IOBA Standard - Printable Edition

The Bane of the Online Book World: Mega-Listers

Gwen Foss

Readers of this journal have probably seen it happen again and again: while hunting the internet for a particular used book, you find a number of reasonably priced copies offered from various dealers, then two or three priced at ridiculously high amounts. Sometimes, if the book is fairly common, you find dozens of copies with prices unbelievably out of whack.

You may ask yourself, What is going on here? You take a closer look. Here’s a copy priced three times higher than every other. Here’s another copy from the same dealer, four times higher. You read the descriptions, looking for something special about these books, but there’s nothing to recommend them—they’re not limited editions, collectible firsts, signed, or in fine bindings. Is this dealer insane?

The high standards for which used bookdealers have been known and respected for centuries did not disappear with the advent of the World Wide Web; they moved out onto the internet. In the late 1990s, purchasing a used book online was a joy. Problems or complaints, though rare, were handled with integrity by dealers who took pride in their reputation for honesty.

But those innocent days are over. It took only a few years from the time the web became the hot new place for commerce until the first book mega-lister set up shop online. That was somewhere around 2001. In the past two years these despicable con artists have mushroomed out of all control.

Every legitimate bookseller that sells online is negatively impacted by mega-listers. Every time a customer is duped by a mega-lister it throws suspicion on every honest dealer. Victims of these con artists become wary of internet commerce. They stop shopping at the site where they got duped and may even give up purchasing antiquarian books online altogether.

There are a lot of names for these opportunistic frauds: fake listers, hollow listers, cabbage sellers, data pilferers. The most common term is mega-lister, which encompasses all their various shady operating methods under one easy label.

How does a mega-lister operate? Let’s take a look at the original mega-lister, a notorious character whom we shall call Justin.

Sometime around the year 2000, this bright but misguided Californian teen came up with a clever business scheme to rake in thousands of bucks with almost no work. Representing himself as a wholly owned subsidiary of a Dunn and Bradstreet credit rated company, he telephoned small used book stores around the country and offered them what he thought would be an easy sell: ship us your books and we will sell them online for you, at a commission of seventy percent, plus storage. Despite taking that huge cut his fledgling business failed rapidly. His new scheme was even more insidious.

In 2001, our intrepid youth came back to the internet as a used bookdealer with a seemingly massive inventory. With prices out of all proportion to the market, Justin set up shop on Amazon.com and began taking orders for used and rare books. The trouble was that he had no physical inventory; or if he did, it was nowhere near the hundreds of thousands of books he claimed.

Justin had apparently devised a software program to scrape the internet for listings of used and rare books. His program captured all the information including the price. When he had compiled a list of several thousand books, he relisted them under his own name but jacked up the prices by a factor of two, three, four or more. When an order came in, he would contact the dealer whose catalog entry he had stolen and, without revealing the true situation to the dealer, purchase the book and have it drop-shipped to his own customer. The dealer who had done the original job of finding and listing the item—whose dedicated research and delicate prose caused it to sell—was invisible to the buyer, for drop-shipping requires that the customer see only Justin’s name on the package and that nothing revealing the original dealer or the real price be enclosed.

Some might insist that Justin has done nothing wrong. This is just a new type of book-search service, some argue. The dealer whose catalog entry was stolen is getting free advertising and selling a book in the bargain. But mega-listers are not the same as legitimate book-search services, which communicate openly that they do not have the book in hand. Mega-listers commit copyright violation, deception, and fraud on a massive scale. They are selling things they don’t own and don’t have a right to sell.

Legitimate book-search services tell you they will try to locate your book and, when found, will quote to you a price. At that point you can turn it down or say yes. When you engage a search service you agree in advance to pay a small fee which will be added to the price at the close of the transaction. Search services do not charge you for the book before they have found it (although they may require a small, refundable deposit). They do not pretend to have a warehouse of books. They do not provide catalog descriptions without acknowledging that the words are from another dealer who has the book in hand. Legitimate search services work from want-lists; they do not scrape the net for descriptions and then wait for an interested buyer to stumble along. Mega-listers do all these things and more.

What mega-listers and their defenders might not know is that on top of the fraud and piracy they are committing, data scraping itself has been prohibited by law in 1998 under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act which “criminalizes production and dissemination of technology that can circumvent measures taken to protect copyright.” (Source: Wikipedia.org.)

Another trick in the mega-lister’s arsenal is to copy the catalog of Books-in-Print (BIP) and use it as their fake inventory. Any bookdealer with experience in new books knows how quickly a book “in print” might become permanently unavailable. There are always a large number of titles in the BIP already out of print. But mega-listers, in their ignorance, will greedily upload the entire BIP under their own name. Orders fly in but many they are unable to fill. Hapless customers find their credit cards charged, their orders cancelled, and refunds a sometimes iffy pursuit.

For every customer pleased with their purchase from a mega-lister there are others who are angry at having been ripped off. Some of these victims receive wildly misdescribed books, as mega-listers steal the data but never see or touch the book. They may copy the description of a Very Good or Fine listing and then fill the order with a specimen that is in reality barely above Poor. Some would-be buyers find their orders cancelled days or even weeks later: the mega-lister can’t fulfill the order but rather than reveal the scam simply cancels it and moves on.

How do the major portals—ABE, Alibris, Amazon—handle these unethical firms? As far as this writer can tell, they encourage them.

Each of the “Big A” portals gains a commission on every sale. There is no incentive for them to boot mega-listers. Operators of these portals may even believe that the number of customers and legitimate dealers they lose by hosting these con artists is negligible.

On the other hand, eBay has strict rules against these nefarious practices. The site specifically prohibits a seller from copying “a substantial amount of another member’s description and pasting it into a listing.” Copying someone else’s images is also prohibited. Penalties range from cancellation of the listing to suspension of the seller’s account. When mega-listers are revealed, eBay seems to police them well.

But on the “Big A’s,” mega-listers are running wild and causing havoc. These giant used-book portals are clogged with millions of fake listings from dozens of mega-listers. It is increasingly difficult on these sites to find legitimate dealers with real books in stock.

Justin alone set up more than thirty seller names on Amazon, multiplying his fake inventory into more than nine million listings, and while it appears he’s no longer in the market, many other unscrupulous outfits are aggressively following his business plan. This exponential expansion of fake listings not only overloads the host site but pushes aside the listings of legitimate dealers who list only what they have in stock. Since 2004, I and others have identified over fifty mega-listers selling under more than 110 names on the “Big A’s.”

Yet another issue involves the status of truly rare books. Let’s say Justin’s fake inventory includes a particularly rare title. By listing it thirty times it appears that there are many, many copies available where there is actually only one—or perhaps none. This wildly distorts the perceived availability of that title and may even cause the price for that title to plummet. This form of fraud runs akin to maliciously causing another person’s property to drop in value.

Used books are like snowflakes: no two specimens are exactly the same. A highly valuable, extremely rare book may require hours of research on the part of the dealer in order to write a description that honestly represents the item’s physical features and flaws as well as its historical or literary significance. A mega-lister who copies that description is not only committing fraud but plagiarism as well.

How can one identify a mega-lister? It takes a little savvy and a little time but there are many ways.

Feedback. On sites where there is a feedback or reliability rating system (Amazon, Alibris, eBay), look for a measurable amount of negative feedback. Mega-listers tend to generate complaints from 5 to 10 percent of their customers, and sometimes their negative feedback is as high as 50 percent.
Boilerplate descriptions. Click on the link to view the seller’s inventory. If you see the same bland, uninformative description on every item, be wary of a mega-lister. Examples from actual mega-listers: “May have some underlining, highlighting, and/or margin notes.” “My copy of this item is in typical used, acceptable condition or better.” “Average condition for its age.” “Books are brand new and shipped directly from the publisher’s warehouse.”
No condition grades. Where the item’s condition would be described, there is instead a stream of inane marketing verbiage. Some actual examples: “All of our items ship within 24 hours!” “Over 2 million customers served!” “These are very good books from talented authors and would make a great books [sic] to read on those chilly winter days or as an addition to anyone’s littery [sic] collection.”
Every book under the sun. Start at a portal’s homepage and run a search for a few common terms, such as author: Jones, title: cooking. When you have a page of results, run your eye over the bookstore names that show up. When you see the same bookstore name over and over again, it is very likely you have found a mega-lister who has uploaded the BIP as their “inventory.”
Whacky prices. Set up a search as above and order the results by highest price first. The mega-listers tend to be the ones listing $3 paperbacks for $75 or $100. They will show up at the top of the list. Sometimes their insane prices are an artifact of how their software is programmed. I found one mega-lister with over 100,000 titles with prices all over the map but nothing between $40 and $180. Another had an apparent minimum price. I stopped looking after the first 300 items—they were all exactly $6.27.
Huge inventories. Imagine the space needed to store 100,000 books. When you see a seller with numbers that high, be wary. But please note that not every dealer with a huge inventory is a mega-lister. Zubal Books of Cleveland has over 150,000 items; Powell’s of Portland, Oregon has over 1,100,000; these are major operations that do indeed have large amounts of inventory.
Ask questions. One clever method is to contact the suspected mega-lister and ask a question that can’t be answered unless the book is in hand. “Does the book have any writing or underlining in it?” you might ask. Or make up a non-sequitur question to see if they lie. “Is this the edition with a preface by Sir Walter Scott?” If they cannot answer your question, or their answer is obviously phony, or you get no reply at all, be wary.

What can one do about mega-listers?

Keep track of them. When you spot a mega-lister, jot down their name(s) and keep the list where you won’t lose it.
Don’t sell to them. Don Gallagher of The Gallagher Collection, Denver, recently reported, “I had an order for one of our books that, alas, could not be found. Told the customer and he wrote back: ‘You’ve got to have it. I’ve already sold it on eBay.’ I went from miserable to ecstatic, and put the jackass on my ‘Don’t Sell To’ list.”
Report them. Your complaint to the host website might not get them booted right away, but it will be added to other complaints and at some point the sheer number of registered complaints will perhaps get them removed and may even encourage them to get out of the business.
Warn others. When you find a mega-lister, let your fellow bookdealers know. Customers too will appreciate being informed which dealers are, shall we say, a little shady.
Support sites that prohibit mega-listers. As much as possible, shop at the “small” multi-dealer sites which, in most cases, show a much greater willingness to police mega-listers and boot them when necessary.

Gwen Foss operates Alan’s Used Books out of Farmington, MI and can be contacted at http://www.tomfolio.com/shop/AlansUsedBooks.

Plagiarism and Online Bookselling

Stuart Manley and Steve Harter

You were warned about it at all levels of your education, and students are expelled from colleges and universities for doing it. You have read about it in the style manuals you used in your education or workplace. In recent years, you have probably heard about historians Doris Kearns Goodwin and Stephen Ambrose, who were shamed by accusations of plagiarism and proofs of their guilt. And there are many other cases of less famous academics, novelists, and other authors who have plagiarized and been caught, damaging their reputations irreparably.

Plagiarism is the representation of someone else’s words as one’s own. In the context of online bookselling, it is the copying of part or all of a book’s description from another bookseller or other source without attribution—thus representing it falsely as one’s own work. “Lying” and “stealing” are blunter ways of putting it.

One of the most disturbing aspects about discussions on plagiarism is the number of booksellers who do not see the problem. So let us make clear from the start that it is wrong. It is unethical, sloppy, lazy, a professional “no-no,” and sometimes illegal. And if you are an offender and none of that bothers you, it is also against the rules of all major bookselling sites and can lead to your entire catalogue being suspended or withdrawn permanently.

The exact wording varies from site to site, but this excerpt from the ABE Code of Conduct will suffice to demonstrate the nature of plagiarism: “Stealing bookseller information (such as descriptions, pictures, and images from other booksellers' listings).” As ABE makes clear, such violations will lead to suspension and, if the violations are not resolved, a permanent ban. Sites with high ethical standards will be reluctant to readmit such an offender and even large listing sites take a strong stand on plagiarism, once it has been pointed out.

Augustine Funnell of Fredericton, Canada has been plowing a lonely furrow against plagiarism for some time and is delighted to see IOBA looking into this matter. Gus suffers more than most—his descriptions are very good, the result of painstaking research and an encyclopedic knowledge, and are therefore more liable to be copied than other less erudite entries. Understandably, he gets—to use his own words—“pissed off!”

Then comes the next strange thing—when the offending booksellers are notified, instead of saying “Oops, sorry, I'll put it right,” many retort rudely or belligerently. Only when forced to comply by the threat of, or actual, suspension do they finally do something about it.

Some booksellers, of course, plagiarize from ignorance (though there really is little excuse for not having read the Code of Conduct when joining a site, or being unaware of the general concept of plagiarism), but most seem to do it out of sheer selfishness or laziness—a lamentable disregard for their bookselling colleagues, not to mention their own reputations as booksellers.

Most examples of plagiarism are found by accident when checking one’s own entries. Once a bookseller has found an example, it can be instructive to check on the offending dealer. Sometimes a serial plagiarist will be found, worth reporting to IOBA! One way to check for plagiarized listings is to examine some of the offender's listings and pick one of the lengthy descriptions. Copy a section of that description and paste it into the keyword panel of a suitable general bookselling site such as BookFinder, AddAll or ABE. If the description is stolen, it will soon show up in another bookseller’s listing.

It is, of course, perfectly legitimate to examine and learn from the descriptions of other booksellers as part of basic research on a book, but that should be the absolute limit. Once having crossed that line by copying and then pasting into one’s own entry, the offender is stealing and deserves any sanctions that come his way.

There are some gray areas:

How much copied text constitutes plagiarism? Must it be the entire description? A paragraph? What about a single sentence? A clever turn of phrase? A single, well-chosen word?

What about factual bibliographic information about the book being described, such as the list of contributors in an anthology, the list of titles in a set of books being offered, or a long title or subtitle?

What about copying a citation to a reference source if you haven’t seen it yourself?

What about ideas, such as X being one of the most important scholars in a given field?

How much paraphrasing is needed to “fix” plagiarism?

What about copying text from a dust jacket blurb, with or without attribution?

Is ignorance an acceptable excuse for plagiarism?

Common sense answers most of these questions but none of these issues will arise if a bookseller does not do any kind of “borrowing” from another bookseller’s listing or other source, without proper attribution. There are any number of reasons why one bookseller might copy part or all of another's description, but there isn't a single good one among them. Not even flattery or as a tribute to the original writer. Plagiarism is simply the brazen theft of the fruits of someone else's labour, and no different from one person scrimping and saving enough money to buy a car, only to have a stranger drive it away.

If a bookseller believes that plagiarism is inconsequential, then he must also believe that he himself has no right to anything he has worked for, or to which he has committed time and effort. And if a bookseller cares so little about the ethics of this profession, he is better off out of it, and the profession is most certainly better off without him. To paraphrase Gertrude Stein, “A thief is a thief is a thief.”

Stuart Manley operates Barter Books in Alnwick Station, Northumberland, England and can be contacted at http://www.barterbooks.co.uk.

Steve Harter operates Sweet Beagle Books out of Bloomington, IN and can be contacted at http://www.sweetbeagle.com.

Defining Mega-Listers

Shawn Purcell

Before we launch into a serious and sustained consideration of the relatively new practice of mega-listing, which is of grave concern to many online professional booksellers, we need to define our terms a bit.

Strictly speaking, mega-listers offer many books for sale through the major search services (ABE, Alibris, Amazon, etc.), through other portals, or through their own websites. To use a somewhat arbitrary but real number, 100,000 books constitutes “many” to most of us. That type of volume would represent a lot of effort and a lot of storage space. It goes without saying that most of us would rather own a catalog of 500 stellar titles or 5,000 fairly scarce sellable books than a huge warehouse full of bargain basement dreck that’s actually worth less, but the free market allows for many niches so that is well and fine.

This touches on another loaded term—“penny sellers.” Speaking for myself, I don’t have a huge problem with penny sellers. I don’t think they have ruined the profession, though they do erode confidence in online book buying if they do not describe their wares accurately, or if they are not upfront about the shipping costs, which is where they probably make a good portion of their money. On the other hand, the stakes are not high for most of the cheap and common titles they offer. Penny sellers came when they heard about the used book gold rush. They don’t find many nuggets, and often don’t know fool’s gold from the real thing, but somebody has to pan for siftings in book streams and cart away loads of Grishamite from the mine floor. If this keeps them out of McJobs and gives them more dignity, time to see their family, or whatever, more power to them. Many will learn the basics and proceed to elevate themselves. They have a right to undersell as long as they have the merch (and there is nothing funnier than a $5 bookseller complaining about a $1 bookseller). Penny sellers are a natural market force. The Glut, where everyone and their grandmother realized they could sell books online, begot the penny sellers, and the Glut itself was spawned by the confluence of huge amounts of unwanted books and the selling platform provided by Interloc, Bibliofind, and the 3As, where profits eventually trumped standards. Capitalism, baby.

I often think back on a copy of The Soong Sisters by Emily Hahn I picked up seven or eight years ago. They grew up to become Madame Chiang Kai-shek, Madame Kung, and Madame Sun Yat-sen. It was published in 1941 or so, with red cloth covers and nice photos. Anyway, there were already a small handful of copies on ABE so I ran it through eBay as a lark and realized around $35 on the transaction. Fast forward to today, where there are 117 listings on ABE alone, from $55 down to $2.75 (and no doubt it could be found cheaper somewhere else). Back on eBay, the only copy recently offered was started at a penny, with $4.00 for shipping (though it was for UPS second day air, so not much profit margin there). From the description, “Book is in great condition. Cover is in worn condition. Lots of great photo ilistrations. Book is in great condition overall. Pretty rare. I could’nt find one for sale anywhere on the web.” He could have looked just below the first search page at multiple cheap copies offered through eBay Stores. (It ended up selling for $8.63 on 9/3/2006, by the way, so eBay can still a good place to move books quicker and higher than the search services do.) I liked the nice profit from this moderately common title not that long ago, but that was then and this is now. Things change fast in the internet age. Many of us have altered our business models, shedding common titles or stocking them in bookstores or on antique center shelves at reasonable prices rather than carrying them online where they will languish in multiplicity. We can undercut everyone else online, but time is money, and we would rather be looking for or describing good books than wrapping $3 books.

This is all by way of explaining that “penny seller” is not necessarily a pejorative term—at least to some professional booksellers and to a great many buyers who appreciate low prices—and perhaps the term “mega-lister” should be accorded the same semantic leeway.

Many accomplished booksellers offer tens of thousands of titles. Some, like Rhett Moran of Gutenberg Holdings, list close to 100,000 titles online, with lots more sitting in storage. He acquired these himself over the years, he knows how to describe and ship them properly, and he can answer any questions about them. Giant physical stores like Powell’s offer millions of titles online, though there is not a lot of description (they have a 1941 Soong Sisters for $9.95 described as “worn condition or underlined”—my underlining), and they can’t always locate the desired out-of-print title. One would have to assume that most BOBs (big online bookstores) would not want to be called mega-listers.

There is a newer breed of online bookstore that seems firmly in the mega-lister camp but still maintains some tenuous semblance of traditional standards. They are a combination of penny seller and mega-lister that one colleague calls “book mills.”

