt with quickly because they have extensive
bibliographical and sales records. The other two thirds of the library
contained very modern books, some from the 20s onwards but mostly from
the 50s and 60s. This will be easy, we assumed, until we examined them
closely.
Every single one of the recent books contained the first
appearance of some new scientific advance in genetics. It took a good
deal of research for two dealers with little experience in that field,
and even we were shocked to find how valuable some of them were. And in
the literary field, the enormous popular success of Harry Potter
combined with very small first printings caused the early first
editions to quickly become very expensive. Thus we find that for quite
different reasons, recent books become quite valuable.
With the Internet now rendering most used books unsaleable one finds
dealers like myself separating themselves further by not even buying
almost all books from the last 100 years or so. While I hate this (I
have always believed that an interesting $5.00 book is the equal of the
$500.00 book in all values except monetary), I now have no choice. When
we check the internet sites to find 150 copies of a modern book, we
begin by not bothering to list our own copy, and it doesn’t take long
for us to realize that we shouldn’t even be buying them in the first
place. So now instead of Used & Rare we increasingly find Used
disappearing and Rare hiding in offices and homes, appearing only at
book fairs.
David Mason Books, Toronto.
When the world-wide web started to function there was a state of
near ecstasy prevalent in the book trade. Books started to sell to
people in places like Tokyo, Singapore, Australia, Eastern Europe, good
books, but ones which previously we would have anticipated might have
taken 15 years for the right person to come along. Pessimists like me
weren’t so sure and now we see why. Rare books, being established by
their scarceness and intrinsic importance, are less endangered. But
there are many cases in the last few years where the Internet has
demonstrated that some books, once considered rare, are considerably
more common than current owners find comfortable.
What I’m saying is
that many so-called rare books are not rare. Last year, obtaining a
first edition of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary I priced it at $30,000 and
offered it to one of my most serious clients. “No thanks,” he said. “I
was at the Los Angeles book fair last week and there were three copies
there.” Johnson’s Dictionary is not a rare book; it is an expensive
book, as it should be, being one of the literary cornerstones of
western civilization. Because it was expensive when it was published in
1755, it would have been purchased only by the wealthy, and instead of
being read and tossed aside, it mostly languished for a couple of
centuries on the library shelves of those huge country houses and
survived in great numbers.
But the great books always sell, in fact they are now more saleable
than common books. Most dealers will tell you that they can sell a
$2,000 book more easily than they can sell a $20 book.
But what used bookstores need, even more than space and cheap rent,
is customers; people who actually come in and browse and find books
they weren’t looking for but can’t resist; or books they didn’t know
existed by authors they never heard of; or simply a newly discovered
book that appeals to their curiosity. The Internet seems to have
affected even people’s visits to stores. The consensus amongst those
colleagues I have talked to seems to be that store sales have been down
over a lengthy period from 20%-50%. It seems that almost everyone uses
the Internet to buy most, if not all, of their books. The intricate
and, I believe, essential connection, between the buyer and the dealer
is thereby threatened, to me perhaps the worst aspect of the entire
current situation. I will touch on this later.
So, used bookshops are closing at a speed which is scary to people
who care about learning and civilization. Right now this is mainly
booksellers, and perhaps the habitual customers, but the implications
seem to me to far exceed the economic concerns of a few guys like me.
A famous writer once said that the degree of civilization of a
country could be measured by the number of used bookstores it could
sustain. Years ago a friend of mine counted all the stores on Queen
Street in Toronto, including the small independents and specialty
bookstores, along with the used ones. His count was twenty-seven; now
there are four I can think of. Anyone who thinks such numbers are
insignificant should read no further. I read a piece, maybe ten years
ago, about the British trade which pointed out that in the previous ten
years Britain had gone from 3000 bookshops to 300. This was attributed
to high rents, the high streets of British towns having become too
pricey for used bookstores. The Internet has exacerbated that, but now
it is apparent that that is only part of it. Friends and colleagues who
closed stores to deal from home thinking they could feed their families
from the net and the occasional visitor, have often had to send their
wives out to work or seek other means of supporting themselves.
