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 alw

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

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