Thriftbooks.com out of Seattle is a good example of a potentially above average mega-lister. They carry many cheap listings, they only flood the market with a quarter of a million books rather than millions, and they often even include such bibliographic information as the date. Thousands of titles are wildly overpriced, but tens of thousands more are very affordable. They claim some kind of mutually beneficial relationship with one or more local library systems, and their boilerplate claims “the HIGHEST star rating of ALL high-volume sellers!” This is obviously a place to go for reading copies rather than exquisitely bound volumes and creampuff first editions of highly important and sought-after works. They make a point of comparing many of their prices to the same title at Amazon (e.g., one cent vs. $7.99), though I don’t know how they keep that accurate or current. From the helpful FAQ page, “How do you sell your books for a penny? We are able to offer low prices because we leverage both our proprietary technology and our partnerships with many large sources of used books including book stores, wholesalers, and publishing houses.” Fair enough. (I had some FAQs of my own about their operation, but Thriftbooks did not get back to me, so this estimation might be a little off one way or the other.) They use some skimpy and boilerplate description, but for reading copies of dirt cheap books with reasonable shipping rates, that is not such a major concern. On the pricier side, I wanted to know more about the condition of The Postal History and Stamps of Bermuda by M. H. Ludington, priced at $150, which is described as “Good. Good.” Does the second Good mean it has a dust jacket? Their response reads, “Each book is individually rated by a Thrift Books staff member. Below are the different ratings and definitions;” and “Good” is defined as, “A copy that has been read, but remains in clean condition. All pages are intact, and the cover is intact. The spine may show signs of wear. Pages can include limited notes and highlighting.” So they really couldn’t be bothered to provide more than that generic description. A bookseller who seems to like books offers this fairly scarce title for the same price, and it is rated “Very Good” with details, so that would have been the logical choice in those cases where you are lucky enough to have a choice. From Thriftbooks’ About Us page, they say they hold over 250,000 titles “in stock.” They also claim to be adding 10,000 new titles a day, though it isn’t clear whether they mean to the website or into the building, or maybe they both buy and sell 10,000 a day so the base number stays at around 250,000. At any rate, and here is the biggest distinction of all—they seem to actually own at least some of the titles in question, and they seem to be stored on premises they own, lease, or rent. Yes, Virginia, some mega-listers don’t physically own the stock they list for sale. We are getting used to this bizarre idea, but it’s still shocking when you think about it.

The BOBs and an okay book mill or three are the last outposts of civilization. After that we run into a whole stratum of mega-listers that are high on volume and short on standards. New book dealers who list the entire catalogs of various publishers and distributors at an often indecent markup; page hogging remainders dealers who offer multiple copies of palletized titles they hold; volume processors of ex-library acquisitions, charity works, and bulk donations; and scavengers who scrape all the titles from one site and list them on another. Super mega-listers, like black holes, suck it all in.

This would all be okay of course if they all fought it out on some giant website where everyone knows what the deal is, but they have invaded once-pure book search services such as ABE and Alibris like some noxious species of plant or insect. (Many Amazon sellers are upset too, but this kind of comes with the jungle that is Amazon.) The 2As know that customers respond to branding and prefer one-stop shopping, but they should have worked out a better way for well-behaved new booksellers and used/out-of-print/antiquarian booksellers to co-exist without all the duplication and duplicity, even if it meant less income for them. Rare book tabs on the home page or other anemic sops are not the answer. We were there first, and we gave them life. We need the 2As at the moment, but surely they realize that given the current situation many of us would leave in a heartbeat if one of the independents would just reach critical mass (as in lots of sellers and lots of eyeballs).

But back to the semantic task at hand. “Mega-lister” is probably the best term to use, because the prefix mega means large, and it’s the large ones that hurt us the most. This puts penny seller mega-listers (PSMs) with their own stock in the same tent as data miner mega-listers (DMMs). There are at least three types of data miners. Those that sell new books they don’t own (and often can’t provide) from distributor’s catalogs; those that put up huge lists of books they don’t own (and often can’t provide) from other types of sources; and those phantom listers that specifically target the catalogs of other booksellers with actual books. Most DMMs (also known as aggregators and data consolidators) never handle any books themselves. You order through the 3As, he gets paid, he orders the book through the distributor, the distributor ships it to you, and the distributor bills him for a much lower amount than you paid him to begin with. Some mega-listers ply their trade internationally, where unsuspecting buyers may not be aware of ABE and Alibris. To complicate matters, mega-listers and data miners often do some of both. They share several characteristics in addition to massive size, like poor descriptions and inane boilerplate, so one name fits them all pretty well. Eskimos have many names for pure snow but only one for yellow snow. If mega-listers are also good booksellers who are not sacrificing standards for profits, they will achieve customer satisfaction, some peer acceptance, and business success. That said, however, mega-lister nomenclature does demand a handy title for the worst offenders. Let us further define the “malicious mega-lister,” then, as distinct from somewhat more benign forms of this practice. Their sins against our noble profession are listed in order of magnitude.

-MMs who scrape listings from actual booksellers and offer them up as their own at higher prices. They can’t stand by the book’s description because they did not create it, and most would probably be incapable of doing so with important titles anyway. They can’t easily answer questions about their phantom listings without contacting the actual bookseller and pretending they are the customer. They rely on drop-shipping by the actual owner, and cannot guarantee proper service in this area either. (As an aside, isn’t it annoying how we even do the wrapping and shipping for these leeches?) They can’t always insure availability, particularly when the order is finalized directly through one of the search services, and that means dashed hopes and the pursuit of refunds. This is all quite distinct from traditional book search services that charge a modest fee for locating wants. The markups many malicious mega-listers charge for a brief stint as middle man are totally outrageous. Selling items you don’t actually own is blatant misrepresentation at the very least. It’s the kind of thing a good federal agency or state attorney general should look into. The situation is different with newer books that they pretend to own but actually order from the distributor, though this can also be problematic for the would-be customer in terms of accurate bibliographic description, stockouts, and high markups.

-MMs steal the hard work of actual professional booksellers who have found, researched, described, priced, and housed these books. They do this in a major way by lifting descriptions in their entirety, which is nothing short of plagiarism, and they are quick to pilfer images as well. This practice is falling by the wayside quite a bit, due to threats of legal action embedded right in the original descriptions, by altercations they have had with angry booksellers, and by the possibility of getting kicked off the search services. It is probably more common now among rogue operators selling single books they actually don’t own on eBay than it is among large established businesses on the 3As, although in some cases this might be one of their off-the-shelf operations. Have malicious mega-listers stopped stealing our hard work and merchandise on the 3As, or have they figured out less obvious ways to present phantom listings they don’t actually own by simply stripping them of unique descriptions and identifiers?

-MMs clog the search service results. This can be confusing and maddening to customers looking for a desired title. It is also a real pain in the butt for true booksellers and researchers, and the ripple effects include virtually useless wants matching and meta-search engine results (as in BookFinder and AddAll). Piling on so many wild price variations and multiple listings of the exact same book with questionable ISBNs and misleading stock images is sure to bury legitimate offerings and sure to add to an erosion of confidence in online book buying.

-MMs have an unfair pricing advantage over small booksellers. Most publishers and distributors don’t sell directly on the 3As because they know the booksellers who support them would complain. Instead, they enter into agreements with mega-listers who have few if any inbound or outbound shipping, inventory, customer service, or other overhead costs. They load entire databases to the web without checking against actual distributor inventories and delivery schedules. Once in this lawless zone, they can underprice and overprice at the same time, casting gill-nets at will and pulling in many of the available fish. Small publishers suffer when most sales are driven through Amazon, Baker & Taylor, or Ingram with their large discounts, because sales from their own websites fall off. And many mega-listers designate new books as used/rare/out-of-print on such sites as Amazon at two or three times retail when they are still in print and available directly from the publisher. In a more recent development, dubious charity mega-listers cut to the front of the line on the supply side, and undercut those of us who have to pay for our stock on the demand side.

-MMs data mine. They use software programs to do the listing work for them. Data mining repeats erroneous bibliographic information, publisher catalog data mining lists many books that are no longer available, it causes too many listings to read the same way, and it often employs stock photos that are really only acceptable for new publications. It is virtually impossible to data mine in a responsible manner, as you would have to personally check thousands of listings for availability, etc.

-MMs throw all price guidelines out of whack with a blizzard of confusing and conflicting information. This lines their pockets, but it often reduces the value of our property, wastes everyone’s time, and drives away paying customers.

-MMs provide poor customer service. They unite a good number of books with a good number of customers for a hidden surcharge, and often nobody is the wiser, but the very nature of their operation precludes a high degree of honesty and satisfaction. These bottom two attributes were around before mega-listing on the internet, by the way, but they are readily identifiable aspects of it. I have some questions about this cyberpiracy that are perhaps rhetorical. First of all, am I missing something? Do MMs do anything that is good for anyone other than themselves and their hosts? And what about the major search services? ABE, for example, used to outlaw this activity before May, 2004. Does the increased income justify sacrificing standards, dealing with complaints, and denigrating the site? (It must, of course, so that one isn’t so rhetorical.) Should we just leave them in disgust and set up our stores on sites most book buyers are oblivious to? Do ABE and Alibris feel they would fall behind if either did the right thing here and reined in malicious mega-listers? Is “malicious” even a good word to use, or is there a better appellation for this new creature in our midst that would serve to differentiate between big online bookstores, relatively well-meaning cheap book mills, and the bad kind of mega-listers? Malice means “desire to harm others or to tease.” They don’t exactly desire to harm us, but they don’t seem to lose sleep over it either. And tease may be a stretch, but they are sure in our face as well as in our pockets, and it’s time somebody did something about it.

I must confess that I do not totally understand how malicious mega-listers ply their trade. It would be interesting if a reformed employee of one of these outfits would come forward and write a book about it or something, or perhaps trial transcripts would reveal the same secrets. The technical details of data mining; the ins and outs of fooling honest booksellers; clashes with same; profiles of customers who pay ten times more because they didn’t know any better; certain understandings they have reached with the search services, including better deals on fees and commissions; the hellishness of their daily email and phone work trying to reconcile canceled orders and explain themselves to disappointed customers. Great stuff, though it doesn’t make up for the loss of our verdant fields with maybe three or four listings of a rare book (remember that dreamtime?) that are now clogged with countless rip-off mutations, phantom titles and PODs (another serious issue) like bodies amid broken down war machines on a bizarre and confusing battlefield, with camp follower penny sellers bringing up the rear, dark clouds and vultures above, and the 3As generals observing it all from a safe hilltop, though General Amazon can be partly excused because he never claimed to be an antiquarian and out-of-print bookseller to begin with.

It seems too late for major reform. The 2As Amazon wannabes are liking huge amounts of newer books and wildly overpriced older books better, regardless of how they spin it. We do not necessarily believe that quality listings and services will always win the day, for example, as ABE and Alibris are now saying, because mega-listers are not stupid and they aren’t hanging around and multiplying for nothing. ABE and Alibris can’t really afford to provide significant relief for their original “partners” by drastically curtailing mega-listing without hurting the bottom line. They say they have plans to deal with the scourge by limiting listings to two copies only of books which are substantially the same (i.e., new books), by introducing seller ratings , etc., but we remain skeptical. What I learned in preparing this article is that they understand why we don’t like page hogging, but the new owners have either forgotten or never fully understood the whole traditional bookselling standards thing. Data miner mega-listers will still be free to list millions of books that are not available anywhere; data thieves can still scrape our listings for inflated prices as long as they are not extremely obvious about it; many older books will continue to be described in highly misleading and substandard ways; many customers will be left bewildered, disappointed, or cheated; most good booksellers will remain frustrated; and the venture capitalists will continue to extract profits while grooming these properties for virtually inevitable takeover by even bigger corporations.

The average ABAA bookseller, somewhat above the fray to begin with by virtue of superior stock, is probably happier now that blatantly pirated descriptions of truly rare books are on the wane. The high fees and commissions they generate give them some clout, which is why Alibris has been courting them. The average IOBA or unrepresented bookseller, squeezed by penny sellers from one end and ruthless mega-listers from the other, are pretty close to the bottom of the totem pole at the present time. ABE or Alibris could make a bold move by firmly re-establishing itself as the premier site for used/out-of-print/antiquarian books. This could be accomplished by consistently expelling bad booksellers and by limiting inventory to, say, 100,000 titles per bookseller, where anything over that would require review. They could also start charging significantly more for listing over 150,000 or 200,000 titles rather than capping the high end of the sliding fee. They could roll back a few other hurtful loss of control policies, downsize a bit, still make good enough livings, and do right by the profession. Come home, ABE or Alibris. Become the site of choice for real booksellers and their happy customers. All is forgiven.

Since that is a pipe dream, you know the drill. Work hard; improve your stock; improve your knowledge; set up your own website; list on clean independent sites like Biblio.com, TomFolio.com, and IOBAbooks.com; try lucrative venues like eBay; ease into book shows and antique centers; join trade associations like the ABAA, ILAB, and IOBA; and work toward a better future.

Shawn Purcell operates Balopticon Books & Ephemera and can be contacted at http://www.balopticon.com.

Big and Online

This is a look at some indisputably large (as in over half a million titles) online book stores that sell on Abebooks.com. It reports on the number of listings; the Book Condition field and other noteworthy findings for the thirty most expensive and thirty least expensive listings; whether or not they provide dates and publishers in that group of listings; and the most highly priced Ernest Hemingway title. This is obviously not an exhaustive or scientific survey, but the findings are accurate as of late August, 2006. It would be more informative if it employed a larger checklist that included antiquarian and non-fiction titles; and one would want to look at other venues as well. You would have to go to even greater lengths to see if they actually own these books, or if they simply order from a distributor or arrange for drop-shipping from other booksellers. Omitting such information as the date and publisher and failing to cite the correct title make it difficult to compare the listing with other offerings. A highest price Hemingway search is one way of determining markup, and of ascertaining if these book stores handle older books or if they just deal in new stock. I have cited some freakishly high prices in the top thirty that can perhaps be blamed on automated pricing systems, but if they have the book and it is ordered, wouldn’t they bill you for that amount just the same? Another way to look at this is how professional booksellers and the book buying public would react to somebody setting up at a book fair with such ludicrous prices, which extend deep into the catalogs in most cases. Visit these sites yourself in order to form your own impressions and come to your own conclusions.

-A1Books of Netcong, NJ. 1,195,112 listings. There is no Book Condition field at all. There are two variant boilerplate descriptions in the Book Description field that read, “Brand new item. Over 3.5 million customers served. Order now. Selling online since 1995. Few left in stock - order soon,” and “May contain remainder marks. Over 2 million customers served. Order now. Selling books online since 1995. Few left in stock - order soon.” Lists AIDS in America by Charles H. Russell at $6,732.89. Does not provide dates and publishers.

49 listings for Ernest Hemingway, the most expensive of which is Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (Modern Critical Interpretations) at $53.40. No date or publisher given, and does not specify binding. The title they give is absurd, and the ISBN and stock image provided do not clearly indicate if this was published by Chelsea House in 1987, Roundhouse in 1998, or what.

-Aaron Brown of Corpus Christi, TX. 1,973,171 listings. Book Condition description for all sixty is “Acceptable,” but there are many “possibly” and “could have” type boilerplate variations in the Details field, along with such reassurances as “All pages together and are readable,” “May be similiar or identical to the edition published under the ISBN number of...,” and “Shape: 2 to 3 of 5 stars.” Most of the book stores on this list start pricing at $1, but Aaron Brown’s lowest price is $25.12 for Dream Baby by Ann Evans. All dates have the “on or around” preamble, and he (?) does not provide publishers.

219 listings for Ernest Hemingway, the most expensive of which is A Farewell to Arms at $11,354.57. “May have been published on or around: 1929.” “My copy of this item is in used, acceptable condition or better.” On 8/29/2006 I asked, “Can you tell me more about this book? Is that the correct price?” No response.

-Better World Books of Mishawaka, IN. 686,798 listings. Book Condition descriptions include various boilerplates such as “Great condition for a used book!,” “Book in almost Brand New condition,” and “Shows definite wear, and perhaps considerable marking on inside.” No real grading specifics in the top thirty listings. (They do have a related enterprise called Better World Books - Collectibles that lists high end items professionally described.) Lots of other boilerplate about their policies, including “Fast shipping, best return policy, and social responsibility put Better World Books above the rest.” Above the rest of other booksellers, other charities, or what? Within this group, 32 sales benefit “Books for Africa!,” and the other 28 benefit 17 different efforts all over the US. Their website explains how they say this for-profit charity works. A Wikipedia entry on BWB casts some doubt. Unusual listings on the high end, some of which only Livrenoir shows, like Texas Police Officer (7th Edition) at $2,850.20. Teach Yourself Windows 95 is listed at $2,156.16 and $1,962.10, with the same inventory number. Provides the publisher, but not the date.

44 listings for Ernest Hemingway, the most expensive of which is The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories at $87.73. Specifies Charles Scribner's Sons as the publisher but no date.

-Books2Anywhere.com of Fairford, UK. 1,494,290 listings. There is no Book Condition field at all. Boilerplate for all reads, “Check out our low worldwide delivery costs! Please note: we only take orders through ABE - NOT DIRECT!” Provides dates and publishers.

135 listings for Ernest Hemingway, the most expensive of which is Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917-1961 at $60.11.

-Caiman of Miami, FL. 1,179,329 listings. The Book Condition description for all sixty is “New.” Does not provide date, publisher, or a single word about the book other than the ISBN.

97 listings for Ernest Hemingway, the most expensive of which is MCI—Sun Also Rises at $51.34. Gives ISBN and stock photo only.

-Limelight Bookshop of New York, NY. 729,412 listings. The Book Condition description for all sixty is “New. New.” Most of the top thirty lists of the really large sellers are populated with multi-volume scientific works, but quite a few at the top here are single volumes like the Oxbridge Directory of Newsletters 2005 and Volume 4 of the Encyclopedia of Human Nutrition, both listed at $2,375.15. Provides dates and publishers.

73 listings for Ernest Hemingway, the most expensive of which is Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917-1961 at $135.74. A little hard to tell if this is hardcover or not.

-Livrenoir of Brooklyn, NY. 3,840,327 listings. [This number jumped to 4, 498,534 since this article was prepared just a couple of weeks ago!] Only two of sixty Book Condition descriptions use more than three words. A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare in Near Fine condition listed at $8,186.56 gives Reprint Services Corp as the publisher and 1871 as the publication date, with no other information whatsoever other than “quarto” and the ISBN. Provides dates and publishers.

“Livrenoir” translates to “black book,” as in The Black Book of Boobytraps by Lyle Whitney (1996). Coincidentally, Livrenoir holds the only copy of this title for sale, according to BookFinder and AddAll, and it is priced at $72.49. That’s a good deal for an otherwise unlisted title. You could make a nice profit on it (though if it’s about deadly traps rather than putting a bucket of water over the door or something, keep the War Against Terrorism in mind). I enquired about availability through the ABE form on the evening of 8/27/2006. This quick response came the following day. “I am afraid we do not keep our inventory at hand. It is located in separate warehouses, therefore it is impossible for me to check specifics on any particular title. I am sorry I cannot be of assistance with your inquiry. Let me know if I can help you with anything else.” Presumably you would get the same response if you called. So you really have to order it to find out, which I did this same day, again through ABE and with special instructions to please pack carefully. Searching WorldCat for this extremely rare title while waiting for my package to arrive, only three repositories hold it. The Ellsworth Air Force Base Library in South Dakota, the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency in Virginia, and the Library of Congress. Is it possible to scrape listings from the good old Library of Congress, or did he just buy this at a book fair or something? I got some bad news from Livrenoir the evening of 9/2/2006. “We're sorry, but this title sold earlier on another site and is therefore no longer available. Please accept our apologies for the inconvenience this cancellation must have caused.” And shortly after that ABE officially reiterated the reason for cancellation, ending with, “We hope you will visit abebooks.com again in the future.”

330 listings for Ernest Hemingway, the most expensive of which is Winner Take Nothing (Scribner, 1933) at $487.27. There is no further description other than the ISBN, “Very Good,” and a stock photo.

-Papamedia.com of Ithaca, NY. 1,373,417 listings. The Book Condition description for all sixty is “Brand new, Perfect condition.” There are two $75,000.95 paperbacks at the top, but that’s probably a boo-boo, because it quickly settles down into the familiar $16,500 range for multi-volume sets. They listed over 3,300,000 titles on ABE not that long ago, but a couple weeks after this article was prepared it has plummeted to 363,498 titles from the figure above, perhaps due to the new “two substantially the same titles only” policy, so changes are afoot. Does not provide dates and publishers.