But what is most troubling to me in all this, is that
collectors need some years of experience in collecting to be ready for
books in the higher price ranges. And it is my deep conviction that
only in the used bookstores can they educate themselves to obtain that
level of sophistication which will prepare them when they are faced
with a high price for a book they need for their collection or their
library. And what will happen to the education of new collectors when
there are no used bookstores? Who will teach them what they need to
know?
The large chains, after decimating many of the independents and
capturing the average new book buyer, have staffed their stores with
young and ignorant, minimum-wage staff. A friend of mine seeking Evelyn
Waugh’s Decline and Fall was told “try ancient history you might find ‘her’ there.” Another, wanting Maugham’s Cakes and Ale
was referred to the cooking section. No one expects a kid working for
low wages to have an encyclopedic knowledge of our literature, but your
average used bookseller not only knows these things, he can lead you to
them, or find them for you, and more often than not will recommend
similar books that you might not know about. All these things point
more and more to the triumph of bland mediocrity over the personal
guidance offered by a knowledgeable bookseller. Every serious reader
and collector I ever knew, knows that having a knowledgeable dealer to
instruct and guide them especially in their early years is essential. A
friend of mine, a long time and astute collector, told me recently that
years of experience had taught him to start with the best dealers.
Although they will often be more expensive, they tend to get the best
material and he found after various unpleasant transactions that the
high-end dealers often end up cheaper in the long run. A very wise
conclusion!
One of my oldest clients, a lawyer, would often, early in our
professional relationship with books, apologize for taking up so much
of my time. As a lawyer he knew that what I was really selling was not
just my books but my knowledge, my experience and my time, and he felt
guilty that our lengthy talks were infringing on my time.
Since he is now not only a client but a close friend, who shares
many of my personal interests and joins me during some of my scouting
activities, and in fact competes with me in a couple of our shared
collecting interests, I thought it wiser not to admit that these
sometimes lengthy sessions discussing collecting tactics are enormously
gratifying to me and one of my greatest rewards as a bookseller.
I thought that a bit of guilt on my friend’s part might be to my
advantage on our scouting trips thereby giving me a slight edge in the
acquisition of some book we both coveted. The truth is that in the end
my greatest pleasures as a bookseller have come from these
relationships and the excitement and pleasure of the great books I have
handled is far less important than the periods of shared experiences I
have had with my long-term clients.
What all this illustrates is that the experienced dealer prefers the
knowledgeable collector, for what greater pleasure than to offer a
treasure to someone who will instantly recognize it as a treasure. In
those cases the book sells itself, no small benefit for a pathetic
salesman such as me.
And just in case you think you have heard the worst, I have barely
started. How about this as a side issue? An article in a major rare
book magazine recently pointed out that Oxfam, that noble attempt to
feed the hungry children of the world, operates many bookshops in
England which are further decimating the trade. These shops operate
with volunteers and, of course, their stock costs them nil since it is
all donated. It was also suggested, in the article, that they were
given preferential rents by landlords because of their charitable
nature (although I believe that subsequently Oxfam refuted that). But
it hardly matters; with free stock and free employees they could pay
double the going rent and regular used shops still could not hold their
own competitively.
Right here, in Toronto, most of the University Colleges hold yearly
sales under the same principles. They use volunteer labor, get the
books free – many, many thousands of them – and use the University
facilities which, of course, are publicly funded, for free – not a bad
deal. During the period from September to October that Trinity,
Victoria, U.C., Innis College, St. Michaels, and Wordsworth run their
sales hardly a book gets sold by the regular used bookstores in town.
And furthermore I’m told the books are no longer very cheap since with
all their free labor they check everything on the Internet, (like the
ignorant back-room booksellers so prevalent on the net) and are pricing
accordingly. Gossip filters back that indicate these college sales are
taking in between $75,000-$125,000 each from these sales. I haven’t
gone to any of their sales for 25 years, in spite of the fact that one
with my knowledge and experience could obviously still buy very well
and make a pretty good profit. But I don’t go based on the sensible
principle that you shouldn’t encourage those people who are stealing
your livelihood.
One irony I find amusing in this situation, is that
any group except booksellers, would probably organize themselves and
raise a big stink about publicly funded institutions who are forcing
them out of business. But booksellers generally choose to march to
their own drummers and I don’t foresee them doing anything. A further
irony for me is that were such a thing to ever occur, the Universities,
who are contributing to the death of used bookstores so unthinkingly,
would probably back down at the first hint of public protest. That is
certainly true if their general moral cowardice in the face of several
recent assaults on free speech and the democratic principle of the free
exchange of ideas in universities, is any indication.
