Foreword

“Independent book store owner” recently turned up in some article as one of the top ten endangered professions. There are two ways to look at this—the Civil War veteran model and the steam locomotive model.

A great wave of patriotism swept the United States in the 1890s, and this included the willingness to revisit painful memories and to embrace both sides of the fading conflict. By the 1930s the diminishing number of Civil War vets was frequently lamented and remarked on. A few made it to the 1950s. I remember one early newspaper clipping about the death of the last horse that saw active duty, and wondered how in hell they determined that fact. Then you get funny little things like Civil War widows who survive to this day, being teenagers who married those in their 80s in the 1930s. Anyway, it’s the same thing with two other great wars. A slender silver-haired WW I vet proudly passed by in a shiny red convertible in our local Memorial Day parade for many years, until fairly recently, and WW II vets are rapidly disappearing from our ranks. These are grains of sand in an hour glass. Their numbers are finite, and the eventual outcome is indisputable. Yes there will always be new wars and vets, but WW II is probably the last “good” traditional war most of us will ever see.

A similar melancholy can be noted in the pages of various train journals of the mid-1900s. The diesel handwriting was on the wall as early as the 1930s, but steam proponents held out hope for some time, and weren’t fully routed until the late 1950s. Steam locomotives do survive though in out of the way places, and not just the tourist kind. And many of their replacements are still things of awe and wonder, but without all the derailments and boiler explosions. I still get a thrill fishing in isolated stretches of the Upper Delaware River and watching Erie Lackawanna Railway cars come bursting through the forest above, and even today in the suburbs the lonely echo of the freight train whistle still washes over the land. Trains of some sort will be around for a long time. And the fastest maglev train of today may be somebody’s fond memory of an antiquated mode of transportation in the next century.

So, you can say the last Rebel or Yankee is dead, to complete this seemingly tortured dichotomy, but you can’t say the last train is dead.

Assuming civilization does not self-destruct, book stores should be with us one way or another for centuries. Books are very hardy, technologically speaking, and don’t depend on power sources and compatibility issues. Communities weep when a good old neighborhood book store closes, but there is always the chance that another will spring up around the corner. Granted that it will likely be a big box chain store, but they nurture readers and release books into the world in their own java jazzy way. And there will always be city and townie and country places that have “real” book stores with esoteric offerings where every last title has not been priced with the aid of the internet. These types of places inspire the next generation of booksellers, often at a very early age. At the very least, there should be room for lots of hybrid stores, with tons of interesting and fairly uncommon stock on the shelves that can be purchased as cheaply as online, but with the added benefit of personal inspection, no shipping costs, and instant gratification. The book store owner, happy to run such a business in spite of the trials and tribulations, can spend the other half of the time listing rare books online, and taking in scattered walk-in or housecall treasures attracted like moths to flame by the bricks and mortar presence.

So, there are fewer great book stores—of both the classy and the rambling variety—prices have been regularized or homogenized by the internet, which often means there are not lots of bargains lying around for the visiting bookseller to snap up, and we are up to our elbows in overnight colleagues with little or no true appreciation or staying power, not to mention the long strong arm of Amazon and company, but we still have life and hope. And we shouldn’t forget how lousy some actual book stores can be, and how great virtual book stores can be even without the creaking floorboards that sound to us like steam sang to the old railroaders.

One last tale of evolution as opposed to extinction. I frequently drove some distance to a favorite book and ephemera auction. I used to find great bargains there. More and more top big city dealers attended. I began consigning, and the checks were good. There came a point when I couldn’t afford to buy much anymore, but it was still educational and lucrative. Then we got the bad news that they were going the eBay Live route. That very first auction, attendance was down by two thirds. Who wants to spend six hours (which used to be four hours before this glitchy and glacial bidding system) getting beat out by some deep pockets collector (former customers, now competitors) on the other side of the country? That happens once in awhile with a phone bid, but now every single lot is susceptible. The owner is reaching for the big time with stars in his eyes. He probably made much more money, but he had amassed some really stellar items for this first online auction so it isn’t a valid comparison. The more common stuff that used to go for $200/box was now getting hammered down for $5 or $10. He vows not to auction this kind of material next time, so the middle feeders will eventually drop out and a couple dozen heavy hitters will have to justify the cost of renting the hall and paying fifteen helpers. Might as well just go eBay Live only, methinks, or even eBay only. Whichever of those ways, it can’t be much fun shipping that many fragile and important items. We used to just walk them out the door, end of story. The podium used to engage the crowd rather than stare glassy-eyed at the computer monitor. There were murmurings. Some of us who had made this specialized auction great felt a little betrayed. I think we all wish him well—which is probably directly dependent on a steady flow of extraordinary consignments—but it was a lot like the relatively sudden death of a good book store. I had saved out a box of newspaper file photos I figured would get wounded there and outright murdered up my way, but just received a surprising $500 check for this locally sold lot, so there is always hope when it comes to good books and paper items and the places we can find and buy and sell them.

In this issue, what happens when you give your catalog a complete makeover; an Arthurian expert joins the round table; an entwining interview with Jim Hinck of Hinck & Wall and viaLibri; and Joe Perlman proves once again that you can’t escape death or Texas. In ephemera, the resplendent Anna May Wong; followed by a most curllish book review. From the Tool Box, Used Books 101; Search Term Strategies 101; and Biblio.com gets the Pros and Cons treatment from Chris Volk this time around. As for the IOBA Bookseller Profiles rap sheet, Troutdale, WA is in da house; Pella, IA is representin’; and Topsfield, MA tops things off. And you can’t spell addenda without end.

We might be back in April but this takes way over an hour so I don’t know.