64 listings for Ernest Hemingway, the most expensive of which is Ernest Hemingway’s: A Farewell to Arms (Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations) at $67.95. No date or publisher given. If the real Papa could see that mangled title he would kick some colon.

-Paperbackshop-US of Elk Grove Village, IL. 616,803 listings. There is no Book Condition field at all. Boilerplate for all sixty reads, “Check out our great rate for multiple orders - you won't be disappointed!” Provides dates and publishers.

43 listings for Ernest Hemingway, the most expensive of which is the popular Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917-1961 at $43.78. No word on the binding.

-Quartermelon of Stratford-Upon-Avon, UK. 1,126,087 listings. Book Condition descriptions all read, “BRAND NEW” or “BRAND NEW \N. \N. \N. (\N) \N (\N),” with “PAPERBACK” or “MASS MARKET” added to some of the bottom thirty. They appear to be based in the U.K. but they say books ship from the U.S. Provides dates and publishers.

80 listings for Ernest Hemingway. Assuming a 1997 edition of A Farewell to Arms priced at $4,859.63 is a typo or something, the most expensive is Green Hills of Africa (1998) at $233.19. I am pretty sure that when ABE first started, they (or perhaps it was BookFinder or Bibliofind) used Green Hills of Africa as a sample search form title, to be used together with the author’s name. The results back then were Hemingwayesque in their directness and simplicity.

Mega-Lister Questionnaire

Short identical questionnaires were sent to Abebooks, Alibris, and Amazon, and they were kind enough to reply. A modified version was sent to the independent meta-search service AddALL, which did not respond.

Abebooks Mega-Lister Questionnaire

1. How does Abebooks define mega-listers, and do you differentiate between categories of mega-listers?

The terms we use to describe booksellers usually relate to the inventory they carry such as rare and antiquarian dealers, used booksellers and textbook specialists. Booksellers use the term, mega-lister, but we don’t use it internally. We believe they are usually referring to booksellers with a high number of listings or booksellers that are ‘page-hogging.’ ‘Mega-lister’ is a very broad term and we prefer to be more specific.

2. What are the main customer and bookseller complaints about mega-listers?

Both buyers and sellers have concerns about the issue of so-called ‘page-hogging’ where sellers list multiple copies of the same book. It makes buying and selling books much harder. We share those concerns. On 7 July 2006, Abebooks introduced a new policy limiting multiple copies of books that are materially the same to two. In conjunction with the new policy:

We are introducing a quantity field to our inventory management systems. It is already available to booksellers with custom conversions or who use our online listings manager, and the upcoming 3.0 version of HomeBase will have it as well;
Quantity will also be added to the search results and the shopping basket;
We have started to enforce the new multiple listings policy but will stringently enforce it when all the tools, such as the quantity field in inventory management systems and quantity in search results, are in place for booksellers to offer multiple copies without resorting to ‘page-hogging’ tactics.

3. Some mega-listers and data thieves steal detailed descriptions of unique and expensive books they obviously don’t own themselves, dramatically marking up prices and then arranging for drop-shipping from the real bookseller after the sale. Has Abebooks been able to cut back on this practice, and if so, how?

When we hear of one bookseller ‘stealing’ book descriptions from another bookseller in order to drop-ship, we investigate and remove the listings if proven.

Booksellers can only list books that they are legally entitled to sell but those books do not have to be in their physical possession. Booksellers can list books supplied directly to a customer from a distributor but they cannot list books owned by another bookseller.

4. Have some of these mega-listers continued that practice and avoided detection by simply removing all unique descriptions and identifiers from their phantom listings?

It can be very difficult to prove or disprove this practice. However, books without unique descriptions are unlikely to sell so the bookseller is unlikely to profit from such actions.

5. What about mega-listers who clog search results with page after page of poorly described, unavailable, and bizarrely priced multiple listings; and who otherwise erode traditional bookselling standards in too many ways to list here? Do you have any future plans to curb or remove Abebooks mega-listers, or to improve the general quality of your bookseller listings?

We are very keen to encourage booksellers to list detailed and informative book descriptions. Therefore we plan to introduce new search refinements to the search results to make it easier for buyers to find exactly the book they want. Booksellers who don’t take advantage of these refinements are less likely to appear in refined results.

In the future, we intend to introduce bookseller ratings and we believe this will improve availability of books and fulfillment of orders. The introduction of quantity and better inventory management tools are all designed to improve our listings.

We are always keen to improve the quality of the listings but it’s important to note that booksellers who offer detailed and informative descriptions, along with an image, win sales – booksellers with poor listings do not.

Alibris Mega-Lister Questionnaire

How does Alibris define mega-listers, and do you differentiate between categories of mega-listers?

What are the main customer and bookseller complaints about mega-listers?

Some mega-listers and data thieves steal detailed descriptions of unique and expensive books they obviously don’t own themselves, dramatically marking up prices and then arranging for drop-shipping from the real bookseller after the sale. Has Alibris been able to cut back on this practice, and if so, how?

Have some of these mega-listers continued that practice and avoided detection by simply removing all unique descriptions and identifiers from their phantom listings?

What about mega-sellers who clog search results with page after page of poorly described, unavailable, and bizarrely priced multiple listings; and who otherwise erode traditional bookselling standards in too many ways to list here? Do you have any future plans to curb or remove Alibris mega-listers, or to improve the general quality of your bookseller listings?

[Alibris did not answer by the numbers, so their blanket response follows.]

We don’t generally use the term, but an easy definition of a ‘mega-lister’ would be a seller who maintains over 100,000 items in their online inventory.

Regardless of inventory level, we’ve demonstrated over time that we hold all sellers to the same performance standards. If they are unable to provide the level of professional service required, they will be removed from our network. Alibris has removed sellers with inventory in excess of 250,000 items, but has also removed those with vastly smaller inventory for the same reasons.

Many sellers who fall into the above definition of ‘mega-lister’ are well regarded sellers within the industry. Others are not. We believe there is room for any seller on Alibris if they uphold the levels of quality and professionalism we seek to maintain. Those who don’t are dealt with swiftly.

Due to our shipping reimbursement and minimum price of $2.95, we have very few issues with ‘penny sellers’ who seek to make the bulk of their profits on shipping. In addition, our search presentation makes it difficult to clog search results. However, when identified, we’ll counsel sellers – regardless of size – on using our quantity field. We’re also looking at ways of ‘rolling-up’ duplicate listings in order to make our search work even better.

Alibris is concerned about sellers who copy other bookseller’s inventory and list it as their own. We have internal mechanisms which help us identify these sellers, whom we refer to as Spiders. Once identified they either delete the offending inventory or are removed from the Alibris network. There are also a handful of known Spiders who are not welcome at Alibris.

Alibris is committed to being the premiere online destination for the best independent sellers from around the world. We understand that we'll thrive not on the quantity but on the quality of our seller network.

Amazon Mega-Lister Questionnaire

How does Amazon define mega-listers, and do you differentiate between categories of mega-listers?

What are the main customer and bookseller complaints about mega-listers?

Some mega-listers and data thieves steal detailed descriptions of unique and expensive books they obviously don’t own themselves, dramatically marking up prices and then arranging for drop-shipping from the real bookseller after the sale. Has Amazon been able to cut back on this practice, and if so, how?

Have some of these mega-listers continued that practice and avoided detection by simply removing all unique descriptions and identifiers from their phantom listings?

What about mega-sellers who clog search results with page after page of poorly described, unavailable, and bizarrely priced multiple listings; and who otherwise erode traditional bookselling standards in too many ways to list here? Do you have any future plans to curb or remove Amazon mega-listers, or to improve the general quality of your bookseller listings?

Not sure what we have to do with this at all so we'll pass on this. Thanks.

An Interview with Mike Goodenough

-Tell us a little about yourself.

My passion for paper started in the school playground, swapping comics, cigarette cards and later, 'naughty' postcards. In the mid 1960s, swathes of houses in my neighbourhood were being bulldozed to accommodate the motorcar, and these abandoned homes gave up all kinds of printed treasures. Along with the discarded books there were magazines, old documents, photographs, cigarette cards—in fact ephemera of every kind. As a teenager I found books both fascinating and frustrating (I’m mildly Dyslexic) but ephemera opened a window on the past for me, and made it real.

On leaving school I quickly discovered that I was unfit for conventional employment, and have contrived to avoid a proper job ever since. I’ve been a boatman, footman, building restorer, gardener, antique dealer, window cleaner… Alongside bookdealing—which I’ve done for more than a quarter of a century—I’ve been equally active as a campaigner for historic building preservation, an environmental troublemaker, and latterly, a founder and director of a charitable community development trust.

-What led to your interest in antiquarian bookselling?

I’ve never been interested in antiquarian bookselling—I’m a bookdealer. I buy and sell books for a living. Old books, used books, new books—but always I hope—interesting books. I started selling them because I had lots and needed money. And it was very easy to turn books into money in the 1980’s.

-How did you learn the trade?

By doing it. Very few of the dealers I know have had any kind of training, let alone a formal apprenticeship. But I don’t really think you can learn to be a bookdealer, you just are one. We’re book junkies and we deal to support our habits. Of course, you need to learn a great deal about all sorts of things in order to stand any chance of being a successful bookdealer.

-You seem to be in an especially idyllic corner of England if the official tourism website at Stroud District Tourism is any indication. Tell us all about Inprint, your charming book store.

It is a lovely and fascinating The Skelly

place to live, but Stroud used to be an industrial town and thirty years ago was on its knees. We settled here with a bunch of other hippies because at the time it was an extraordinary backwater, more like Southern Ireland than Ye Olde Cotteswolds.

Opening the shop was an act of commitment to the town and it provided a base from which to run various campaigns against the wanton destruction of its architectural heritage and social fabric. Times have changed but I hope the shop still excites people’s interest and serves some of their needs.

When we opened we stocked what turned up, but the shop stock has over time become strongly arts based, and reflects the subjects we enjoy, and hopefully, know something about. We still try to offer books at every price from 50p to many hundreds, and sometimes, thousands of pounds. I hope you can get some impression of the shop from visiting its web page [see link at the bottom].

-You have been at the same location in Stroud for over twenty-five years. How have things changed in terms of clientele, buying patterns, etc.?

What hasn’t changed? In the early years we reckoned to pay all our overheads from the paperback sales — it wasn’t unusual for some customers to buy up to ten novels a week! Charity shops cut deeply into paperback sales, although we are now undercutting their prices by selling fiction in the covered boxes outside.

We’ve seen huge growth in book collecting over the past twenty-five years, much of it in subject areas that interested me. Initially we stocked a lot of material largely overlooked by an older generation of dealers and collectors—pulp fiction, SF, popular entertainment, old magazines and ephemera were main stays.

I suppose the majority of our stock still reflects popular culture, particularly the visual and performing arts—although we have always said that we try to stock the books our customers tell us they want to buy. For many years we ran a book finding service which gave us valuable insights into our customer’s interests and the often-surprising rarities they were looking for.

Along with most other secondhand bookshops, we have been struggling to cope with the seismic effects the internet has had on bookshop trade. Joy (my wife and more recently business partner) is bringing a fresh eye to the shop after years of running our book search, and we are both spending more time in the shop dealing with customers. On a good day we now sell two or three times the number of books from our window displays than from the internet sites we list on. And weather permitting, there are always people searching for bargains in boxes on the pavement.

The internet has hugely increased the average person’s awareness of out-of-print books, and many of these newly-aware, potential customers, are walking past our door. All we have to do is lure them in…

-What aspects of maintaining a physical bookstore are the most problematic?

Simply achieving a turnover that’s sufficient to pay the ever-increasing bills. Secondhand bookshops by their very nature have a fairly low ceiling on the turnover that they can realistically generate. Increasingly this means that they are being priced off the High Street.

-What are some of the most unusual things that ever happened in your shop?

A gas company van crashing into the front Inprint Greenery

window was probably the least expected! We boarded up and donned WW2 gas masks and helmets (recently acquired from a clearance) and soldiered on. I’ve always been inclined to see bookselling as theatre and for years my alter ego—a life-size cardboard skeleton—featured in a succession of elaborate themed windows. I think my favorite was a cut-price book window, in which The Skelly cut up books with a bow saw. And “Singing in the Rain” was memorable, but sadly unrecorded. It’s all rather tame and middle-aged these days—but we do have a forest of plants hanging from the ceiling, which is quite unusual.

-In general terms, who are some of your favorite customers, past or present, and why?

My favourite customers? The ones who save a quiet day, or week, with their purchases and all those who say “what a wonderful shop”—and then buy something!

-Celebrity customers?

Bob Geldolf might have become a customer if my wife hadn’t asked him to leave for talking very loudly into a mobile phone. We live in something of a royal ghetto, so some of the more minor ones use the shop. And, as we also live in “Cider with Rosie country”, Laurie Lee is a much-missed customer. Unlike some celebrities he understood that the principle reason for visiting a bookshop was to buy books.

-Cinema and entertainment seem to be your main specialty? How did you get into that?

It was personal interest. Twenty-five years ago it was close to impossible to find books on these subjects out here in the sticks, so I set about trying to make it easier.

-Here’s one from left field, as we say in the states. What is your all-time favorite movie?

Bomber and Paganini. Made in Germany in the mid-70s, it’s a very black comedy about a couple of inept petty criminals who hate each other, but are forced by circumstance into mutual dependence. If anyone can supply the English subtitled version, on any format, I will pay handsomely.

-How do you acquire most of your stock?

Walk ins, other bookshops, flea markets, book fairs, auctions, ebay, car boot sales, internet databases, skips—anywhere and everywhere. You can still find lots of interesting books if you’re prepared to look. And of course it helps that I’m a compulsive book buyer.

-How do you keep ahead of the perennial space problem?

By selling as many books as we buy, and only buying those we know will sell. If books are hanging around it’s usually because they’re too expensive, and ours is a tiny shop so we have to be ruthless.

-Are all of your internet listings available right there in the shop, or are they stored offsite to keep them in the described condition or to simplify inventory management?

A lot of our shop stock is listed on the internet. I’ve never understood dealers who kept their internet or book fair stock separate—don’t they want prospective customers to see their better books? Of course it raises stock control issues, but our fulfillment rate rarely falls below 90%, and as we cover most dust wrappers, and are assiduous about shelving, we rarely have problems.

-What is your most memorable purchase?

A recent memorable purchase was an enormous folio volume entitled: Mike and His Great Orpheus Pavement Book

An Account of Roman Antiquities Discovered at Woodchester in the County of Gloucester. It records the discovery of the Great Orpheus Pavement—the largest surviving mosaic in Northern Europe—and was published in 1797. Woodchester is just a few miles up the road and the book’s owner had helped uncover the pavement, for what was to be the last time in 1973, when 141,000 visitors flocked to it. It was his hope that this beautiful work of art and scholarship would stay in the Stroud Valleys, where I’m pleased to say I was able to find it a new home. It’s difficult to put into words the thrill of opening such a book for the first time, but maybe the accompanying photo will help?

-Tell us about the proverbial one that got away?

The original artwork for the frontispiece of Mervyn Peake's Titus Alone, a pristine first of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe … I could go on … and on.

-It would take a separate interview to cover TheBookGuide, which is your online guide to sources of secondhand and antiquarian books in the U.K. In addition to listing and describing hundreds of book stores, you also provide current information about fairs and auctions, you dispense informative news stories relating to our profession, and you provide all types of interesting content. While this is obviously a labor of love, it seems very labor intensive, and on behalf of the profession I would like to thank you for the effort and the contribution.

What can I say? It is a labour of love, but then I always seem to have worked for love rather than money. :)

-I especially enjoyed your Drif page. For those who have not heard about this caustic U.K. book store reviewer, check it out from TheBookGuide home page. You are carrying on his work, in a more polite fashion, with great concern for the quality and survival of physical bookstores. Your first couple of Drif reviews were not so hot. “I still remember our review in the first guide: ... ‘UNR (unreliable opening times) ... hippyish bookshop with bizarre prices’. It was a relief to have at least become REL (reliable) in the next edition but I aspired to the accolade ‘WAD’ (worth a detour).” This Drif review from the Inprint “Shop” page must be more recent. “Immensely attractive style ... a lovely atmosphere ... it looks like something out of a film: The Bookman of Alcatraz!”

So, some Drif questions. Do you remember him coming to your shop any of these times? Did he collect anything himself, or was it all buy low and sell high? Any favorite Drif anecdotes, and what ever happened to him?

I didn’t know Drif, but met him a couple of times in our shop and occasionally bumped into him in others. I think he warmed to us when his request for anything on necrophilia, or children’s books featuring frogs, resulted in me selling him both. I don’t imagine he collected anything, but I suspect that he often bought high and sold very high. He disappeared after his novel—said to be a work of some brilliance, but ruined by obsessive rewriting—failed to find a publisher. A rare Drif sighting comes from an old friend of his, John Martin, who bumped into him at a Chiswick (London) car boot sale last year. Apparently Drif had spent the previous three or four years in Calcutta, and confirmed that he was no longer involved with the book trade. They exchanged phone numbers ... and then John lost his mobile!

-In closing, we spend a lot of time discussing our evolving relationship with ABE, Alibris, and Amazon. Even if they treated us as partners rather than dependent suppliers, you can’t blame some book buyers (and booksellers for that matter) for using the internet for the sake of convenience and savings. Have physical book store closings leveled off, and what must they do to survive?

I certainly don’t blame anyone for buying or selling books on the internet—we do it. But it seems to me that as a buyer it’s becoming less convenient, and as a seller, more expensive. Buying relatively common titles is a nightmare of wading through dross, and some of the sins of omission in the descriptions of more expensive books are jaw slackening. As a seller, the only online venues that move any books exact an ever-increasing price, not only in cash, but in the loss of independence and the ability to build relationships with customers.

As to the big question: how will bookshops survive? I think that the answers will rely as much on developing retailing and marketing skills, as they will on the books we buy. Hopefully some of my answers indicate how we hope to survive, and indeed prosper—but it’s a complex subject, which I would like to return to on another occasion!

Mike Goodenough operates Inprint in Stroud, England and can be contacted at http://www.inprint.co.uk.

Books, Books Everywhere, But Not a Page to Read, or,
a Book Dealer’s Travels in Spain

Joe Perlman

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Whenever I used to travel to a foreign destination I always packed at least ten books. I would pack a minimum of three guide books, Michelin, Fodor or Frommer, and one of the more offbeat travel guides like Moon or Lonely Planet. I would also pack at least one of the literary anthologies of great writers on the region. I have this expectation, that if reading say Wuthering Heights at home is wonderful, reading a chapter sitting on a rock overlooking the moors in Haworth is even better. I can never predict what reading “mood” I will be in on the journey, so I always packed a wide assortment of different types of soft cover books.

This fear of running out of books can be traced back to the vacation we spent in the Outer Banks of North Carolina in the mid 1970s. I ran out of reading so I went into the small local bookstore and asked for a copy of Middlemarch. The clerk, a young girl about 18 years old looked puzzled, so I said “You know, Middlemarch, by George Eliot.”

She replied “Is it new?”

“No.” I answered. “It was written over a hundred years ago. It’s a classic.”

“What else did he write?” she asked.

I left the store with a lurid roman-a-clef about psychotic twin gynecologists in Manhattan, and vowed never to leave home without sufficient literary materials to last at least twice as long as any planned vacation.

This worked well for me, until the year I went to Hawaii over Christmas. Some of the airlines have become very strict about baggage weight, and between the books and the cameras, and snorkeling gear, I was 30 pounds over the allotment before I even left New York. Even after I crammed as much as I could into my already overcrowded carry-on bag, I still had to pay a hefty supplementary fee.