A famous bookseller in a talk to the Grolier Club (perhaps the most
prestigious club for book collectors in the world) once said of
bookselling, that it was “perhaps the last profession in the world
where a man could still control his destiny.” This noble thought, which
I never miss an opportunity to quote, and the mindset which causes it
to be true, ensure that booksellers may fuss and whine at these gross
assaults on their livelihoods but they won’t involve themselves in any
organized protest. Myself, I have been considering setting up a tent on
the lawns in front of those colleges during their sales and offering
courses in Philosophy or Literature – and my fees will be much cheaper
than the University’s.
There was a time, a century or so ago, where any town that had a
university, never mind one that had 3,500 or so professors, as does
University of Toronto, (never mind York and Ryerson) would be a
guarantee that used bookstores would flourish. That this is not true
now in Toronto invites significant questions. Perhaps someone should
explore the question of Professors and their apparent indifference,
even distaste, for books. During a recent conversation over drinks with
some colleagues we shared opinions about why academics have all but
disappeared from the used bookshops. Some interesting conclusions were
arrived at.
The general consensus was that many academics seldom seemed
to be interested in anything outside their specialties. And being
spoiled by many years of getting free books from publishers they don’t
like to pay for books. Indeed, teachers, especially professors, are
number two on the booksellers’ secret list of cheapskates by
profession, just behind ministers. While teachers once were ill-paid
this is no longer true so their protestations of poverty do not
convince. And we, the booksellers on the frontlines, so to speak, can
perhaps be excused for assuming that it is really just another
indication of dreary mediocrity. But one of my colleagues thought it
unfair that the good ones were not being mentioned; meaning those
professors who do frequent bookshops. As we dropped names of those
professors who do buy books (I refer to North America and Britain) it
became obvious that those scholars we were naming were more often than
not those whose work was considered the most important in their fields.
This pattern was only momentarily surprising to people who believe, as
we do, that it is culture that we are selling.
A club of which I am a member, which was founded many years ago by a
number of librarians, booksellers, publishers, and writers, had no
current member from the Antiquarian book trade when I joined. Roy
Britnell, one of the founders, was probably the last member with a
connection in the Antiquarian book trade. After a few meetings one of
the publishers there asked me one day over lunch “Just what is it that
you Antiquarian booksellers do?” In one of my all-time greatest
one-liners I got to reply; “The function of the Antiquarian Bookseller
is to clean up all the mess that you guys create publishing all the
crap that you do.” That got a nice laugh, but in fact, funny though it
is, it’s also true. Our job is to search out and buy from remainder
tables, from garage sales and the junk heaps, those books which our
instincts tell us someone should be looking for, and hold them until
that person appears. In other words, we are trained to cull the worthy
from the dross. We rescue the past to hold for the future, and if we’re
wrong we lose money, so we learn to hone those instincts.
But in spite of these things the main culprit is the Internet. The
same principle which causes us to be more likely to believe anything,
no matter how outrageous it seems, if we read it in print, also has a
parallel on the Internet. For on the Internet, to the casual browser,
all books and all booksellers are equal. But we, the pros, know better.
We know, to paraphrase Orwell, that while all book dealers are equal
some are more equal than others. For unfortunately, it seems to be,
that all one needs to be a bookseller on the Internet is a name and
some books. Knowledge, experience, some vague clue about the means of
ascertaining edition, completeness, or even value are not seen as
necessary. We find ludicrously inept descriptions which any good used
bookseller can tell are ignorant and erroneous offered as accurate by
fools completely unaware of the depth of their ignorance. A guy like
me, after 40 years in the trade, will generally have a huge and
valuable reference collection (in my case overflowing a very big office
into our storage warehouse) but the average No-Name bookseller on the
net probably has no reference books, nor sees the need for any. After
all they can lift the description of their book from an entry on the
net (at the same time they are copying the price). Of course, if their
book is not quite the same, like maybe being a different edition or
state or issue, what does that matter? It looks like it should be a
first edition. And even worse, these people, who are so unaware of
their own stupidity, are also quite incapable of discerning the equal
ignorance of those they copy so assiduously, so that the errors and
misdescriptions become compounded.