So, when packing for a trip to Spain last spring, I decided to limit myself to only three books. For the guide book, I selected the trusty Michelin, since it has the most in-depth information about the sights in each city (though I did include some photocopied pages of walking tours and restaurants from Fodor and Frommer). I also selected two books to read, both of which I sampled before I left, so that I was sure that I would want to read them on the trip.

The flight over to Spain went smoothly. The airport lines at JFK were short, so we breezed through check-in. Between the long wait for departure, the hold over in Madrid, and the terrible airline movie choices, by the time we arrived in Barcelona, I had already finished the first book (Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point — a terrific guide for learning how to start marketing trends).

The first few days we stayed with friends in a very small suburban coastal town — Arenys

The Author as Sancho Panza in Puerto Lapice, Spain

de Mar, just north of Costa Brava. They speak no English, and so all of the books on the two 36 inch bookshelves in their apartment were in Spanish. Naturally, I did spend a bit of time looking them over. The top shelf contained a large collection of coffee table type books. These included travel photos of regions of Spain, world geography and collections from the great European Art museums. To my surprise they told us that these books were Christmas gifts from their local bank. I told them that back home we were lucky if our banks gave us a calendar. The bottom shelf contained a large set of books all in matching leatherette bindings. I knelt down for a closer look, and to my dismay, they turned out to be the complete works of Danielle Steele in Spanish translation.

So, for my bedtime reading, I started my second book — Boyle’s The Arc of Justice, the 2005 winner of the National Book Award for non-fiction, and a riveting account of a famous racial segregation battle in Detroit in the early 20th century. By the fourth day of a fourteen day trip, I realized that I was in grave danger of running out of reading material.

On the fifth day we bade our friends goodbye and headed for Barcelona where I could begin my search for something else to read in earnest. The week before I left home I read Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, so my immediate reaction when I stepped off the train was how calm the city seemed. Mr. Orwell’s Barcelona was a teeming city with blood-stained bodies littering the Ramblas. Modern Barcelona is nothing like that.

We saw all the sites, the wonderful Gothic quarter where the sounds of the street musicians echo in the dark, narrow, high-walled passage ways, the Gaudi buildings and the Parc Guell. I stopped in a few new bookshops, but left empty handed. The English language books were few, and I had either read them, or was not really interested. I was not yet desperate for any old book to read, since I had not finished the Boyle, and I still had a least a week before the long flight.

We took

Madrid Becomes Book Country--the Annual Book Fair Along Paseo del Prado

an overnight train to Madrid, to meet some New York friends for a one week tour of Southern Spain. To my surprise, in the late spring, Madrid becomes a giant book fair. All along the wide boulevards near the Prado, at least one hundred temporary book stalls are set up. Dealers sell everything from new bestsellers to antiquarian books to scientific tomes. I saw a table with a stack of the Kama Sutra in Spanish right next to a stack of books about Pope John Paul. I am always a bit taken aback by what gets translated. Dan Brown, I can understand, but Richard Powers? Nobody reads him in English, so who would read him in the Spanish translations?

Our friends had just arrived from New York, and while they napped, I spent a delightful afternoon, looking for James Joyce in Spanish as well as something in English to read on the plane home. I was more successful in the former quest than the latter. Several of the kiosks offered small boxes of used English language books for sale. These were old dog-eared paperback bestsellers, mostly romance novels and self-help. I saw a very nice one volume reproduction of Description d’Egypte in French which I considered buying but did not want to add another 12-15 pounds to my luggage — it was smaller than the original, but still a substantial book.

I did manage to find a two volume paperback Spanish translation of Joyce’s Ulysses. I have a Penguin type edition I bought in Puerto Rico, but this set has more character. There is no glossy cover, and it is the type of book a poor Spanish intellectual would sit and read all day over one cup of espresso in a local café. (Note: For my first time readers, one of my goals in life is to obtain a copy of Ulysses in every language that it has been translated into.)

Spain has only one department store chain, oddly named El Corte Ingles. Madrid has a very large branch with several annexes, one of which is a two story bookstore. I went over looking for a hardcover copy of Ulysses as well as something to read in English, but left empty handed. I did learn something interesting, though. All of the bookstores carry the Spanish version of the Penguin Paperback classics. There are hundreds of books in the set, but instead of arranging them in alphabetical order, the books are arranged on the shelves in the order that they are added to the series. If you are looking for a classic, you need to use a long laminated plastic card which hangs from the shelves by a small chain. You look up the author and the title, find the publication number, and then search the shelves for that number.

Since I did not find anything new to read in Madrid, each night I slowed my reading pace, and read fewer pages trying to savor my book.

I saw lots of old churches, synagogues and mosques in Toledo, Cordoba, and Grenada, but no bookstores selling English books, except for guides and souvenir pictorials. I managed to pick up a few books about the old synagogues, but nothing that I would classify as airplane reading.

No Libros en Ingles--A Bookstore in Sevilla

In the old quarter of Sevilla, I found a small, dusty hole in the wall bookshop, and went in and asked the clerk in my pigeon Spanish if she had any “libros en Ingles.” She responded in perfect English that there was one small carton under a table in the back. Again, I saw the ubiquitous self-help, romance and mysteries, not an interesting book in sight. We did have a nice conversation, where I learned that she was from the Midwest, married a Spaniard and had lived happily in Sevilla for 30 years.

In Tangiers, I found a bookstall in the Casbah, left the tour group and braved the beggars, only to discover that all of the books were different editions of the Qur’an.

The very last day, we were staying in Marbella and spent the morning at the beach in Puerto Banus. I had purchased a T shirt at El Corte Ingles in Madrid, and discovered that I had misread the size, so I left the beach early to try to exchange it at the Puerto Banus branch. Lo and behold, right across the street from the department store was a large, brightly lit bookstore. Its name was Bookworld Espana and it contained only English language books. Puerto Banus is the British Florida, where many well to do retired British people escape the winter. I left with an interesting book, Don Quixote’s Delusions: Travels in Castilian Spain — at last something to enjoy on the long plane ride home.

We boarded a small plane in Marbella to take us to Madrid, and spent the short ride discussing the trip with our friends. We had never traveled together before, but all agreed it had been a great success. One friend became an expert in removing the heads and tails from cooked shrimp, so that his wife would be able to eat her dinner at night (that is how they served shrimp all throughout Spain). Another friend repeated his travel advice so often it became a mantra. “Don’t stand when you can sit. Don’t sit when you can sleep.” I learned never to travel without at least one extra book.

We landed in Madrid to change to our plane for New York. The airport is huge, with many concourses, and since we were given no direction from the airline, we came very close to missing the connecting flight. By the time we boarded the second plane I was exhausted, and promptly fell asleep. When I woke up, we had landed in New York. Groggily, I looked down and saw that the long sought-after book had remained unopened in my lap.

Joe Perlman operates Mostly Useful Fictions out of East Northport, NY and can be contacted at http://www.mostlyusefulfictions.com.

Ephemeral Assays: Herbarium Symposium

Shawn Purcell

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Weeding through countless fields of obsolete digital pics and scans on my hard drive, up popped a set of images from Herbarium and Plant Descriptions that reminded me what a pleasure it was to handle this item for awhile. I remember writing a fairly lengthy description for an eBay auction and starting it at $100. If the herbarium didn’t sell there I would have transplanted the work over to my regular book list, thus preserving more gleanings about the little girl who put it together, the gist of her efforts, and a written description of the volume that contained them. If it remained unsold to this day, I could have consulted her notes about each plant for this piece. But as things turned out it did sell on eBay in May of 2005 for $113.61, with two bids. The only other information I still have is the auction title, “PROVIDENCE RHODE ISLAND RI HERBARIUM 1888 MAGNALL,” and the name and address of the buyer.

“Magnall” refers to Florence A. Magnall of Room 11, Providence High School, as a notation on the inside front cover informs us. She was the earnest student who wandered through field and forest on the margins of Providence searching out these specimens for pressing and preservation. I do recall that her notes were charming, and this was obviously for class work rather than personal interest. My own little girl is a big plant science major now, and she collated this for me, as one or two leaves (an appropriate term) were missing. And speaking of the scythe of time, what can be more ephemeral than one plant in trillions that is still with us over a century later?

Simply put, herbariums are special albums used to preserve and describe mounted plant specimens. Booksellers come across older ones from time to time, and there is a limited market for them that is probably split between those who collect such items, and those who collect anything unique or in book form from particular areas of the world. If the herbarium was well realized to begin with and has come down through the years in good condition, they can be quite beautiful and interesting. I like to think that they may be valuable some day, in terms of scientific research, but who knows? On the commercial side, ancient herbariums from exotic places have probably changed hands for extremely high prices. The specimen I found was fairly common.

Rather than wax on about this subject, I thought it would be more interesting to look at the descriptions of every used copy of Herbarium and Plant Descriptions currently listed for sale on Abebooks. Edward T. Nelson is the author or designer, and there seem to be two editions. They are listed here in descending order of price, which averages out to around $100 when you throw out the highest and the lowest. (Maybe this article will result in some sales!) Preserved images from my aforementioned copy are interspersed.

-42 pressed plant specimens, preserved in very good state, each with a printed template completed in ink ms., 9pp. of printed text including instructions on how to press and mount the specimens, one leaf a bit frayed (nothing missing), the leaves loose in a small 4to. portfolio, quarter green leather over printed boards, slightly stained, two of the three ties present, a nice copy of a rare type of publication, Boston, MA, Allyn and Bacon, 1889 The specimens were almost all collected in Poultney, Vermont in 1892 ("Its beauty, flora and wildlife for centuries has provided inspiration " as their website has it.) though there are stray plants from the neighbouring communities of Hampton NY and Wells VT. RLIN has some half a dozen copies (some are the second edition of 1895) one of which has 48 double leaves for pressed plants; but they are all blank.

-Second edition, 24 pressed plant specimens, preserved in very good state, each with a printed template completed in ink ms., 8pp. of printed text including instructions on how to press and mount the specimens, the leaves loose in a small 4to. portfolio, quarter green cloth over printed boards, the three ties present, a nice copy , Boston, MA, Allyn and Bacon, 1895 The specimens were presumably all collected in Crystall Falls, Michigan in Spring 1900 by Ada A. Harding. Miss Harding has not always filled in the locality; but where she has it is always Crystall Falls; habitats include bank of stream, marsh and dry woodland; how much has the flora changed, one wonders? As the Crystall Falls website makes clear this is still a very rural area with much forest; deer feeding is prohibited in city limits.

-Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1895, Boston, 1895. Portfolio. Book Condition: Very Good. Second Edition. 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall. 8 leaves of text, 50 plant specimens with manuscript descriptions collected in the vicinity of Lexington, Michigan, in 1896, moderate wear and soiling, lacks original string ties.

-Allyn & Bacon: Boston 1895. 10 x 7.5", portfolio, boards, 8pp to text + 48 double pages, covers well worn, rubbed & soiled, waterstained, corners bumped & worn & fraying, only side tie remains, waterstained, interior paper spine covering detached, torn, creased & missing pieces, smudging, light soiling/creasing, edge tears, 38 of the pages filled in with specimens & notes: the first 24 well detailed, rest minimal, some sm pieces coming loose. Margaret Hefferhan (or Hefferon?) of East Stroudsburg, PA has numbered the blank sides up to 39 (with 37 absent). Wild geranium, jack in the pulpit, buttercup, daisy, veronica, violet. May 4 to June 30, 1901.

-Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1895. Second edition. c.1888. Winged portfolio, Printed green paper boards over quarter green pebble leather. Top, fore and bottom edges on both boards have grommets with original three woven laces with metal tips. Cr.4to (roughly). pp. 20-4 page sections with specimens, 6-4 page sections blank. Good. Nelson, a Biology Professor at Ohio Wesleyan University, designed the portfolio for specimen collection for his courses. How to collect, press and mount with a key to plant descriptions and a blank index on page 8. There followed the format for the 'folds' which consisted of a folded sheet with print listing plant description key words, the remaining 3 pages where blank and housed the pressed, dried and mounted specimen. The 1895 edition had the 8 page description and 43 folds. The 1888 edition had the 8 page description and 51 folds. The binding expanded for the loose completed folds. This offering has edge wear to portfolio paper with several dark stains, is missing the 8 page text and 17 of the blank folds. Twenty of the sheets have

minimal and sometimes no information filled in but were collected from May 16 to June 1, 1919. The specimens have foxed the inside of the folded sheets and most are loose. Ones actually named are: Indian Tobacco, wild oat, wild strawberry, Jack-in-the-pulpit. I do not think this person passed the course, but maybe she found a good Methodist husband instead.

-ALLYN AND BACON, BOSTON, 1895. Hard Cover. Book Condition: Good. Dust Jacket Condition: NONE. I COUNT ABOUT 40 PRESSED IN PLANTS FROM DIFFERENT LOCATIONS. ASHLY OHIO AND OTHER ILLEGIBLE NAMES. ONE LEAF IS BROKEN. IN GREEN BINDER WITH ALL THREE TIES IN PLACE. ALL PAGES LOOSE. I WILL TRY TO ANSWER ANY QUESTIONS.

-Allyn and Bacon, Boston, 1895. Book Condition: Good. Octavo 7" x 9". A loose leaf field workbook with a cover in half cloth over printed boards. This one has been filled with pressed specimens contained throughout and described with the notes dated individually during the year 1903. The cover contains several prior owners' names and stamps inside and out.

Hey, I took one last zoomed look at Florence A. Magnall’s work, and I’d forgotten that she recorded verses on the opposite page that relate to each sample. Entries about when and where she found the plants were probably up front with the index or something. Was this part of the assignment, or creative padding? Here is a lovely snippet borrowed from Erasmus Darwin, opposite the pressed anemone.

All wan and shivering in the leafless glade
The sad anemone reclined her head;
Grief on her cheeks had paled the roseate hue,
And her sweet eye-lids dropp’d with pearly dew.

We’re glad you left us these frond memories, dear Florence
Because the same pale recline happened to you.

Shawn Purcell operates Balopticon Books & Ephemera and can be contacted at http://www.balopticon.com.

Books About Books

Lynn Wienck

The Art of the Book: A Review of Some Recent European and American Work in Typography, Page Decoration and Binding, by Charles Holme. London: The Studio, 1914.

Beauty and the Book: Fine Editions and Cultural Distinction in America, by Megan L. Benton. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000.

It is always interesting to view books as works of art, and The Art of the Book edited by Charles Holme and Beauty and the Book by Megan L. Benton explore just that territory. Written 85 years apart and emphasizing different facets of the publishing industry, these two books provide an interesting picture of the world of fine editions from the middle of the 19^th century to the early part of the 20^th century. There is a surprising amount of overlap, and the information in each dovetails nicely.

The Art of the Book presents eight essays by different authors on typography and bookbinding. Although these essays draw upon past history, the focus is on the work of printers and binders at the turn of the century. William Morris, founder of the Kelmscott Press, is quoted. “I began printing books with the hope of producing some which would have a definite claim to beauty, while at the same time they should be easy to read and should not dazzle the eye by eccentricity of form in the letters.”

The chief value of this book is not so much in the essays, which are sometimes remarkably brief, but in the numerous illustrations of title pages, initial letters, headers, ornaments, colophons, fonts, and composition. Fine binding is also well represented with clear photos of wonderful examples of tooling, inlays, and various leathers. The elegance and variety of this work is shown in books from Great Britain, Germany, France, Austria, Hungary, Sweden, and America. These illustrations and photographs delight the eye and the mind with their symmetry and balance. They are exquisite.

This book itself is a work of art. The text is set in a block upon the page, ornaments denote new paragraphs, and there are handsome, wide margins. The content is readable and remarkably clear despite having been written in 1914, keeping in mind that language changes over time. It cites many presses and printers of note. This volume is well worth acquiring, and a 1990 reprint from Dorset Press is widely available.

Beauty and the Book, by contrast, covers the period after World War I through the early 1930s. It is a history and a social commentary on the fine book world as it existed at that time. The author recounts the explosive rise of the fine book and its subsequent fall. The following is from her introduction. “Attention here centers on the broader social and cultural phenomenon of fine publishing. The study therefore encompasses the great majority of postwar fine books, the several hundred titles produced by the era’s leading commercial . . . establishments. Among the best known and most active were the Grabhorn Press of San Francisco; the Pyson Printers in New York; Boston’s Merrymount Press; and the firms of William Edwin Rudge and John Henry Nash, located in Mt. Vernon, New York, and San Francisco, respectively. Beauty and the Book

These printers also occasionally published books, but most fine editions were produced via more conventional practices, whereby a publisher hires a printer to produce the books.”

As the author explains, common books had flooded the market by 1920. They were highly affordable due to the massive industrial production of paper. It helped, too, that affluence abounded in the United States. To a certain extent, books were a measure of luxury and leisure, but more than that, they were a measure of culture—class, distinction, and taste. Small wonder, then, that fine books began to make inroads. The use of handmade paper, hand typesetting, and the slower production of small print runs were designed to restore “luster to the cultural entity of the book.” Indeed, producing a fine book was viewed as separate from the industrial and commercial venture. Yet, paradoxically, the production of a fine book was a commercial venture, and even if viewed from a lofty height, it remained a business which demanded profits in order to survive. The publishers and printers of fine books seemed to hold in their minds simultaneously both the noble calling and the need for sound business practices in their day-to-day dealings.

The author presents this period as heady and intoxicating for the producers and purchasers of fine books. She focuses principally on the production of the page—the typography, illustrations, and margins—rather than the binding. Surprisingly, publishers and printers were less interested in fine bindings, and as long as the books were adequately bound they were satisfied. Eventually, though, the bubble burst. Fine books flooded the market and the public became jaded as the downturn of the economy further depressed demand and value. Never again would such fine books be offered in such profusion.

It was an amazing period while it lasted, and the author recounts this unprecedented cultural expansion from its first stirrings to the final flourish. Each chapter is an essay covering an aspect of that era regarding fine books. The relationship between printers, publishers, fine books, and the process of creating them is explored. From these tales book builders may be deemed an eccentric lot who are both creative and opinionated.

Highly readable and well-documented, this book presents an era of American history from a perspective not usually viewed. Explanations are clear, and the author merges history and social commentary smoothly to provide a clear glimpse of the book world at that time. Although some examples of typography are presented, the book’s focus is on why and how these exquisite volumes came to be created.

Both The Art of the Book and Beauty and the Book provide a marvelously in-depth view of the book world in its best attend-the-opera finery. They introduce a facet of elegance not often seen in the era of mass publishing, and they complement each other well in their coverage of information. Taken together they provide a nice running narrative on the evolution of fine printing going forward into the early 20^th century.

Lynn Wienck operates The Chisholm Trail Bookstore out of Duncan, OK and can be contacted at http://www.ctbooksstore.com.

Books About Bookselling: Books, Friends, and Bibliophilia

Shawn Purcell

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Books, Friends, and Bibliophilia: Reminiscences of an Antiquarian Bookseller, by Anton Gerits. New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2004.

Anton Gerits’ reminiscences start off on a very personal level. His was a rather awkward childhood, filled with youthful soul searching that blossomed into a permanent state of introspection. From the introduction, “there were painful memories of mistakes, of selfish acts, of all kinds of unhappy incidents that had caused old sorrow and guilt that I had carefully buried in my mind and that now came to the surface once more.” Not what I am used to in booksellers, particularly of the blustery American or British type, but tolerable if there was lots to learn about the profession amid all the self-reflection. But Mr. Gerits also establishes very quickly that he does not have a very good memory for details, bibliographic or otherwise, and that it would be hard for him to do justice to the task at hand. His father was a stern tailor in The Hague, and as The Netherlands went from the Depression to German occupation, and it became obvious that his son would not be joining any religious orders as anticipated, he was allowed to bicycle to a rural region of the country for safety and sustenance. When Gerits the Younger was still stealing his first kisses from farm girls on page 24, I began to have some doubts.

In short order, however, the Germans are pushed out, and young Anton secures a job interview with the prestigious Nijhoff Company back in The Hague. Established in 1853, with roots going back even further, Martinus Nijhoff and his descendants were true bibliophiles. Although they admired fine bindings and exceptional printing, they were mostly interested in the contents of books, and their goal was to preserve and advance learning. It is explained to Anton that he was in for a six year training period filled with reading catalogs, studying bibliographies, and pulling books, and that during this time he would not be contributing much to the company. Not that many years earlier his parents would have paid for this apprenticeship, but as that practice was falling out of favor, they would provide a small salary during this stage. When he was called in by Wouter Nijhoff Pzn after six months and offered a position in the publishing department which he had first applied for, Anton chose to stay with the antiquarian department. “‘I hoped so,’ he said, smiling, and I think that from that moment on we were friends, although we would never have said so.”

If new booksellers ardently interested in the profession could only read one chapter, the second, “From Necktie to Bowtie,” is a wonderful primer on learning about the world of antiquarian books. Although the methodology it chronicles has sadly disappeared, there are still many lessons to learn. Frederick Muller, who trained an earlier generation of booksellers in the 1800s and whose shadow was always in the room at Nijhoff’s, was said by Menno Hertzberger to be, “the one who, at least for Holland, founded the antiquarian book-trade on a bibliographical footing.” And bibliographical it was.

In what they called the “catalogue-room,” the walls were all filled with reference library works, from important bibliographies to obscure pamphlets. The large “pricing table” sat in the middle of this room, and huge piles of books were sorted, described on white sheets of paper with “dip pens,” and priced by the inner circle. Mr. H. E. Kern was the expert who devoted himself to Anton’s apprenticeship, and joining Mr. Nijhoff at this table were Henk J. van Tienhoven and other notable bookmen. Although Anton was not allowed to write catalog descriptions for some time, and then only for modern books, his work space was at this table. “Sitting here gave me the opportunity from the start of my career to follow the discussions about the bibliographical descriptions and the prices.”

In another room in a large fire-proof safe, title archives were kept in 128 wooden drawers. The file cards they contained were divided into “living titles” and “dead titles,” depending on whether they were in stock or sold. Recorded on these “titles” were the purchase price in code and the asking price, many in the hand of founder Martinus Nijhoff, his son Wouter, and Wouter’s nephew of the same name (hence the Pyn, or son of Paul, to distinguish them). A certain bow-tied future head of the antiquarian department (he started wearing them when his regular tie kept ending up in the middle of piles he was pulling from the warehouse) added many more entry points during his tenure. These included the date of acquisition and sale, the name of the buyer, and other customers who were looking for the same title. For important works, details from other bookseller catalogs offering the same title and prices realized at auction were also added to the cards.

Anton proved himself useful more speedily than his employers first anticipated, and he quickly rose through the ranks. Even such soundly established firms need to modernize, and his claims to fame include recognizing the importance of and gaining access to Eastern European antiquarian works languishing behind the Iron Curtain; as well as the primacy of periodicals and ephemera. His command of many languages was a major asset in this pursuit. The confines of this review do not permit much mention of the treasures that passed through his hands throughout a long career, but they are truly breathtaking, and will of course never be seen again in such profusion.

Collections were another specialty, and he handled large numbers of them on such subjects as the emancipation of Jews in France; Protestant history; the revolutions of 1848; early newspapers and satirical journals; works on and by Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier; the Austro-Hungarian monarchy; Central Africa; Dutch and other plays (one numbered over 2,300 dating from the late 1600s to 1830); and Mazarinades, or writings for and against the famous Cardinal Mazarin during the 1830-1841 revolt known as the Fronde (one of which contained 2,440 pamphlets). Collections of French political trial material were very important and instructive, as they contained reports, transcriptions of confiscated documents, witness examinations, and speeches of the prosecution and defense that were mostly stenographic copies only available to the judges. In 1968 he laid out $3,300 as a favor to another bookseller who needed to unload 9,000 laxly counted pieces of early printed music, most with engraved covers. It turned out to be more like 20,000 pieces, and was flipped for $34,000 the following year to the National Library of Canada.

There are many funny and interesting anecdotes throughout. Breaking Mr. Nijhoff’s antique globe as a new employee; how the young women of the order department pulled more than old slips in the archival cellar; taking inventory in the huge warehouse for the first time in over a century; buying trips to Europe and the U.S.; failing castles and manor houses in France that allowed his colleagues to reduce formerly overcrowded library bookshelves in such a way that their owners did not appear to be going broke; and one colleague deceiving another into flying to Malta for a collection of fifteenth century books that did not exist.

Gerits provides many thumbnail sketches of the famous and infamous booksellers of the day, and recounts great friendships with the likes of Michel Bernstein. There is lots of local color from his travels and adventures, and much on the trials and rewards of the profession. Most illuminating were the sections on the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of The Netherlands (NVvA) founded in 1935, and the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers (ILAB) founded in 1947. Our fledgling Independent Online Booksellers Association is facing many of the same challenges they have overcome or are still struggling with. Gerits was president of both these organizations for fairly long terms, and he cites our individualistic natures, management by improvisation rather than strong planning, the difficulty of getting members to help with projects and committee work, limited financial means, and an unwillingness to discipline colleagues who are established and powerful. An example of this last occurred when one business caused others to be audited by recording fictitious transactions for tax purposes, and they reached an agreement that would not have been extended to a novice. In what comes close to qualifying as an international bookseller crisis, a dealer at an ILAB book fair in connection with an ILAB congress in Tokyo touched a raw nerve when he was overheard defending his high prices by saying something close to, “That does not matter. The Japanese will pay them.”

Nijhoff Company was a rather formal but happy family when Anton Gerits joined the firm in 1950. His observations on creeping corporatism and merger mania in the decades to come as they apply to this great book palace are very trenchant. His career took several interesting twists and turns before (and after) finally leaving in disgust, culminating in the formation of A. Gerits & Son run by Arnoud Gerits as we know it today. (I just took the virtual panoramic tour from the website and fear it would blow old Martinus Nijhoff’s socks off!)

Two things nagged me as I proceeded through the book. The first was the large amount of unique Dutch material that was being sold outside of the country, often to libraries in places like the American Midwest and Japan. Over 1,000 rare Dutch historical pamphlets, for example, were purchased by the National Library of Australia in 1966 for a mere $8,850. There are many such examples where the material was more important and the price was much lower. The low prices themselves were also puzzling, even accounting for inflation. In many instances, a single piece today would sell for more than the entire collection it came from sold for as recently as the mid to late 1900s. Obviously values have escalated due to a variety of factors such as collector interest, but it is still jaw-dropping to see how low they were at the time. Remarking on Nijhoff’s 800th catalog, entitled The Freedom of the Press in the Dutch Republic (1581-1795), and consisting of 230 rarities set aside by Gerits for that occasion, he admits, “These 1968 prices seem ridiculous in the light of the market-value of such books now.”

Gerits does not address aiding and abetting the loss of national heritage until late into the work. He basically explains that the Dutch government was simply not interested in paying what the material was worth. In his experience, librarians have a certain disdain for booksellers, and it is worse between national libraries and local booksellers. Why? “Maybe it hides some jealousy. Never having the courage themselves to accept the risks of being a dealer, and having chosen a safer existence in their profession, academics probably envy the freedom, independence, and adventurous life of the antiquarian bookseller.” On top of this, Nijhoff’s had a reputation for being pricey, perhaps because, “It sometimes happens that such myths come into existence through some trivial incident and then acquire a life of their own.” The important thing is that somebody wanted this material, and that large collections of related items tend to be taken care of and cataloged rather than neglected and dispersed. Still . . .

As for my initial reservations about all that introspection and sensitivity, it makes Gerits’ narrative that much more understandable and enjoyable. His stated need for respect and recognition, for example, clearly bore rich fruit. And when he raised an alarm by admitting a fuzzy memory for titles, dates, and amounts, that was not the mere false modesty so conventional in introductions to older writings. Luckily the Nijhoff title cards were safely transferred to the Royal Library in The Hague before the firm was fully ravaged, and he toiled there for hundreds of hours, in addition to many other researches and verifications. As a matter of fact, one of the best aspects of the work is the extraordinary number of sales that are reported. The bookselling industry is far too tight-lipped about pricing, and Books, Friends, and Bibliophilia should serve as a model for such retrospective disclosures. In closing, this is a highly entertaining and informative contribution to the field by a learned man who bestrode the ancient and modern eras of bookselling, and it comes highly recommended. Some excerpts follow.

“I worked on the first floor of the splendid building at the Lange Voorhout. On that first floor was the so-called room 13 [across from the catalogue-room], with a view onto the Voorhout. In this room Wouter Nijhoff Pzn and H. E. Kern had their work tables opposite each other. The walls were covered with books from floor to ceiling, except for one wall, where a beautiful old-style bookcase with glass doors stood. This bookcase contained only very expensive items. The door of room 13 was always open, unless strictly confidential staff matters were being discussed. And the room was always filled with a thick haze from cigars and cigarettes, for both Nijhoff and Kern were heavy smokers. When in the first week of my presence in the antiquarian department I opened a window, Mr. Kern shouted: ‘Gerits, close that window! Mr. Nijhoff and I do not like fresh air!’”

“Once Kern even yanked an expensive book from a client’s hands because the man appeared not to understand its importance, and he was not allowed to buy it.”

“As soon as the mail had been sorted, the five groups were carried to room 13 and placed on a table where Mr. Nijhoff looked through each stack while the heads of the various departments stood around the table. He commented on various letters, gave instructions, and asked questions. A department-head would have to explain or justify his decisions, especially when a complaint appeared among the letters. In these sessions the impressive memory of Wouter Nijhoff Pzn played an important role. Nobody could lie because Nijhoff never failed to remember what staff members or other employees had said weeks before; and when he asked someone to check something and report to him, nobody could hope that Nijhoff would forget this request. These time-consuming sessions around the mail were detested by quite a few of the staff members, but Mr. Nijhoff achieved two important goals by them: he remained very well informed about everything that went on in the company, and the various heads of the department were daily confronted with each other’s problems and with everyone’s successes and failures. These sessions thus served a unifying function, the significance of which can hardly be overestimated.”

“I am lucky enough to have known the period when complete runs of scholarly journals and periodicals were collected, collated, and, if necessary, bound or rebound.”

“A large number of atlases were in stock in those days. I remember at least two Ortelius atlases, a beauty of a Janssonius atlas, and a complete Theatrum urbium with its many topographical plans and views of European cities, which we sold in 1962 to Belgium. At least three Blaeu atlases were on the shelves when I entered Nijhoff’s, a Spanish, a French, and a Dutch set. The most beautiful Dutch copy of all was the property of Wouter Nijhoff Pzn himself and was kept in his reception room. The nine folio volumes, printed between 1648 and 1665 and containing some 600 contemporary hand-colored maps and plans, were bound in red morocco at the office of Blaeu.”

“As a matter of fact it was the Nijhoff policy to pay smaller dealers very quickly. ‘It is the best form of publicity,’ Mr. Nijhoff used to say.”

“Why is it considered self-evident that antiquarian booksellers make their expertise available free of charge?”

“The price Mr. Kern paid to his brother’s heirs seemed to me quite low. When I mentioned this matter to Mr. Kern he answered laconically, ‘It is sufficient. They do not need more.’ At that very moment I made up my mind never to allow myself to use such an argument when buying, and I believe I have succeeded. However, when dealers asked too low a price for a book I accepted the offer without scruple because in my opinion you may take advantage of an expert’s lack of knowledge. In the case of heirs of a collector, who often have little or no idea of the value of that part of the inheritance, you should, in my opinion, act differently. That is not always easy, for if you offer too much you run the risk that the reaction will be, ‘Ah, if it is worth that much, we will think it over a bit longer,’ and they will use your offer to try to get more elsewhere. To protect oneself in such situations is not easy; but it is not impossible. Once, when an old lady entered Nijhoff’s with a small but extremely rare pamphlet of only forty-eight pages that she had discovered among the papers of her deceased husband, I found a good solution. The pamphlet was the famous Breedan-raedt aende Vereende Nederlandsche provintien (Broad advice to the United Dutch Provinces), Antwerp: F. van Duynen, 1649. It is one of the most important documents concerning New Netherland. It deals with the deception of the directors of the West Indian Company by the general director of New Netherland, Willem Kieft. Peter Stuyvesant succeeded him. Stuyvesant had much to put right and executed this task with great vehemence, which in its turn, is criticized in this pamphlet. It also deals with Brazil and criticizes the Portuguese as well as the Dutch. Historians still disagree about the identity of the author. I was afraid that if I offered some hundreds of Dutch guilders the lady would walk away with her pamphlet, so I said that I believed that I could guarantee her at least one hundred Dutch guilders, but that I had a client who would probably be prepared to pay more. If she would allow me to keep the pamphlet for one day, I would try my best for her. She agreed, and I gave her a down-payment of f100 ($45). When she returned the next day I told her with enthusiasm that the client had made a generous offer and that I could hand over to her another f500 ($226), at that time a very good price. She was extremely grateful, and the pamphlet lay on my desk; the real buyer remained unknown to her.”

“During one of my wanderings in Braunschweig I arrived at a beautiful cemetery, where light blue crocuses were moving gently in a soft wind and spreading their scent under a pale February sun. Suddenly I found myself before the grave of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, which was adorned with a lovely little bed of winter violets. After such an experience, holding the first edition of Lessing’s Nathan der Weise (1779) or a copy of his at the time sensational so-called ‘Reimarus-Fragmente’ entitled Von Duldung der Deisten (1774) is no longer only a commercial event.”

“When during the last years of my career when I was confronted with modern automation, which enables the antiquarian bookseller to save long descriptions with just one key and where an efficient search-engine makes it possible to retrieve a title without being obliged to look through long files, I sometimes asked myself whether an excellent way of training the memory of younger assistants had not been lost.”

“Fortunately, even in modern times the fear of work still exists and often offers the ardent collector and the industrious antiquarian bookseller splendid opportunities.”

“I stuck to my bow-tie for the rest of my life. In Japan it would earn me the nickname of Mr. Butterfly, a not unwelcome distinction. Soon it proved to be an effective promotional device. At large gatherings, receptions, and the like, I never needed to introduce myself. The man with the bow-tie was Mr. Gerits.”

“It is often said that the greatest enemies of books are water and fire. There is, however, one greater and more frequent threat to large concentrations of books, be it a modern bookshop, an antiquarian bookstore, or a library. That bigger danger is an indifferent or inexpert management. Usually the two go together.”

“That the future will offer sufficient potential for the antiquarian book business seems certain (I will speak about some encouraging aspects later), but only hardworking and inventive individuals will succeed.”

Shawn Purcell operates Balopticon Books & Ephemera and can be contacted at http://www.balopticon.com.

How I Spent My Summer Vacation: Teaching at the Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar

Christine Volk

How do I even begin to describe what it was like to be on the faculty of the Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar—the booksellers’ boot camp—for the first time?

Exhilarating, exhausting, exciting—and one of the best weeks I have spent as a bookseller!

But no—it was not a vacation—except in the sense that a vacation is a break from the normal routine that can recharge you and help you to return fresher and more energized. Some of the comments from the Class of 2006 are posted on the seminar website (Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar), but I will quote one here:

“I am currently implementing many of the practical applications and I am now directed to the areas where I know I need to 'learn' more. And this along with a notebook chocked full of real, usable information, contacts, etc. I have attended scores of conferences over the years in several fields, and this coursework was as well organized, classy, attentive to detail and interesting. All of the faculty were 'characters' and not shy about straight out talk or tough questions or saying "I don't know". I cannot recommend the seminar strongly enough, but it was not for sissies as far as the hours. Your money's worth??? YOU BET!!”

And a word of warning: if you think it might be enjoyable to see something of Colorado and the Colorado Springs area while you are at the seminar, plan on going early—otherwise Pike’s Peak will remain just a mountain in the distance! There is no “spare time” or “free time” during the week itself—you live, think, and eat bookselling. It is only when you are in the middle of the seminar that you realize how apt the nickname “booksellers’ boot camp” is!

With a wide range of students’ background and experience, and an even wider range of their knowledge of bookselling and hopes for the seminar, the curriculum has to balance the amount of time spent on different areas—it has to include both depth and breadth in discussing books and bookselling and cram that all into one week—and we all know that bookselling is something you can spend a lifetime learning and still not learn everything.

One of the ways that the seminar handles this mission is by long, packed days, careful attention to time and an intensive focus that did not let up even on the “breaks” or at lunchtime (most days, the faculty sat at different tables, so “seminarians” could sit with them and continue discussing books and bookselling). A significant part of the learning was in one-to-one conversations, or small group discussions either with faculty or just among the students themselves.

The curriculum is also evolving to confront the changing realities of today’s bookselling world, but without neglecting the traditional knowledge base that a professional bookseller needs.

Since this was my first year, I have no basis for comparison, but other faculty members commented on what a dynamic group of students were at the seminar. A large part of what makes an experience like this so valuable is not just the information given by the faculty but also that shared by the attendees from their years of experience!

As a (former) teacher, I was dismayed when halfway through the week, a student asked in conversation a very basic question: “what is a trade paperback?” While I was able to answer that specific question then, the reality is that the seminar does not, and cannot in one week, answer every student’s questions. It is easy to assume that dealing with concrete “how to” topics can be more valuable to beginning booksellers—and the seminar addresses many very specific issues, ranging from details on packing for the mail order bookseller to Dan Gregory’s marketing presentation (an hour that contained enough ideas that would in itself justify the expense of the seminar) to the use of reference materials and how to approach librarians (another extremely valuable presentation given by Dan DeSimone, a bookseller for 25 years and now a Curator at the Library of Congress). And even though I am a bookseller who loves scouting and pride myself on being pretty good at it, I picked up several great tips from Michael Ginsberg’s session on scouting!

Although many specific presentations focused on the practical to a large extent, that is not—in my opinion—where the real value of this seminar lies. Rather it is in opening up to booksellers the idea that they do not have to deal in “ordinary” books, but can become involved with the best and most significant and interesting books. It is in creating a sense of limitless possibilities—in telling booksellers that, yes, they can control both their business and how much money they can make—and then in showing them what they need to know to do this.

Almost anyone can teach “how-to” methods, but I think the Colorado seminar is unique in its ability to convey the sense of what bookselling, at its best, can be—and I think that the uniqueness is due to the quality of those booksellers who have kept the seminar going year after year, ranging from Ed Glaser, who has given of his time, energy and knowledge for the entire 28 year history of the seminar, to Michael Ginsburg, Rob Rulon-Miller, and newer participants like Tom Congalton. They present, as booksellers, an example of collegiality, professionalism, and generosity that is unmatched. A recurring theme was that other booksellers are not your competitors; they are your colleagues, that helping other booksellers will help you, and even that booksellers can be your best customers.

It is also important to emphasize that the seminar does not end at the end of the week. Since so much is covered and so quickly, the fat binder both extends the information presented and becomes a resource that can be consulted over and over again as a reminder of what was covered. The students are told that they can call upon anyone on the faculty afterwards for help. A mailing list was started before the actual seminar and it is still going on. More importantly, I am sure that some of those attending have already formed relationships with other seminarians that will survive for years of their bookselling careers.

And finally, the worth of the seminar will be determined by how many of those ideas are put into practice! The ABAA has a clear sense of how significant the seminar can be, and it is reflected in their membership requirements: attendance at the seminar is worth six months of full-time experience as a bookseller.

Chris Volk operates Bookfever along with Shep Iiams out of the Sierra foothills of Amador County, CA and can be contacted at http://www.bookfever.com.