Another sad result of all this dumbing down is that some problems in
the new book trade which used to be solved by the used bookstores, are
now instead worsened. Once new bookstores would have in stock large
backlists of the earlier works by popular writers. So that discovering
a new author you liked, you could go and find other of his titles in
your neighbourhood bookstore. Space concerns, (i.e. high rents, and too
many books) have ruined that tradition too. It seems that new
booksellers can no longer stock a writer’s earlier books, even in
paperback.
Two recent personal incidents of my own illustrate this. A wonderful
book by Amos Oz led me to recommend it to a writer friend who in turn
informed me that another Oz title, was perhaps the best book he had
read in the last ten years. I went to my local new bookstore, a very
good one, but they had none of Oz’s earlier titles. I was forced to
order it. (In an amusing but quite irrelevant aside I can’t help adding
this. Soon after, in another Antiquarian shop, I saw and bought six or
seven other Oz first editions (which at $25-35 each were still only the
price of a new book.) When I returned to my shop my partner suggested
that I might easily have purchased them cheaper elsewhere – from
myself. Turned out I had five of them on my own shelves, but hadn’t
thought to look there. There is no doubt a moral there, although I’m
still trying to figure out what that moral is).
Most recently I discovered an Irish noir writer whose books I didn’t
know and went in search of more. He has written, it seems, 15-20 books.
My favorite new store had two, Chapters the same two, so I had to visit
“The Sleuth of Baker Street,” the best of the crime specialists where I
found ten more. The point being that now only a specialist can carry a
writer’s backlist. In the old days such wants would send people to the
used bookstores for these sought-after earlier titles. But now we are
losing the used stores. Public libraries are wonderful but I want to
own the books I love so libraries are not a solution for me.
Which brings us to one of the most confusing things one encounters
on the Internet; why the wide discrepancy in prices? Many people are
not aware that lots, maybe a majority, of the so-called dealers on the
Net offering books, are not real dealers at all. Some offer their books
more cheaply because they think that cheaper will trump condition (and
it probably will – to the equally ignorant.) But there are many people
who haven’t a clue that the same edition of the same book can have
widely different prices amongst legitimate dealers – for one reason
alone – the condition. After rarity and importance the most important
thing about the book as an object, is condition. Condition, condition,
condition. But the amateurs are fuelled by greed, and driven by
ignorance, so we get a lot of descriptions which might be amusing if
these ignorant fools weren’t tacking on a price, sometimes a hefty one,
at the end.
So we get descriptions such as, a book with a signature
bound upside down, a fairly common result of machine-binding, and
having no bibliographic significance nor any effect on value, will
often be described as “a rare error book” and priced outrageously. Here
is a not unusual description. “Covers shredded, but a lot still there –
could be fixed with some tender loving care. And you could get a copy
of the missing title page from the library and then you could tell
exactly how old it is. But I know it’s old, maybe in the Eighteen
hundreds and in wonderful shape considering it’s age.” These people
usually don’t mention that along with the tender loving care you would
need to spend several hundred dollars and it would still be near
worthless because of the missing title page. And if you think I’m
exaggerating, or just in a silly mood, look for yourself – especially
on eBay. As I’ve mentioned I’ve met very few deliberately crooked
booksellers but I’ve seen a lot of ignorance. And I guess being cheated
by a fool as opposed to a crook may temper the anger a bit, but in the
end you’ve still been cheated.
One Antiquarian dealer, whom I greatly admired, now sadly gone, a man called David Magee (whose memoir, Infinite Riches: Adventures of a Rare Book Dealer,
should be required reading for anyone, collector, dealer or simply a
reader who enjoys sophisticated anecdotes about books and bookselling)
wrote a couple of small pamphlets humorously poking fun at the
descriptions some dealers use in their catalogues to deflect attention
from the defects, sometimes horrendous ones, in their offerings. In
Magee’s satirical descriptions stains are always tiny (and only found
in margins), annotations are always scholarly, plates in 18th-Century
books are always naughty, and previous owners’ names defacing the title
are always those of significant scholars (even if they are
undistinguished clergymen from some unpronounceable obscure village).