The Boot Camp for Book Dealers

Kenny Parolini

[click picture for larger image]

I had been hearing about the Colorado Antiquarian Book Market Seminar, as it is formally termed, for a number of years. Sometime a few years back I started thinking that it might be fun to go. So, with that in mind, I began following the emails and notices that showed up in various chat and news groups online. I gradually became aware of the occasional ads that appeared in book publications such as Fine Books and Collections and Book Source Magazine. This year I attended the 2006 seminar, which was held from August 5^th through the 12^th. First a little more background on my decision to attend.

In the early days of the Internet book selling was laughably easy. You bought a lot of books, priced them for something or other and sold them relatively quickly. It turned out that even I could do it pretty well. As time went by it seemed that this was becoming apparent to everyone with a computer. So the pressure began. With the price competition began the race to the bottom.

Before the Internet there was no really reliable way to know how many books were out there of a given title. As book prices became more transparent the high prices being realized brought books out of the barns, attics, trunks and bookshelves of America. What was previously thought to be a good book was now found to be a mediocre book and what was thought to be a mediocre book now became fodder for the soon to arrive penny sellers.

I had always admired penny sellers who bought books by the truckload and sold thousands of them every day. They subsisted mainly on the few pennies in shipping profit they gleaned from each book that they often sold for one penny each. They were doing America a great service in spreading literacy and knowledge and making a profit while doing it. But they were driving many booksellers to the wall. I had no desire to be one of those standing resignedly, back to the wall, with a blindfold across his eyes and a cigarette in his mouth.

I had started very modestly, worked hard and gradually built up a decent inventory. It had become clear to me early on that my only salvation was to buy those books that were sufficiently scarce not to decline in value as more and more books were driven to market.

It seems that at some point soon fewer and fewer of the modestly uncommon books will be appearing and even the cheaper books will again turn and head back up a bit. Surely at some point the reserves will become at least partially exhausted. For most of the cheap books, say less than $25 today, it seems unlikely to me that anything will ever save them—not even time. As sources dry up, and long before retail prices began to rise significantly, the cost of acquisition increases. Increased acquisition costs are a direct result of new sellers willing to work for less, a lot less, maybe even nothing. I found it no longer feasible to compete with hobby sellers. The more so because most of them seemed blithely unaware that their business was a hobby.

There was another factor that concerned me as well. I was regularly logging 80 hours or more a week. I knew that it wouldn’t be too many more years before this would begin to lose its attraction. I had been there before in other businesses and wanted to avoid that downward spiral at all costs. It was fun and I wanted it to stay fun.

So with these concerns turning in my mind I felt that I had to get a different perspective on book dealing. Maybe I had to get many different perspectives. Up until now I had done only Internet sales, some being fixed price sales and some auctions. I don’t mean to imply that I wasn’t doing well. Actually I was doing better than I had any right to expect, up 20%+ every year. If I had thought this would go on indefinitely I could have slept peacefully. But I didn’t see this going on forever. I felt I had to find new venues, new philosophies, new perspectives, new sources and new customers. In a word I had to reengineer my business or run the risk of perishing as I continued upon what I felt was a perilous path.

There was another concern which made this cross country jaunt to Colorado almost a perfect fit for me. With recently increasing sales I was badly in need of income tax deductions. You might wonder why I was so concerned if sales were on the uptick. The book business, while not exactly boom and bust, is not a “steady as she goes” business either. It needs careful tending. Ignore your income stream at your peril! I needed just a few more tricks in my basket than I already had if I was going to feel at all secure.

So I called and spoke to Kathy Lindeman several times. She was quite forthcoming about the ins and outs of travel, housing and so forth. I owe her a lot and want to thank her again right here. Her assistance in getting me oriented was invaluable. She held my hand while I decided what the best arrangement would be for me.

I hadn’t been in Colorado for more than 25 years. I had passed through once when I was living in Nevada and had found the people so friendly that I seriously considered moving there. I am happy to say I found them just as helpful this time as I did the first. While I was there I checked the real estate ads as I usually do in a new area. There are many very beautiful homes available much more cheaply than is common elsewhere. It is high desert with low humidity. The elevation is about 6000 feet. Annual snowfall is 33 inches. So far, so good, then I found that low temperatures reached -10 degrees F or so. So I’ll stay in New Jersey a little longer.

I have half a dozen online travel discount sites that I use. They are farefox.com, cheaptickets.com, air-gorilla.com, allcheapfares.com, travelticker.hotwire.com, and priceline.com. To my surprise I found the best fare by a considerable margin on a site I didn’t care for much, orbitz.com. I made a $350 deposit by Visa over the phone to hold my spot, made arrangements for a place to stay, purchased the airline tickets, and I was in!

I stayed at the Colorado Inn. This is on campus. It was purchased by Colorado College recently and refurbished. It is quite adequate and a cut above college dorms but just barely. There is an Econo Lodge right next door. Most seminarians chose to stay at one of these. There are a few other choices of lodging including a couple of bed and breakfasts and a Sheraton about 2 miles away. But I wanted to be in the heart of things. As it was I was just about 3 ½ blocks from the cafeteria and from most of the classes. So it worked out well for me and I was able to walk almost everywhere.

At the Colorado Inn there are laundry facilities downstairs. Food shopping opportunities are just about non-existent within 2-3 miles. My plan, which is the recommended one, included breakfast and lunch with the students. All but 2 of the dinners were provided by the seminar. In addition there are frequent snacks. So meals are definitely not a problem.

Downtown is about 8 blocks and a pleasant and safe stroll away. There are many bars, restaurants and several book stores. Basically a college town within a town. The city of Colorado Springs itself has 600,000 people and is mainly supported by the two military bases there. Many of the military personnel retire and take another job in the tech or the security industry.

Because of the difficulty in making connections from Atlantic City I flew in a day early and left a day late. I could have flown much cheaper into Denver which is 80 miles away and taken a shuttle. Full details are provided in the registry materials. However the people I talked to who had flown into Denver had not found the arrangement particularly congenial to their needs.

The seminar registration was Sunday 3-6 and was quickly disposed of. I then walked downtown and had an excellent and reasonable steak dinner at The Olive Branch for about $20. I sat for a while in a small park in the center of town. They had the most ingenious fountain display I had ever seen. First came dancing waters. Then a large multi colored globe began to rise until a fire engine dog and then later a clown could be seen beneath it. They all did their bag of tricks in this water driven automaton. I then headed back for the on campus reception at 7. There was plenty of wine, cheese, foods and conversation, a good time was had by all. Terry Belanger was the keynote speaker. His wit and scholarship are equally well developed.

The next morning we began congregating in the cafeteria at about 7. The food was like cafeteria food all around the world but still quite a bit better than I remember it being during my own long distant university days.

We were given full materials for the course including a hefty notebook. The notebook is nicely laid out with sections on everything from where to stay to how to paginate an antiquarian work. This contained invaluable materials compiled from the experiences of the best minds in the business. We also received daily handouts and amplified notes for each class. The whole thing was very carefully thought through and cleanly executed. This is a very valuable resource and one to treasure.

At 8:30 sharp class began. Morning classes ran 3 ½ hours with a 15 minute break. Afternoons about the same. For the most part we ran 6 classes a day. And none of these, and I do mean none, were lightweight fill-ins. One thing that struck me was how often staff members mentioned that they learned a lot every year from attending. There are so many experts from so many areas.

Then came a breathless staccato-like presentation by Dan Gregory on How to Market Your Book Business. Later on he followed up with Technology of the Book Trade. It was almost impossible to take notes because of the speed at which he covered the work. And it was ALL critical material. He generously agreed to email us expanded notes after the seminar. He obviously firmly believed in his message of promoting your business. If people look at your business card, bookmarks or whatever and don’t say “Wow!” then they aren’t good enough. Book selling is story telling. Dan believes that 90% of ABE and Biblio customers are collectors.

I especially liked Dan’s summary of communicating with customers and advertising.

Customers don’t think
Customers are blind
Customers have short attention spans
Customers are more valuable than your books
NEVER underestimate you customers

Ed Glaser and Dan DeSimone gave a session on Reference Books. The bibliography handout for this talk alone may well be worth the cost of the course. I have since picked up some of these that I never knew existed such as the English Short Title Catalogue. Tom and Heidi Congalton contributed a copy of First Editions of Dr. Seuss Books which I won at their auction later on. I finally have the title of the mysterious and often cited “Wing” and will be picking that up soon.

Angela Scott presented an amazing display of paper making materials including leathers and papers and a discussion of bookbinding. Dan DeSimone presented an illuminating discussion of book illustrations. Then we wrapped up the day with drinks, alcoholic and otherwise, and eats at a gathering from 7 to 9. Day One was pretty much a template for the days that followed.

The average age of the seminarians was a little over 40 and the experience level was from “thinking about it” to “full professional.” The majority had been involved for perhaps a few years and wanted to become more involved. There were also a number of librarians and attendees sponsored by various of the book industries.

In the next 4 days there were two microphones in the aisle between the seats. Those with questions would (ideally) line up at the microphones and ask their questions. Additionally there was a question box available to drop queries in. These boxes were emptied after each break.

I can’t begin to do justice to the material covered. Each topic would require a paper of its own. The best I can do is to skim the subjects to give you the flavor of the sessions and the materials they cover. And perhaps encourage you to find out more for yourself. I have been a long time reader of the works of Kraus, Rosenbach, and other famous dealers. Unfortunately these books are long on stories and short on method. Here are the methods.

After a lifetime of boring and often feckless classes and seminars this whole affair came as the most pleasant of surprises. As I sat in the room gradually the awareness grew on me that I was surrounded by a whole lot of very bright people. I have been to Mensa gatherings that were not half as impressive.

Rob Rulon-Miller was the seminar director. His discussion covered the areas of Catalogue Making, Ethics, and Appraisals. His discussion of catalogues I found particularly useful. There were probably close to 100 different catalogues along a back table in stacks from various dealers, and they were laid out in such a manner that it made choosing the format most suitable for my business much easier. I definitely have a color laser printer on my list of acquisitions for next year. We were free to take what we wanted and there was an open discussion about costs, efficacy, production and problems. Rob also spent a fair amount of time on ethics. Although some might find it restrictive, I thought it simply the best way to run a successful business with as little pain as possible.

Terry Belanger gave an exhaustive and witty talk on Bibliographic Description, Format and Collation. This covered such esoterica as different types of laid paper, watermarks, counter marks and their origins, pagination, and printer’s marks. It was as intensive as it could reasonably be in the short time available. Printed 18^th century folio sheets were handed out to the class to help explain various of the printing processes. We were taught how printers numbered sheets so the binders could fold them to form signatures in 8vo, 12mo, 4to and so on. There was a fascinating talk on paper making and how it advanced. Terry said that there was an old saying that the size of the initial sheet of paper was determined by the length of the arms of the papermaker. By the time he finished it was pretty clear why he had been awarded the coveted “MacArthur” in bibliography.

Terry Belanger oversees The Rare Book School at the University of Virginia with auxiliary classes in New York, Baltimore, and Washington DC. These classes are subsidized by the University and the tuition charge is about half of the actual cost. They offer about 30 five day courses each year. Tuition is $845. More information is available at virginia.edu/oldbooks.

There was a faculty directed workshop on how to write book descriptions and two more on book pricing. We spent some time in class on this and then broke up into groups in various rather nice rooms. There we submitted our books and descriptions for criticism. The groups were, as always, small, with one or two faculty members assigned to each.

There was an on-site tutorial on running a used book store by the Ciletti’s, Mary and Jim. The class was split into two groups and bussed to their Hooked On Books book store. There we were treated to talks on running a book store and a packing demonstration. The inventory was also available at standard book dealer’s discounts to us. The class picked up a fair number of books. Half of the class did this on one of two nights while the other half attended Conservation and Preservation by Dan DeSimone and Angela Scott. Angela does antiquarian restoration and book binding at her shop in Washington DC. Dan is the curator of the Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection of rare books and manuscripts at the Library of Congress. They combined their skills to give an invaluable look into the nuts and bolts of antiquarian works. Displayed were many materials not commonly seen such as rare leathers and papers.

Later on Dan DeSimone presented Libraries as Markets for Books. This was a look into a world that is a pole apart from internet bookselling. With this information, and its diligent application, anyone with at least a modicum of talent could gain entry into this area. He covered the area pretty thoroughly including why the library market, identifying potential customers, how to create bibliographical lists and dealing with librarians.

Evaluation and Pricing was taught by Ed Glaser, an internationally known specialist in rare and important books in science, technology and medicine. He noted that the keystone for rare books is 1/3, 1/3, 1/3. He explained this as being 1/3 for acquisition, 1/3 for handling and marketing, and 1/3 for profit. Ed covered auctions, price guides, dealer’s price lists, the Internet and other resources in detail.

Chris Volk discussed Internet Bookselling as well as Buying on the Internet. She went into various websites and their peculiarities as well as the ability to move books. We discussed dealing with customers and their questions. One of the promotions she offers is gift wrapping—certainly essential for any Internet seller. Chris offered some caveats about buying stock from eBay sellers. Various database programs for book dealers were also discussed both in her talks and Dan Gregory’s. The general consensus was that BookTrakker is the best available setup for controlling your books next to having your own proprietary database custom designed.

Mike Ginsberg discussed Book Fairs, Scouting, and gave a session on Auctions. Then he conducted an auction of donated materials, some of which were quite worthwhile and brought good prices. The auction included various reference materials, book related items and a dinner with the faculty. Mike has an interestingly disciplined approach to scouting. He lays out the route ahead to time with specific objectives in mind. His comments on equipment for book fairs was very useful. One tip he gave was, “Always bring a flashlight for the top and bottom shelves that no one can see.”

Tom Congalton is the proprietor of Between the Covers Rare Books. He is also co-owner of Allottabooks.com. Tom made the comment that only 10% of his income came from the Internet. This was a sentiment echoed by many of the faculty. His specialty is modern firsts, however he easily fielded questions in any area that came up. He does a number of major shows each year and is well known there. Currently he is chairman of the ABAA membership committee.

There was a conducted tour of a number of the downtown bookstores which I did not attend.

A CPA, Bradley A. Walberg, conducted a session on taxes and accounting. He specializes in the area of books and maps. The more so as his wife is a book dealer of 20 years standing. I had to skip this talk in order not to miss Dan’s second presentation. I hope that the faculty will address this issue so that future seminarians won’t have to share my disappointment. They were, however, most cooperative in providing substantial outlines of both talks to help us make the decision as to which to attend.

During the whole time the faculty were punctilious in making themselves available to answer all questions and give advice where possible. I tried to pick a different table at lunch each day to get a cross section of their philosophies. Everyone was helpful, everyone was gracious and everyone boasted a wealth of experience.

A word about the staff which included 5 past ABAA presidents. These men and women are the legends of tomorrow and the frontrunners of today in the rare book trade. They are well worth listening to.

Kenny Parolini operates Poor Man's Books out of Vineland, NJ and can be contacted at http://www.poormansbooks.com.

Joe Perlman of Mostly Useful Fictions

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My name is Joe Perlman and I am the proud owner of Mostly Useful Fictions. The name describes my specialty, which I like to think of as “Useful Fiction” (i.e., twentieth century world literature). I sell what I love, mostly serious fiction, including lots of literature in translation.

I have been a bibliophile for as long as I can remember. Since elementary school, I have never had enough shelf space for all the books that I own. I have always had at least two or three boxes of excess books in my closet, often many more.

My journey to becoming a book dealer has been long and meandering. It best described by some lines in a poem called The Waking, by Theodore Roethke:

“I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.”

In college, I majored in Psychology and English, and moved from New England to New York City in 1973 to start graduate school in Educational Psychology. In spite of the heavy work load, I would stop studying around midnight, just as the heat in the apartment building went off, turn on the oven for warmth, and pick up a novel. At the time, I was enchanted by the South American magical realists. Unfortunately, their writing did not lull me to sleep. Rather, I had to fight with myself to put the books down so I could wake up in time for classes. The last vestiges of the Book Row on lower Broadway and 4^th Avenue were still in existence at that time, so I spent hours browsing and managed to acquire quite a few books, in spite of my meager student income.

In 1983, married with two children and three rejected doctoral dissertation topics, I dropped out of graduate school, left the not for profit world, and accepted a position on Wall Street as a computer programmer trainee at the infamous Drexel Burnham Lambert. I worked for several firms and progressed from trainee to programmer to programming manager. Eventually I left the technical side and became a business analyst specializing in the relationship between banks and brokerage houses. As my income rose, so did the number of books that I was able to buy.

By 1985, we left Manhattan for the suburbs. We moved to East Northport on Long Island and my commute to Wall Street grew to nearly two hours each way. I was able to buy and read more books than ever. In spite of the fact that the house had a den with wall to wall bookshelves, I still did not have enough shelf space. Every year the number of cartons of books in the attic increased. I collected modern first editions, South American and Eastern European writers in translation, and writers I fell in love with on the train—Yukio Mishima, Naguib Mahfouz, and William Trevor, to name a few.

In the early 1990s I saw an article in Biblio magazine about book collector groups. A Long Island group was mentioned, so I wrote a letter to the secretary asking for information about the group. They sent me an invitation to the next meeting, and I have been a member ever since. The organization, Long Island Book Collectors, meets monthly on Sunday afternoons at Adelphi University. Each meeting is hosted by a member on a rotating basis, and the member either recruits a speaker, or talks about some aspect of their own collections. I spoke several times, and continue to learn a lot from other members.

One of the valuable lessons that I learned about collecting was to focus and collect in depth. While I continue to buy modern firsts, I now seriously collect Jack Kerouac (who lived in Northport, Long Island for several years), James Joyce, particularly Ulysses and books about Ulysses, Anne Frank, and my newest collecting passion Alice Munro. The best part of belonging to a collector group is that you can talk about books with people who love them as much as you do. It is the only place I know where you can lament the fact that the one book you need to complete a collection costs $1,200, and the person next to you will not look shocked that a book could be so expensive, but instead will reply, “Well, you really should get it, you can afford it and you’re entitled to splurge every once in awhile!”

The other important lesson that I learned from the group was that one third of the members were also book dealers. They had formed a separate organization, the Long Island Antiquarian Book Dealers Association (LIABDA), and I was asked to speak to the group a few times about my collecting interests. I became friendly with some of the dealers, attended their twice yearly book fairs, and realized that I should become a dealer myself.

When my eldest child left for college in 1997, I started buying books for resale. I had decided that once I had 1,000 books to sell I would put them on-line. I gleaned through the cartons in the attic, scoured tag sales, library sales and used bookstores and by the fall of 1998 I was ready to start. I went to the county office to register my business name, received a tax ID number, and began to price and catalogue the books. Fortunately, I had a teen-aged daughter at home who was glad to earn some extra spending money by helping to enter the books into the database. I would make notes about the condition and price on a post-it attached to the front of each book. She in her typical teenage fashion would emerge at midnight and type away until dawn. When I awoke there would be a large pile of books without post-its, meaning the data had been entered, and a small pile of books with additional post-it notes with her questions. When the one thousandth book was entered, I uploaded them to Bibliofind, and was open for business. I remember the first order—a first American edition of Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, the Sea.

The orders increased slowly each year. I discovered that in part, it was a numbers game—the more books listed, the more orders. I now have about 8,500 books on-line at any given time, and hope to increase that number to 12,000 over the next year or two. Bibliofind is long gone, but I list on the standards, ABE, Alibris, Amazon, as well as my own website, Mostly Useful Fictions.

Since I always enjoyed writing, I began to write some humor pieces on making the transition from collecting books to selling them. They were published in the now defunct Book Quote magazine. When the editor of the LIABDA newsletter retired, I was quickly recruited, so I have been the corresponding secretary and newsletter editor for that organization for the past four years. Some of the pieces I have written for that newsletter have been reprinted in the Standard, and Book Dealer Monthly. Others are on my website.

Working full-time during the day, commuting two hours each way and trying to build an internet business have kept me pretty busy for several years. As of July, I have cut back on my day job to 21 hours, so that Mostly Useful Fictions could become my primary job.