All defects, in fact, are proven of no consequence compared to the
importance and beauty of the dealer’s copy of the book. Magee was
poking gentle fun at some of the excesses of his younger colleagues,
but his motive would have been to educate through pointing out the
perils of over-enthusiasm in describing our wares. But I think he would
have been appalled at what we are seeing on the Internet today. An
ignorance of traditions going back almost 500 years is made almost
respectable by being so widespread.
And there is more. Like the colour copying machine. Another example.
At a small book fair a few years ago I found myself by chance in a
booth with a fairly new customer, he was a well-read guy, had
discovered First Editions and bought a few from me (and I presume from
others). In other words he had discovered the joys of collecting and
was pursuing his new hobby.
After greeting him I returned to my scouting, when he suddenly
blurted out, with the delighted gasp of one who has found a sleeper.
“This is a real bargain. I must buy this.” I looked over. He was
holding a copy of Richler’s Duddy Kravitz with a nice dust
wrapper. He showed me the price, twenty-five dollars, about a tenth of
its value, but my trained eye instantly noticed that it had not been
marked by the dealer “First Edition.”
“May I see it?” I asked, suspicious. I checked the verso of the
title but indeed it was the first edition, so I proceeded to the next
step in assessing a book, removing the dust wrapper to check if the
binding had stains or wear. I saw instantly that the dust wrapper was,
in fact, a colour Xerox copy, which explained why it was so nice. The
book was much less nice showing the normal wear and tear on any book
that has not been protected by a dust wrapper for a long time. “This is
a fake,” I said. My new collector was stunned, speechless. I went to
the woman manning the booth. “This is a fake, a colour Xerox, but you
haven’t marked it as such,” I accused.
“I don’t know anything. He’s not here,” she said, “he” meaning the proprietor.
“That’s unacceptable,” I replied, walking away. So did my client. A
little while later, “he,” a dealer I didn’t know, came up to me, very
agitated, on the floor.
“I was going to tell any buyer it was a copy,” he said defensively.
“Well, that’s pretty hard to do if you’re not in your booth,” I replied.
And worse, this was an honest man, as I found out when I got to know
him over the next few years. (Even that wasn’t so easy since he cringed
in embarrassment the next few times we met.) He had made an honest
mistake, an unthinking lapse, the kind guys learning anything tend to
make and I doubt he’ll make another like that.
But the point of the anecdote is not that. It is that the new
collector has not been seen again, by me or anyone I know. I think
probably his collecting career, with all its new pleasures, is over. He
probably left thinking, “These guys are all crooks. I want nothing to
do with any of them.” And he hasn’t returned.
Another example: a book came in that I hadn’t had for four or five
years. I remembered that I had sold the last one for $100. It was
Western Americana of sorts, a book on the Mormons, usually a very
saleable subject area and not an area about which I was terribly
knowledgeable. But this was a subscription book which to the
knowledgeable means it will be, no matter its historical material, what
today we would call a quickie. These books were printed in enormous
numbers and were sold door to door by subscription. They were quickly
written compilations done to cash in on the latest fad or catastrophe.
The modern equivalents are the paperbacks put out within a few days of
such newsworthy events as say, the 9/11 tragedy. (For instance, there
were hundreds, if not thousands, of such books on the sinking of the Titanic
which are mostly still so common that we get regular calls from people
who think they have a treasure, leaving us to let them down gently. It
will be a couple of hundred years before these books even become
scarce.)
Books on the Mormons were very popular, not out of religious
curiosity but, bluntly, because of sex. There’s nothing like books
about a harem (the secret dream of every red-blooded young man) to
arouse interest and sell books, as any honest publisher would admit.
Anyway I asked an assistant to check this book on the net, just out of
curiosity, even though I knew it was probably still only a hundred
dollar book. There were two copies of this book being offered on ABE
Books, one priced at $2,000 US and the other at $1,750 US (this when
the Canadian dollar was still 60¢ to the US dollar, so say $3000 and
$2600 approx.) You will be preparing yourself to hear me whine about
the treasure I sold for nothing but not so; this was a hundred dollar
book. So what is the point? Well, it must have gone like this: the
first man got the book and thought to himself “Mormons. Everybody wants
Mormon material. This book is from 1857, that’s over a hundred years
old, it must be worth $2000” – and prices it accordingly. The second
man, equally ignorant, sees the $2000 – and thinks. “Well I see this is
a $2000 dollar book but I’ll be cunning and price mine at $1750 – and
sell it before that other guy.” So here we have a $100 book priced at
20 times its value by two different apparent dealers (but who, of
course are not really dealers at all). And, what if you want that book?