Awhile back I wrote a piece about bookselling and the lottery. For me, most of the time being a book dealer feels like winning the lottery even without the big check from the State of New York. Mostly Useful Fictions really did start as the saying goes with just “a dollar and a dream.” That was the first time I actually bought a book at a tag sale, not for my own collection, but to start to build up an inventory to put up on the internet. I can even remember the name though it was sold a long time ago—Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity. It is a great book and I still pick up and list copies whenever I run across them.

A dollar here and a dream there, and the books began piling up. I may have chosen a few bad sets along the way, but the dream persists, and grows stronger over time.

I have held many jobs in my various careers. I lasted one night as a cook at McDonald’s back in high school. I have been a car jockey, a psychiatric aide in a drug and alcohol hospital, a supermarket cashier, a research assistant and a grants writer. I have taught early childhood development as an adjunct at a university in New York City. I have designed and developed numerous computer systems for Wall Street firms including money transfer that handle several billion dollars worth of wire transfers every business day. None of these jobs has given me the satisfaction that I get from selling a book that I love to someone eager to read and to own it.

Joe Perlman operates Mostly Useful Fictions out of East Northport, NY and can be contacted at http://www.mostlyusefulfictions.com.

Marc Monsarrat of Bookmarc Books

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First, a few words about me. My name is Marc Monsarrat, owner and sweeper of the digital floors of www.bookmarc.ca, otherwise known as Bookmarc Books.

My parents were both authors and editors, so I believe I came upon my love of words and illustrations honestly. Before my semi-retirement I had spent 30 years in the printing industry in Canada, so I believe I came upon my respect for paper and ink honestly, as well. I believe that in order to deal with old magazines and books going back more than 75 years, you have to understand what time and conditions can do to the pulp and paper material and treat these babies with care and close attention.

I got into bookselling by purchasing an existing inventory about four years ago. Nothing spectacular—3,500 general inventory titles. The descriptions had to be re-written, conditions checked and photos or scans taken of the more interesting titles. Very time-consuming, but I felt that if I were to represent these books properly, I had to grade them on my own.

At the same time I was trying to come up with a specialty, because that’s all I heard—“specialize, specialize” from other sellers (Thank You). Knowing I had to specialize meant it had to be in something that would hold my interest, because our enthusiasm and knowledge of our books shows in our listings. Well, one day I walked into a bookstore and found a back room full of Astounding Science Fictions and Weird Tales and Dell Mapbacks and Ace Doubles and thought, now this is something I could specialize in. The combination of the writing and the illustrating, coupled with the era and the politics, etc. really appealed to me. Since then my inventory has almost doubled, mainly in the speculative fiction area, from the 1920s and onward.

The more I began to focus on pulp fiction, the more fascinating the subject became. The authors, artists, publishers and editors combined to make some incredibly thought provoking books and pulps.

The effect of the atomic age on science fiction writing and publishing really opened up the field. It’s interesting to note that many of the authors used pseudonyms in the beginning for a variety of reasons creating a challenge when trying to track down information to chart an author’s progress.

On the weird fiction front we have the triumvirate of Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E. Howard. Combine those three with Weird Tales and Arkham House and you have some wonderful stories with even better stories behind the stories.

The market for historical speculative fiction is still growing. There are areas in the world that I sell to more than others. Sweden and Germany spring to mind, as well as Great Britain.

There are specific issues that confront the Canadian bookseller. The main one in my mind is our Canadian postal system which is downright expensive when compared to media mail or m-bags in the US. An American seller can charge $4.00 for shipping and still make a bit, but up here we have to charge $7.00 just to break even on the shipping component. Multiply that by 500 sales a year and you get a sense of how much we have to subsidize our shipping charges just to stay competitive.

Another issue for us is the exchange rate against the US dollar. Four years ago or so, when I first started listing, the US dollar was worth $1.39 against the Canadian dollar; now it’s worth $1.11. That’s a 20 percent drop, for those of us who list in USD. On the positive side, a lot of my purchases and listing fees are cheaper now because of the relative strength of the Canadian dollar.

But there are lots of issues confronting independent booksellers globally. That discussion is best left for another day. I still deal in general inventory as well, because, let’s face it, they sell. Not everyone is a collector and the general public seems to have a voracious appetite for reading, whether it’s for entertainment or knowledge.

My general impression is that most of us didn’t get into this to get rich. What we’re looking for is the ability to make a comfortable income, doing something we love to do. To this idealistic soul, there’s something to be said for the promotion of literacy in this day and age of iPods, Xboxes and downloadable ring tones.

Marc Monsarrat operates Bookmarc Books out of Malahat, British Columbia, Canada and can be contacted at http://www.bookmarc.ca.

IOBA Standard: Volume 7(2) Addenda

John Hardy of Hardy Books

I'm John Hardy of Hardy Books, Nevada City, California. We're in our 10th year of business.

Hardy Books specializes in “All Things Californian” (California history, fine Press, authors, poets, photographers, artists, food and drink, flora, fauna, movies, books to film, photoplay editions, law and order, San Francisco, Yosemite, Sierra Nevada, and on Michael Ginsberg, Michael Heaston, Susie & John Hardy Relaxing After the 2006 Gold Rush Book Fair

Michael Ginsberg, Michael Heaston, Susie & John Hardy Relaxing After the 2006 Gold Rush Book Fair

and on), Western Americana, and Books About Books.

As to marketing, we are open by appointment, and on the internet at www.hardybooks.com, which leads prospective buyers to our books listed on www.abebooks.com. Hardy Books is also one of 15 local dealers in a co-operative open shop called Booktown Books & Tomes in Grass Valley, California (4 miles from Nevada City).

Our Bookroom at Hardy Books By Appointment Table

Our Bookroom at Hardy Books By Appointment Table

My wife Susie and I also produce the Gold Rush Book Fair in May each year at the Nevada County Fairgrounds ("California's Most Beautiful Fairgrounds"). The 7^th Annual Gold Rush Book Fair will be held on May 19, 2007. We have over fifty dealers with all kinds of books and paper material, although the preponderance of the material is Western Americana. The GRBF is on Saturday, with the Dealer move-in on Friday. On Friday night, we host the Booksellers Banquet, a complimentary sit-down dinner for all our dealers held in the historic Masonic Hall in Nevada City. Each year we name an "Honored Guest Bookseller," based upon "Ethical leadership and scholarship in American bookselling." The Honored Guest Bookseller is given Booth #1 at the GRBF and we put them up at a local hotel, all with our compliments. Past recipients of the honor have been William Reese Company, John & Susie Hardy at the Gold Rush Book Fair Dealer Sign-In

John & Susie Hardy at the Gold Rush Book Fair Dealer Sign-In

The Arthur Clark Company, Emmett Harrington Fine Books, Michael Heaston Rare Books and Manuscripts, Edwin Glaser Fine Books and Michael Ginsberg Books. Visit Gold Rush Book Fair for more details and photographs.

Susie and I attended the eBayLive! Conference in Las Vegas this year and learned about eBay Stores. Hardy Books opened an eBay store several weeks ago and the results are very promising. As one would expect, the eBay folks are very helpful in providing all sorts of templates, marketing tools and suggestions to help one succeed.

I have been a collector of books, primarily Californiana, all my life, as was my father. He was a member of The Book Club of California, as am I. I retired after thirty-five years as a trial lawyer in San Francisco. We bought our house in Nevada City in 1994 and moved here full-time upon my retirement in 1999. Nevada City is a wonderfully restored Gold Rush town, in the Sierra Nevada Foothills, about half-way between Sacramento and Lake Tahoe. The area has been designated by Hay-on-Wye's Richard Booth as "Gold Cities Book Town," because of the many bookstores, printers, bookbinders and bibliophiles located in Nevada City and Grass Valley.
Nevada City, California

I've attended the Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar twice; the first time at the dawn of the internet and the second time after the internet explosion. Other than a long apprenticeship in a famous bookshop somewhere, it's the best thing that ever happened to the education of booksellers, be they fledglings or seasoned veterans.

I've thoroughly enjoyed the company of all book people, be they dealers, customers, librarians, bookbinders, printers or whatever. It's a vast club to which we all belong.

John Hardy operates Hardy Books out of Nevada City, CA and can be contacted at http://www.hardybooks.com.

Addenda

Post-Erattum

In the previous issue, we used “Errata” for the column heading in this space. Errata, of course, is actually a list of writing or printing errors in a given work, usually provided on a small slip of paper and laid in loosely or inserted. I have been taken to task by a British editorial colleague (on the Fourth of July no less, though a bit of a tempest in a teapot as nobody else complained) over my apparently ignorant misuse of the term, as “Addenda” more clearly fits the bill. I pointed out that I was merely stretching the use of the word, as some of the column deals with the errors, misconceptions, and deceits of the modern online book trade, but he counters that I have stretched to the point of “a complete tumble out of the window and a fall to disaster.” Addenda is a bit staid in terms of zingy column headings, and I enjoy the old OED quote, “In whom the dear errata column is the best page in all the volume!,” but we must not forget our mission of education, and if the language is too organic one ends up with literal manure, so Addenda it is. As long as we are qualifying headings, “Happy Hits” means funny little things one runs into when database searching. They aren’t always happy, but I’m sticking with that one.

Happy Hits

-One of the search services lists 36 copies of Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time with a publication date of 2030.

-The bibliographical details of genealogical works can be hard to pin down. These are usually published in limited quantity, often by first-time authors who are long on family history but short on publishing information. Take Gaskill Genealogy, by Elizabeth P. Koleda. That’s the gilt title on the blue front cover of this 759 page work. No copies available online, but there are two WorldCat entries. The 1989 original is held by fourteen repositories, and what looks like a 1996 revision by Donald Oreste Caselli is held by four. You usually want the revision with genealogies, but in this case it doesn’t matter. To back up a bit, the printing in this book is from a computer-generated program of the era. Not too hard to read, but you feel like you’re looking at a printout rather than a published page. The author thanks one Mike Pawley in the dedication, “a very understanding computer friend.” It is this cramped and monotonous printing that led the original cataloger to miss the true title, Edward Gascoigne, aka Edward Gaskill and Many of His Descendants, directly across from the table of contents. That tells you more, and it doesn’t get confused with Gaskill Genealogy by Clinton Gaskill Cudaback, a wholly different work published in 1904. In a new half-page foreword stuck or pasted to an endpaper by Donald Oreste Caselli, a New Jersey relative of some sort, he tells a little about author Elizabeth Potts Koleda, and then uses the occasion to provide the history of his own branch not included in the original work. Caselli also applied a label over the title page "Compiled By" note. It gives us five lines about Koleda, so we learn that she died three years after her life work was published, but it obliterates what lies beneath, which is the original date of publication. Caselli did the same thing at the very rear of this work under "Direct Correspondence," covering over the original place of self-publication (the same WorldCat record cites both Princeville and Prineville, OR, they are both real towns in that state, and you can’t quite make out the original text under the label in order to settle the question) with his own address in Egg Harbor City, NJ, and thus confusing another sloppy cataloger. To summarize, then, Caselli somehow snapped up a handful of Koleda 1989 first edition copies, and three labels later he is the co-author of a 1996 revision published on the opposite coast, though none of those last three things actually happened. At any rate, on the somewhat confusing, busy, and transmogrified title page, under the heading "Serendipity," we find the following from the original author.

"The British Isles are made up of four nations. The Scots, who keep the Sabbath and anything else they can lay their hands on; the Welsh, who pray on their knees, and on their neighbours; the Irish, who don't know what the devil they want, but are willing to fight anyone for it; and the English, who consider themselves a race of self-made men, thus relieving the Almighty of a terrible responsibility."

Blurbettes

From the dust jacket of Lonesome George: The Life and Loves of a Conservation Icon, by Henry Nicholls (London: Macmillan, 2006).

“Lonesome George is on the stamps of the Galapagos Islands. He is a 5ft long, 200lb tortoise aged between 60 and 200. In 1971 he was discovered on the remote island of Pinta, from which tortoises had supposedly been exterminated by whalers and seal hunters in search of a square meal. He was carted off to his current home, the Charles Darwin Research Station on Santa Cruz island. He has been there ever since, on the off chance that scientific ingenuity will conjure up a way of reproducing him, and resurrecting his species. Meanwhile a million tourists and dozens of baffled scientists have looked on as George shows not a jot of interest in the female company provided.

“Henry Nicholls details the efforts of conservationists to preserve the Galapagos’ unique biodiversity and illustrates how their experiences and discoveries are echoed the world over. He explores the controversies raging over which mates are most appropriate for George and the risks of releasing crossbreed offspring into the wild. His story draws together the islands’ geology, evolution, history of human exploitation and imperiled future. It features strong characters, from Charles Darwin, to cloning pioneer Ian Wilmut, to the beautiful Swiss graduate who spent four months trying to persuade George to have sex. Some 100,000 tourists visit the Galapagos Islands each year; all drop in on George.”

Book Blogs

Confessions of a Bookplate Junkie

http://bookplatejunkie.blogspot.com

Posted 8/27/2006

“Children’s Bookplates and Meerkats”

My Home Library

Every Friday evening my wife and I watch a television series called Meerkat Manor. One of the things that bonds Meerkat families is grooming and it occurs to me that reading to children before bedtime is much like grooming.

For those of you who read to your children and want to give them a bookplate click onto the link for My Home Library above.

You will find this free service delightful.

If some of you out there are especially proud of the bookplate(s) you or your child have already designed why don't you send me a scan? I can be reached at Bookplatemaven@hotmail.com

There are a number of children's bookplates in my own collection and I have scanned a few for your enjoyment. Additional scans and biographical information about the bookplate designers will be added throughout the week.

The bookplate for Harold Chandler Kimball Jr. was designed by Harvey Ellis (1852-1904) who is best known as a furniture designer who worked with Gustav Stickley. I may be mistaken, but it appears that Harold Chandler Kimball Jr. graduated from Harvard in 1912 and was a casualty of world war 1.

I bought the bookplate designed by Winifred Bromhall at the Papermania show in Hartford. The artist was unknown to me so here is what I found in a Google search:

"Winifred Bromhall was born in Walsall, Staffordshire, England and was educated at Queen Mary's School, Walsall Art School and Birmingham University. Her family immigrated to The United States in 1924. She worked for a while at The Children's Art Center in Boston and in the art department of a New York settlement house before illustrating full time.

She illustrated her first children's book, Zodiac Town: The Rhymes Of Amos and Ann, by Nancy Byrd Turner in 1921. She continued to illustrate for other authors until 1945, when she began writing and illustrating her own books. Her first self-illustrated book was Johanna Arrives.”

Ye Olde Booksellers

Here is a small volume with red pebbled boards entitled, Forty Years Among the Old Booksellers of Philadelphia, with Bibliographical Remarks, by W. Brotherhead (Philadelphia, PA: A. P. Brotherhead, 1891). This 122 page gem must be well known to those interested in the early history of our profession in this city. He tells his own story first.

“In 1849 I commenced to sell old books at the northwest corner of Sixth and Market streets. My stock was worth about $60. It did not fill up my shelves, and I added cigars to my stock, and filled the empty shelves with cigar boxes. These in a short time I took down, and in their place I covered the empty shelves with Catlin’s portraits of Indians. These being highly colored, made a good show.”

Toward the rear of this little work are chapters on Men and Books, Prices and Editions of Books (with many details of fantastic Americana collections scattered through sale or auction), Something About Old Books and Their Buyers, Old Book Collectors, etc., followed by an index. We are interested in pp. 21-71, however, where he gives an account of dozens of his contemporary booksellers. Excerpts follow.

-Apley: In one of those stores resided a very dirty man, surrounded on all sides by a collection of old books almost without form, scattered here and there without any classification. He was a man of about fifty years of age or thereabouts; he might have been older, but his dirty and ragged appearance made it difficult to say how old he was. He always looked dark and sallow. His features were not repulsive to look at, but they had that miserly cast which at one glance caused him to be a marked character. The windows of his store were so thick with dirt and rubbish that it was difficult to see the titles of his books. I have many times visited the store for the purpose of purchasing books, and in looking round through the vistas of shelves erected at random, you would see him in some nook or corner lift up his bedizened face, and if early in the morning he would be cooking or eating his breakfast. The smell of the room, with the mustiness of the old books and the smell of his eatables, was anything buy savory or cleanly. The description which Dickens gives in “Old Curiosity Shop,” of the store in which Little Nell’s grandfather lived, is nothing to compare with old Apley’s store in the Arcade. As far as my recollection carries me, he slept and lived in this dirty atmosphere of old books. If he was married, and I think he was not, I never in all my visits saw the appearance of a womanly face, or any signs of womanly care and attention.

-James Dalling: Dalling was a Scotchman, of the old school. He kept a very select collection of old books for sale on South Eighth street, above Chestnut, east side, now Green’s hotel, and was well patronized by book buyers. He was a man of more than ordinary education, and attracted the best class of book buyers. He was not a man who stooped to conquer, but was firm in all his dealings, and with all the canny characteristics of his race. He, like the majority of old booksellers, did not amass a fortune; in fact, the pure and unadulterated old bookseller seldom does more than live comfortably, collect stock, and feast among his books, and love to talk to his literary customers of the great geniuses in the Elizabethan age, and descant on the talents and greatness of the age of Queen Anne.

-John Pennington: Mr. Pennington’s store become the centre of the elite litterateurs of this city, and of men like Charles Sumner and others. When the literary men of the Eastern, Northern and Southern States visited this city, nearly all were attracted to his store to buy from his fine stock, or give orders for European books. The literary chit-chat of those men, for I have heard them, reminded me of what can be found in Boswell’s “Life of Johnson,” where men like the burly, stern moralist Dr. Johnson met the inspired idiot Oliver Goldsmith, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Garrick, and other great men, where their wit and learning kept the table in a roar. Those times are past, but I hope at sometime will be resuscitated. I forget the year when John Pennington removed from Fourth street to Seventh street, near Walnut street. He was there for several years. The war broke out in 1861, and as his principal trade was among Southern men, his business become paralyzed, and his losses great. He felt his loss of the Southern trade very much; and as New York had begun about this time to pay special attention to the importation of books, engravings, and the fine arts, we lost that part of our business in this city, and it has been for many years prosecuted with great energy and tact, and is still pursued with vigor by them. To our disgrace it must be said, that New York has robbed us of that fine literary business we had here from 1800 up to 1860. This city was the great literary emporium of the United States from 1800 up to 1850. The finest edition of the Bible—hot-pressed copies—were issued by the Smalls, and fac simile editions of the English Classics were issued from the press of Wardle. Nearly all that prestige has gone; spasmodic attempts appear now and then, it is true, but the general effect has passed into other hands. John Pennington died some years ago; his business passed into the hands of his son, E. Pennington; until physical infirmities caused him to relinquish it into the hands of his son; but the halo of old John Pennington has passed away, and his fine old store and name, except to a few, is sunk into oblivion.

-Peterson and Childs: The old book business cabined and confined this young Hercules, and he desired a larger sphere for his talents, and suggested the publication of books. About this time the intrepid traveler, Dr. Kane, had returned from his Arctic voyage—he was the hero of the day. Mr. Childs saw his golden opportunity, and urged Mr. Peterson to make arrangements with Dr. Kane for the publication of his travels. Mr. Childs, with great energy, entered heart and soul into this great enterprise, and, taking the tide at the flood, pushed it on with a resistless vigor—fanned the flame of excitement from every point that an acute observer only can see—and the result was a marvelous success. The book was illustrated with sketches from Dr. Kane’s drawings, by that erratic genius, James Hamilton. Those who are acquainted with art, know well that the genius of James Hamilton, in a collective sense, stands unrivalled as an artist in chiaroscuro, and bold effects. The book will always find a place in Arctic discovery, and stands second to none in artistic illustration. I am not sure, but believe that the masterly management of Mr. Childs in this book caused Mr. Peterson to accept him as his partner.