And they are the only two offered? Well you may think that it is worth
that, so you may buy it. Aren’t you likely to assume that they know
what they are doing especially since there’s two of them? Well, good
luck. And that’s only one example; I’ve got hundreds more.
We advise our clients very strongly not to buy anything more than a
$25 or $50 book from people on the net unless they have initials after
their name (meaning a professional affiliation which is world-wide and
offers not just an assumption of professionalism but official recourse
when disputes arise.)
But what may seem to the reader as carping at the larcenous nature
of those who steal the hard-earned knowledge of long-time dealers like
me isn’t actually true. Or at least not in the way it may seem. What
bothers us is the ignorant misuse of our knowledge. For the good
antiquarian dealer freely gives from his vast hoard of knowledge and
experience to his customers on a regular basis. What normally occurs in
a business like Antiquarian books is a student/mentor situation in the
beginning, which is based on a shared passion – for the books, or for
the subject. The client’s interests and the professional’s experience,
result in shared experiences, and the collector’s increased
sophistication.
This leads, more often than not, to friendship. When I say, as I
often do, that most of my long term customers become friends, I am not
exaggerating. Book collecting after all is an activity, which, while
based on reverence for some of man’s noblest instincts, and regard for
man’s greatest accomplishments, also operates in emotional areas which
are fuelled by some of man’s least attractive habits. Greed,
acquisitiveness, and profit based competition may be the foundation of
collecting, but they are generally leavened by the mutual respect and
regard that so often grows between the dealer and the knowledgeable
collector.
I had a joke once that I used to test people with. I would point out
that dealers and collectors were, or should be, by essence, natural
enemies. After all, think of this; I have the book and you want/need it
(and if you don’t understand that a collector needs the book
the way you need your dinner, or sex, you haven’t grasped the basic
core of collecting.) So not only do I have what you need, but I get to
set the price that you have to pay to own it. The only constraints on
my greed are my need for money to survive, and whatever civilized
regard I have for the social contract. If this is essentially true (and
I believe it is) surely it is a measure of our civility how we deal
with this situation. When I would put it this way it usually elicits a
laugh – but the laugh usually is followed by a thoughtful pause while
the listener realizes the basic truth of my premise.
A very hard lesson for a collector to learn, or for that matter
anyone buying anything which doesn’t have a fixed commercial price, is
to recognize when it becomes necessary to bite the bullet and pay a
price one is certain is too much for a coveted object. The value of
things relates to need; a bottle of water in the desert is of obvious
value; the trick with books is to learn to measure the level of your
lust.
A few years ago a colleague showed me a proof copy he had just
bought for a buck or two, of what I consider the greatest political
novel of the 20th century, Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, to my mind more compelling then Animal Farm or 1984.
Proof copies seem to be out of favour amongst collectors these days
probably due to the modern practice of publishers issuing them like
“review copies,” in very large numbers.
But when Darkness at Noon
was published, proofs were still issued in quite small numbers, mostly
for in-house use. I wanted this one badly. I asked my colleague for
first refusal hoping that the fact that he’d paid a dollar or two for
it might mean I’d get a bargain. He said sure, but I heard no more for
a couple of years. Then I entered his shop one day and he showed it to
me in a special box he’d had made for it. I’d hoped that at worst it
might be $2000 – and was prepared to pay $3000 – but he was asking
$5000. I knew he would not have located any selling prices for it. Nor
did I think he would even find selling prices for the first edition to
use as a benchmark comparison. For some reason the first edition of Darkness at Noon
is itself a rare book. No copy in dust wrapper has appeared at auction
in 30 years and I have only ever seen two copies, one of them defective
(note: in 2008 after this was written a copy of the first appeared at
auction in a “restored dust wrapper.” It sold for £950. Today we find
on ABE a reputable British dealer offering the first edition in the
dust wrapper for Can. $6400.00. This dealer claims, perhaps accurately,
that this title, noted by him as “of infamous scarcity,” was destroyed
by enemy bombing in WWII. On the other hand, if all the stories of
books which I have seen described as scarce because of the bombing of a
publisher’s warehouse were true, there would have been little left of
London after the war.) So I was forced to use the formula I suggest to
my clients as the final arbiter, namely – “Do I want that enough to pay
that price for it?” For there is no “real” price for a rare book, only
a scale of factors to measure the personal value to you.
It took me
less than thirty seconds to buy it at about double what I thought its
value should be. Of course, an old saw in the book trade says “When
your competitor sells a $5000 dollar book it is criminally overpriced,
when someone buys your $5000 book you sold it too cheap, in fact you
probably gave it away for nothing, indeed it’s obvious you were
robbed.” Such is human nature. In the case of this book I asked an
English friend whose firm has been in business almost a hundred years
and has kept a record of every book they’ve owned, if they had ever had
a copy. When he informed me that his firm had never had a copy nor had
he personally ever seen a copy, and that should I sell it, I would “do
well,” my overpriced $5000 folly immediately became a $15,000
certainty, and now some 5 years later it is, in my mind at least, a
$25,000 book. So far, my lapse into momentary insanity, has yielded a
profit of $20,000, albeit untested yet by the reality of the market
place. And it goes up almost daily in my mind. Who knows where it might
end? But it hardly matters because I won’t be selling it. See how easy
it is?
Now that I have established some of the horrors which the new
electronic revolution has brought to the area I know something about
(and if you think other fields where I share your ignorance might be
different, let me say that experience tells me they won’t be), you will
see our concern.
And, there are still factors that I haven’t even touched on yet.
Most days I feel like a blacksmith must have felt just after Henry
Ford started making his assembly line Model T. Almost the only thing
which rescues me from acute depression is my age. There’s not much more
they can do to hurt me short of a major catastrophe and, curiously,
this is mainly because of two character traits which in almost any
normal business would be considered major defects.
The first is that I am one of those lucky people who don’t much care
about money. It was once pointed out to me by a psychiatrist that there
might be some connection between this and the fact that my father was a
banker, a revelation which I found a bit disconcerting when it was
brought to my attention, but which later became, and remains, a source
of some amusement. But I am very grateful for the gift no matter the
source. Richard Jessup’s The Cincinnati Kid is a small
classic, which Norman Jewison turned into not a bad movie. In it the
young gambler (played by Steve McQueen in the movie) is interrogated
about money by his girlfriend’s father, a dirt farmer in the Ozarks.
“All my life,” says the old farmer, “I’ve been trying to understand money and I can’t seem to do it. But, you seem to get it.”
“The thing to know about money,” says the Cincinnati Kid (who is only in his twenties), “is that it’s necessary but not important.”
This quotation seemed to me at the time the best description of the
true significance of money in our lives that I had ever seen anywhere,
and it seems so still.
So, if you don’t need a lot of money you have an edge. We need
enough to be free to pursue our destiny, as the Cincinnati Kid knew,
but to waste time in getting more than is necessary, seems silly to me.
After several years living hand to mouth in Europe, where I began to
educate myself, I had trained myself to not want anything that I didn’t
need. When I returned to Canada I found I could walk up Yonge Street
without even looking in a window (except a bookstore window, of course)
because I didn’t want any of the junk the stores offered, the junk
which causes so many people to sacrifice their dreams for the security
of an income.
The second factor which should save me for the ten or twenty years I
might have left is my buying style. From the beginning all I have cared
about is books and since I started bookselling I have spent every penny
not needed for the necessities on books. So quickly did I build up a
stock that word filtered back to me through the grapevine that it was
believed that my father was rich and was funding me. My father loaned,
not gave, me $500 which is all I had when I began and I never got
another cent, so such gossip angered me at first. But I saw it didn’t
matter what they thought, in fact it said more about their philosophy
of bookselling than it did about me. For the fact is that I did it all
myself, and the simple truth is that I want books, not money.