-W. A. Leary: Mr. Leary was a short, stout man, persevering and industrious in his habits, though by no means an educated man. He dealt in books as a grocer deals in sugar and candles, more by weight than from any intrinsic value; in fact, he did not know anything about the bibliographical qualities of books, he never pretended to know, and for this admission we must accord him due credit.

-Paine: Mr. Paine kept a book store with a book stand on South Second street near Noble street. His stock was not large. He dealt in school books, and sold any old miscellaneous books he could purchase. He was a very kind man, but did not know much about the value of old books.

-John Campbell: Campbell was a pushing man; he soon took the lines of his surroundings, and was one of the heaviest buyers of books at auction. John’s burly figure was always expected there, and soon his sonorous voice was heard above all others. If any one chanced to bid against him, woe to the bidder; John would again raise his sonorous voice to a higher pitch, and advance the price in such a vigorous tone that a laugh or a titter would ring through the room.

-Hugh Hamel: This old bookseller kept his store on South Tenth street, next to the Mercantile Library. He was there for many years, and had a large and good stock of old books for sale. He had risen from a mere peddler of books, and by dint of perseverance, collected them as a junk dealer collects his rubbish. He was probably the most ignorant of all the old booksellers in this city. At one time he could not write his own name. Whether he acquired this accomplishment afterwards I know not.

Peter Doyle: He was a man of much culture, with a refined taste; his personal appearance was somewhat peculiar. He was, in physique, rather small; delicate frame, with a large head and a peculiar cast in his eye. His face bore a studious aspect—pale and full of thought. A cast of melancholy, somewhat Hamlet-like, struck you on first impression. He was the most silent bookseller I ever met; only his most intimate friends could influence him in any prolonged conversation. He had his books carefully arranged, and when rare or valuable he wrote the most beautiful chirography and suitable descriptions I ever read. He was well posted in general literature, and had a fair knowledge of the bibliographical character of his books. So silent and so very soft in his conversation, that the book had really to sell itself. If you asked for a book and he had it, he would silently give it to you and point to the price, which as a rule was higher in price than any other bookseller in the city. No other effort to sell was made. He was always coldly courteous to you, and the reticent gentleman was always to be seen in him. His window was always filled with choice and rare editions, and often some choice work of art.

The sale of his fine stock of books was a very unfortunate affair to Peter Doyle, and there can be but little doubt that it hastened the close of his eccentric but high moral life. He was a man easily duped, and many cases are known where designing knaves took advantage of his generosity. One morning he was found dead in his store, unattended and uncared for. Peace to his ashes.

-Brown Brothers: Kept for several years an old book store, I think at the northwest corner of Fourth and Arch streets. One of the brothers was employed in the book department of Thomas & Sons, auctioneers, and had the best chances of purchasing old books of any booksellers in the city. This advantage was well used, and enabled the brothers to have a fine collection of books in their store. The brother with Thomas & Sons acquired bad habits—too fond of stimulants—and he died in a few years after the store was opened. The other brother, who was a kind and genial man, after the death of his brother, removed the stock somewhere out in Iowa, and whether he is dead or not I have not heard.

-Joseph Sabin: He entered into his new store with vigor and energy, and soon became the chief buyer at Thomas and Son’s auction store. For a few years he and John Campbell were the principal buyers, and few buyers could purchase books except Sabin and Campbell. Jennings the auctioneer seemed to favor them when opportunity offered. The consequence was that as credit was freely given, Sabin soon had a fine stock of books, the finest in the city at that time. Sabin was the connoisseur among old book buyers, and a fine business was the result. Had his rectitude been equal to his ability, none could have surpassed him in his business. One fine morning his store was closed and his whereabouts was not known. Jennings, of Thomas & Son’s, who had credited him with several thousand dollars, was soon on the alert, and found all the books had been shipped to New York. He at once went there, replevined them, and had them sent to their auction store and sold on their account. This ended Sabin’s career in this city. [More on Sabin’s New York adventures and bibliographic efforts follows.]

-Moses Polock: The library of Professor Reed, who was lost in the steamer Arctic over thirty years ago, he bought of the family, and in it were many fine books. The Roxborough Club books, a rare collection of early English reprints, were in this library. I presume Moses Polock was and is in a fair comfortable condition, because he made little exertion as a business man to sell his books, and because his prices are and were always fanciful. At any time after 10 o’clock in the morning you can ascend to his store; there you will find him bachelor-like all alone in his glory, breathing the atmosphere of his old books. He will meet you in the most genial manner, and will talk to you about his gems in the most intelligent spirit. There is but one exception I know of to this. He once sold for $16 “The Laws of New York,” printed by W. Bradford, a good price at that time; but the same copy was sold in the Brindley’s Collection of Americana at auction for $1600. The mention of this fact operated on Polock’s mind as if he had taken bitter gall for his breakfast. He has a rare early knowledge of men in the book business for the last forty years; but being a very reticent and diffident man, I am afraid those of the city will lose a charming lot of history about book-sellers, publishers and books. He is still in his old place, ever ready to do business with you, but is seldom visited except some old book-worm wants some very scarce book or pamphlet.

-John Hunt: Some twenty-five years ago, this brusque Englishman kept a book stand at the southeast corner of Sixth and Arch streets, and was very energetic and pushing in business. He also peddled books through the country in a wagon. He seemed to do a thriving business for several years; but all is not gold that glitters. His stock was seized and sold for the benefit of his creditors. He still lives in Camden, N.J.

-H. McKean: This old book-seller, who had a book stand against the burial ground was in Fifth street, near Spruce; and also a book store at the northwest corner of Fifth and Adelphi streets—added but little to the credit of the profession of old booksellers. He was literally of the character of an old junk dealer; and as a man his conduct was anything but exemplary—nay, censurable in every sense. I regret to write thus, but truth is the best, after all cavil may say. He was an Irishman by birth, but is now dead.

-W. S. Rentuol: An odd-looking character, a Scotchman by birth, and a good type of the old curiosity monger. He is lean and lanky in personal appearance, and always very frowsy-looking about the head. He has a fine collection of old Presbyterian books, and is located in the second story on Sixth street above Market. I understand he came here from Pittsburgh. He has over thirty years, but is known only by that class of book-buyers. He is of the old blue-stocking type, which is now becoming rare. I presume that from his long experience he knows every book of note in the literature he sells, from John Knox to the Old Covenanters of to-day. He is known to few collectors of books, as he deals only in those mentioned.

-Henry Holloway: For some years he was very successful; his stock so increased that he rented the next store, and had both of them well filled with books. He is a man of general culture, and has translated books from the German. In physique he is weak and puny; he has been suffering for over twenty years from a spinal complaint, but he still lives and sells old books; he is kind and genial in his manners, and a very interesting conversationalist. I have sold him many books in the course of twenty years, and always found him pleasant. After he had taken the additional store in Tenth street, he flourished for some time; but some ill luck or misfortune overtook him, and he had to remove to S. Ninth street, near Cherry street. There he opened with a poor stock of books; he lingered there for a short time, and then he removed to Eighth and Wood streets, with very few books, and opened a newspaper stand, where he remained a few years doling out a mere existence. About a year ago he removed to S. Tenth street, above Walnut, and there he has a few books, and I hope is improving his financial condition. Old age is creeping on him and with it poor health: it is not to be wondered at that he should be somewhat eccentric in his habits.

-Leary & Co.: Old booksellers everywhere consider old school books as trash, and place them away in some remote corner of the store. I am aware that the plea is, there is money in them; I am also aware that this firm has made some money out of them; hence it is continued. But does not this show that the prevailing active spirit of this firm is not influenced by such high types as James Lackington, Henry Bohn or a Quaritch, or the first-class old booksellers in Europe and in this country? All persons who know this well-known store know that it contains many first-class books; and why the lowest class should be their specialty can only be accounted for on the plea of making money. Primarily speaking, money is the chief factor, the great lever in business; but there were old booksellers, and there are still a few left, who look on money produced as secondary as a means to a brighter and nobler end. That end is the intrinsic love of the subject-matter of the books—the large amount of knowledge derived from the reading of them—the association and communion with the great minds of the past and the present—all of which tend to elevate the mind, the development of a higher moral tone, and the pleasures of intellectual growth. I know of old booksellers who have on their shelves the finest and recherché editions of the best authors. I have been in their stores when some of those fine books have been sold, and when the buyer had gone the expression was made, “I am sorry I have sold that book—such a fine edition of so great a writer.” Such men are rare, I know, and show that the money value of the book was merely secondary.

-Holloway: He has a book stand and basement in Third street, near Walnut, and has been there for several years, and has a stock of old books and magazines jumbled up in a very chaotic mass.

-Walter B. Saunders: A few months ago he removed his fine stock of books into a large store in Walnut street, above Ninth street, and I learn he is selling off his fine books and has commenced the publication of medical books. For this I am sorry, and I fear it shows that the patronage of our book buyers has not been liberal enough to induce him to continue to have for sale such a fine class of books.

-David McKay: This young man, whom I am not personally acquainted with, I have learned is a Scotchman, and was a salesman in Lippincott’s book store. He started the old and new book business a few years ago, and seems full of energy. His stock of new and old books is large and of good quality. His experience in old books is necessarily limited, and as several of our old booksellers have become venders and jobbers of new books, it can scarcely be expected that this young man, who is a large jobber of new books, can be of much authority among bibliomaniacs. He also publishes a few books, and judging from their character, no great fortune can be expected from their sales[Guess again]. His store is on Ninth street above Chestnut street, rear of the Girard House.

-W. H. Brotherhead: His place of business is at 288 Girard avenue. He has been selling old books for a year, and seems as if success was with him. He has a full stock, and I trust all will be successful. He is one of my sons, and I trust and believe that the old book business will prosper.

Made in IOBA

Amy Ione of Diatrope Books is the author of Innovation and Visualization: Trajectories, Strategies, and Myths (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005).

There Once Was a Book from Nantucket

Boggy Solitudes of Nantucket. Not only is that an evocative title from 1908, but it is doubtful that those four words were ever strung in succession before then. This humble 118 page work epitomizes everything I love about bookselling, and here’s why. It was

The Boggy Solitudes of Nantucket on a Bed of Moss in Upstate New York

purchased sight unseen in a large lot of books at a general auction late in 2004. Once home it jumped out as a relatively important item because of the subject matter, it was signed, the binding was attractive, and the NY publisher (Neale) was not well known to me. If this secretive little wildflower had been choiced out on a long table of gaudy dying roses and dyed mums as they often do with books at this auction house, it would not have been plucked until they got down to the $5 level, if at all. Once you have an eye for it, booksellers enjoy a great advantage over dabblers, greater even than that enjoyed by their brethren (and cistern?) in the antiques and collectibles fields. And how much can an old chair or a Pez dispenser inform you anyway, compared to a book? And how much easier is it to ship a book than a set of china? As we sort through the piles and rows back home, some like this catch our eye and demand our attention. We want to understand what it is we have here, and if we happen to like the subject matter or have an enquiring mind, it’s fun to delve deeper. I enjoyed leafing through this wonderful collection of brief essays and observations on the natural history of the island, complete with poetic and literary quotations. The reddish orange lettering and pink and green floral decoration stands in simple but stunning contrast against the black boards, and a little blue came through for some reason, to marvelous effect.

There was no good way to place a value on this book using existing records like online listings, prices realized at auction, or bookseller catalogs. No copies for sale online is a very good sign, and the subject matter is specialized rather than general, which is always desirable. It would pay to authenticate the author’s signature though, minor as she was, and that was a tall order. Anne Wilson is a common name, and the much later inscription only reads, “For my friend Margaret Dewey. With the love of Anne. July the Eighth, 1933.” I searched many reference books and databases, including CLAMS (Cape Libraries Automated Materials Sharing), to no avail. I finally sent out a query to the BookFinder Insider list, enquiring about Nantucket bibliographies, and lo and behold the resident genius there uncovered Everett Uberto's 1946 Nantucket in Print, which I promptly paged up and consulted. Not only did it list this rare title, but it provided the author’s middle name of Washington. This led to another scarce, slim book of verses by Anne Washington Wilson published nearly twenty years later entitled Scrimshaw (Baltimore, MD: Norman, Remington Co., 1925), with an attractive scrimshaw art cover of its own. Paging this up from the same research library on a long shot, it was signed by the author, in full this time! The handwriting is the same, they both end, "with the love of," and the two Annes are identical.

The sleuthing was fun, it pays to strengthen those types of skills, and I could now honestly claim that this was signed and inscribed by the author. I divined a reasonable asking price of $150. It was listed 1/15/2005, and it sold 8/12/2006, to a buyer in Nantucket. We are both happy. The printer would be proud of how his finished product held up. Above all, Anne Washington Wilson would be delighted that we are talking about her passion and her output nearly a century later.

“The whole island is a veritable garden spot. One has only to go on the moors to appreciate the truth of this statement. Flower succeeds flower, springing up from the sandy soil and moss, in greatest luxuriance and profusion, beginning with the tiny hepatica and blue flash of the violet in the spring to the showy golden-rod and imperial aster of the fall.”

“I sprang out of bed and ran over to the little window from which there was a glorious view of a long stretch of moorland melting into low hills covered with all the different shades of green, from the pale leaves of the bayberry to the blackness of the stunted growth of heath-like little shrubs.”

May the island of Nantucket and the profession of bookselling remain relatively unspoiled.

Postal Priorities

Postal services. We’ve always needed them, and now more than ever. When I read about booksellers who dread entering their local post office, I count my lucky stars that the two or three I use most are staffed with friendly and efficient workers. Complaints include postal clerks who consider our trade to be a nuisance, sticklers who rule against reinforcing tape on Priority mailers, and various local branch interpretations that defy reason and Post Office policy. If somebody behind the counter really has it in for you, the best options seem to be switching post offices (if practical) or complaining to the postmaster or those above him or her. Whether you are in their good graces or not, however, it isn’t the easiest job in the world, and it pays both parties for the bookseller to bend over backwards in facilitating smooth transactions. In my case, my wife helps out by doing about 75% of the mailings. She goes right by a small PO on the way to work, and the receipt often reads right around 8:03 A.M. She is prettier to look at and more polite than I am, or less likely to be impolite at any rate, so that helps too.

The best thing you can do is to be prepared and follow all the rules. Prepare neat and safe packages, use the correct mailing materials for the job, completely fill out customs forms and the like ahead of time, write neatly, tell clerks what they need to know as you proceed, if you are paying by check have it nearly ready to go by the end (including your driver’s license number where required), and try to pick off-hours when the lines are not long. Don’t bend the rules. I forget if I read this on a list or heard it from a clerk, but one customer actually tried to ship a bowling ball Media Mail! Some of the rules are more apparent than others. I saw one customer pitch a fit because he wasn’t allowed to use an empty liquor box for shipping. In short, do everything you can to help the clerk and speed the process. We’ve all been on lines where everyone suffers because of ill preparation or manners.

I generally try to keep a low profile too. If some directive in your region orders a crackdown on booksellers, I don’t necessarily want to spring to mind as the most ready sacrificial lamb. Loose lips sink ships too. I have heard many conversations about eBay while waiting on Post Office lines with my box of eBay and book shipments, and chatting there is a little like discussing the particulars of your gold mine while at the assay office. In closing, national postal systems are not perfect, but most do a remarkably good job at delivering things. My only significant complaint about the U.S. Postal Service is how they are raising Priority and Media Mail rates in leaps and bounds, while all the general public howls about is regular stamps going up a penny or two at a time. So far my area has dodged the new and unimproved privatization and automation efforts, but complaints waft in on westerly winds. They should get out of the Teddy Bear business too, because I’ve never seen anybody buy one, and I used to be able to stack packages where they now sit.

House Calls

“Hi. Are you the man who buys books?”

“I do have that ad in the paper.”

“What kind of books do you buy?”

“It might be easier for you to tell me what you have, but in general I am after large amounts of books, usually hardcover, usually older . . .”

“I have hundreds, and they are mostly old. Some are paperbacks, like Harlequins.”

“What about the hardcovers? What kinds of books are those?”

“Oh, I don’t know, all kinds.”

“Are they like best sellers?”

“They probably were back then.”

“Are they spy and romance novels?”

“There might be some of those.”

“Can you give me an idea of some of the titles?”

“You’d really have to come and look.”

“Thanks for calling, but it doesn’t sound like what I am after. You might try donating them to a book sale, or some would probably sell at a garage sale.”

“You’re not interested then?”

“Well it’s a little hard to tell over the phone, but I don’t think so.”

“They are old, but they are like brand new. They probably go back forty years.”

“Did you read them yourself?”

“No. Actually, they were copies sent to the newspaper for review, but they were never even cracked open.”

“Oh. That sounds better. What town do you live in?”

Solicitations

The Standard can always use interesting, well-written articles on subjects of interest to the bookselling trade. Please query first, however, to editor@ioba.org. You will be supplied with submission guidelines, but to summarize, the material should be original, it is subject to editing, you retain copyright, and of course there is no payment other than most everyone’s satisfaction. You do not need to be a member of IOBA, except for the IOBA Bookseller Profiles section, though we would surely like you to join. We are very interested in the book trade outside the U.S. as well.

Currently we are seeking short pieces for the following self-explanatory columns. House Calls; Garage/Estate/Library Sale Tales; Auction Action; Book Show Impressions; and Book Store Lore.

Booku

I Drove Mules on the C and O Canal by Wolfe,

claims he used canal water taken from Lock #44

for his signature, color added.

Comic Books

From the Comic Weekly section of the New York Journal American dated 4/26/1942, the final panel of Skippy by Percy Crosby from a strip entitled, “Skippy Meets Another Little Bookworm.”

Table of Contents

The Bane of the Online Book World: Mega-Listers

Plagiarism and Online Bookselling

Defining Mega-Listers

Big and Online

Mega-Lister Questionnaire

Abebooks Mega-Lister Questionnaire

Alibris Mega-Lister Questionnaire

Amazon Mega-Lister Questionnaire

An Interview with Mike Goodenough

-Tell us a little about yourself.

-What led to your interest in antiquarian bookselling?

-How did you learn the trade?

-You seem to be in an especially idyllic corner of England if the official tourism website at Stroud District Tourism is any indication. Tell us all about Inprint, your charming book store.

-You have been at the same location in Stroud for over twenty-five years. How have things changed in terms of clientele, buying patterns, etc.?

-What aspects of maintaining a physical bookstore are the most problematic?

-What are some of the most unusual things that ever happened in your shop?

-In general terms, who are some of your favorite customers, past or present, and why?

-Celebrity customers?

-Cinema and entertainment seem to be your main specialty? How did you get into that?

-Here’s one from left field, as we say in the states. What is your all-time favorite movie?

-How do you acquire most of your stock?

-How do you keep ahead of the perennial space problem?

-Are all of your internet listings available right there in the shop, or are they stored offsite to keep them in the described condition or to simplify inventory management?

-What is your most memorable purchase?

-Tell us about the proverbial one that got away?

Books, Books Everywhere, But Not a Page to Read, or, a Book Dealer’s Travels in Spain

Ephemeral Assays: Herbarium Symposium

Books About Books

Books About Bookselling: Books, Friends, and Bibliophilia

How I Spent My Summer Vacation: Teaching at the Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar

The Boot Camp for Book Dealers

Joe Perlman of Mostly Useful Fictions

Marc Monsarrat of Bookmarc Books

John Hardy of Hardy Books

Addenda

Post-Erattum

Happy Hits

Blurbettes

Book Blogs

Ye Olde Booksellers

Made in IOBA

There Once Was a Book from Nantucket

Postal Priorities

House Calls

Solicitations

Booku

Comic Books

Books, Books Everywhere, But Not a Page to Read, or,
a Book Dealer’s Travels in Spain