No, it was my love of books which propelled me and now I have a
large stock of very good books all carefully chosen by me with all the
skill accrued from forty years experience. For instance, because I
bought obscure editions of many of the earlier writers, instead of only
first editions, I now have a lot of books which are only to be found in
the stocks of the best specialists around the world. Books that get
regularly ordered on the Internet now, because they are becoming
unobtainable. I also for many years bought books which I thought were
good but which the world hadn’t yet caught up to. When you’ve been
around for forty years you’ve seen lots of books go from being unwanted
– “dogs” we call them – to much sought-after with commensurate rises in
value. When I grew to recognize this obvious phenomenon I bought
heavily in areas not yet held in esteem by other dealers, many of whom
in my view spend much of their time competing for the latest flavour of
the month. There are right now several areas where I buy heavily,
although quietly. Since some of those areas are made up of things which
the rest of the world (at least around here) doesn’t seem interested
in, and since, given my age, the world view may not catch up with me
before I die, I have taken to telling my partner Debbie that I am
investing for her old age. A couple of years ago in an interview one of
the questions was: “Are there any new areas that are overlooked, where
one can still buy bargains? And if so what are they?” My answer short
and succinct was: “Yes there are, but I’m not telling. Use your
imagination.”
That I continue to get away with buying far more than I sell is now
largely due to my partner Debbie, who operates under the delusion that
if she sells enough, (and she is ten times better at actually selling a
book than I am), then we might eventually enter the middle class. I do
not attempt to dissuade her of this for it allows me to continue buying
books, and this is all I want to do.
In retrospect, another of the many ironies I see in my so-called
career is that my father, the banker, after working at the same job all
his life and doing everything properly had a comfortable retirement,
but in the end left very little. I, on the other hand, did everything
wrong and am a terrible businessman (as are most booksellers), yet when
I go I will leave behind a few million dollars worth of books
(admittedly worthless until someone buys them). I will die a very rich
man and I have had a wonderful time amassing these riches. And if I
don’t sell them I have the pleasure of looking at them and of handling
them. And of course, the most important pleasure, reading them.
Larry McMurtry, a highly respected bookseller for a very long time
as well as a fine and prolific writer, won the Academy Award for his
screenplay of Brokeback Mountain. When he accepted the award
he cheered all us booksellers enormously, first by stepping up to
receive his award in a dinner jacket, dress tie and jeans, the
traditional garb of the trade (the jeans, not the dinner jacket, and
certainly not the dress tie) But what most warmed us all was when he
said in his acceptance speech: “And finally I’m going to thank all the
booksellers of the world. Remember, Brokeback Mountain was a
book before it was a movie. From the humblest paperback exchange to the
masters of the great bookshops of the world.
All are contributors to
the survival of the culture of the book. A wonderful culture, which we
mustn’t lose.” McMurtry also dedicated his most recent trilogy to the
used booksellers, as follows: “The Berrybender Narratives are dedicated
to the secondhand booksellers of the Western world, who have done so
much, over a fifty-year stretch, to help me to an education.” This sort
of public acknowledgement of our place in the grand scheme of things
makes up for a lot of the humiliation and indifference to which we have
being subjected in the last few years, makes it a bit easier to deal
with what will probably only become worse.
Like the blacksmiths, we may be doomed but let me make a prophecy.
We are not going away. If we are doomed, it is only to more of what we
have always had to deal with and we will deal with whatever comes next
in the same manner. Fairly soon we will no doubt be selling books as
quaint artifacts like antique dealers and we will be selling fewer
books to fewer people. But the truth is that most dealers I have known
won’t much care as long as they can survive to buy another book
tomorrow. And read another one tonight.
My father, the banker, despised the book business and despaired of
the life he foresaw for his son. But, he was in fact very pleased that
his son was doing something he loved so much, and for which he had so
much passion. As a banker his conservatism was a given, but in the
1950s – that most conservative time in the 20th century – his advice to
me was: “Never mind the suit and tie, never mind respectability and
security, find some work to do that you can love and do it as well as
you can.” I thought that trite at the time but I don’t now. It was the
best advice I could have had, even if I didn’t catch on for many years.
And it remains the best advice I could give to any young person setting
out now. For doing something you love makes up for everything the world
will throw at you. Even after forty years I still wake up every morning
wondering what exciting thing will happen today. And what book I will
buy that I never thought I’d own.
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