IOBA Standard Volume 8(4) - Printable Edition

Foreword

Shawn Purcell

Feedback is usually a good thing if it is fair. Most of us engage in and are shaped by feedback in ways we don’t even realize. Evolution itself is one giant feedback loop.

As booksellers, one important way to measure the viability of whatever business model we employ is profitability. Less immediately tangible are such factors as reputation. The more prestigious bookseller associations screen applicants in a preemptory bid for high quality based on a number of factors, and if you seriously misbehave after admission you can get booted out. Until recently, however, with the exception of insider oddities such as the infamous Drif’s U.K. bookstore guides, we have not been universally rated as such.

EBay is the mother of all online transaction feedback. Personally, as a frequent seller and very infrequent buyer, I don’t have too many issues with eBay’s feedback system. If my regular procedures and safeguards fail, my satisfaction guaranteed policy comes to the rescue. Admittedly, however, book and ephemera customers really are the cream of the crop, and I’m sure I wouldn’t fare so well selling fake vintage pottery, reconditioned electronics, a kidney, or whatever. I also admit that I am not up-to-date on every nuance of the feedback debate. I don’t cruise the boards sopping up hate-mail from eBay conspiracy theorists or ABE-bashers who don’t realize that they were simply the first wave in the inevitable tsunami of overnight Gold Rush widget-sellers that has driven prices and professionalism into the ground to a far greater extent than greedy or inept search service managers could ever pull off on their own.

Currently all of the 3 As (AbeBooks, Alibris, and Amazon) utilize rating systems. In two of the three systems, booksellers (whose stock is their lifeblood) can’t rate the buyers in return, as they can on eBay, so there are no checks and balances; and casual shoppers don’t even know what the ratings are based on. Most professional booksellers understand the importance of reliability, but we have also been rubbed raw by a series of untraditional setbacks, of which this is just the latest.

So how do these three bookseller rating systems work? With Alibris, the star line provides an explanation, but it is not at all apparent that this is clickable. I had to be told about it by Alibris support. Their bookseller rating is based on fulfillment, which means the percentage of orders filled, versus canceled or refunded, within the last 31 to 210 days. Seller Rating is the default search. Sellers with a five star rating show up first, from lowest price to highest, and that is then repeated through the lower successively buried star ranks of reliability. For those who only have four stars (85-94.99% fulfillment) for reasons they deem unfair, this rather typical Alibris Big Brotherism must be a real sore point. And you can get kicked off altogether for consistently falling below 85%, though they will try to work with you first to avoid this. Alibris has made a decent attempt to eject and ban the worst mega-listers—an example AbeBooks should follow—but this rating system is unfair to booksellers for reasons we shall see, and it lets bad buyers off the hook altogether.

Peering into the intergalactic horn of plenty that is Amazon, one is immediately inundated by home page images of such items as the Omega Seamaster watch worn in the latest James Bond movie (“grappling hook and detonator not included”), gourmet decorative sugar, and dreadful bestsellers at cutthroat prices. Surprisingly, though, their five star/percentage rating system is pretty good. You can read the positive comments about service and the negative comments about poor description, high shipping, and yes, even lousy fulfillment. They also allow Seller Response. I didn’t feel like navigating around for half an hour to see what it takes for sellers to get kicked off Amazon, but it’s clear that buyers will understand what the system is based on simply by looking at the individual comments, just like they do on eBay. Last time I checked, both of these companies were doing fairly well.

Now we come to AbeBooks and their new five star rating system (five seems to be the industry standard). It works pretty much the same way as Alibris. Misleading to the public, and potentially unfair to the bookseller. At first glance, this appears to be a comprehensive rating based on many factors. At least with AbeBooks you can click on the somewhat more obvious Bookseller Rating link next to the star line to learn that it’s solely based on fulfillment, but how many customers will figure that out or bother to click if they do? Some years ago when AbeBooks first began to remove titles from their database as soon as they were ordered, for the avowed purpose of reducing customer disappointment over low fulfillment, I considered this blatant interference. I’ve changed my thinking in the meantime. AbeBooks indisputably removes my listings faster than I would, and they have made it easy to reinstate them if the transaction does not proceed for whatever reason. Most of us have experienced the disappointment of all those “Sorry but this sold already” replies, and this is an example of middleman interference I can live with. Their rating system rankles though. I happen to have five stars, but with slow sales through the watered-down modern AbeBooks it wouldn’t take much to reduce that to three or four stars. “Slow” (based on sales per period) sellers can only earn four stars, even if they have 100% fulfillment, though in some cases their handful of selective sales comes to a far higher total than that of their five star colleagues in the same period. Go figure.

AbeBooks allows mega-listers to disappoint hundreds of customers, not to mention flooding the once pristine landscape with poorly described multiple copies of titles they do not even have in stock, but these mega-listers maintain a four or five star rating because they fulfill thousands of other orders for bestsellers and dreck. It is easier for unscrupulous outfits like this to simply click “will ship” on all orders—knowing that a certain percentage of customers will forget they ordered something, lose their hard drive or internet access, die, or whatever—and then simply say “Sorry, lost in the mail, here is a refund” when they do get called on it. Booksellers used to be rewarded for finding and presenting very uncommon used, out-of-print, and antiquarian titles. Now they are penalized for doing so by rigid fulfillment systems, while sellers of common new books that are easily sourced or “books” that are printed on demand thrive under these one-dimensional systems. Furthermore, many unfulfilled buyers would not be upset enough to neg professional booksellers over fruitless orders, but the AbeBooks and Alibris beancounters and computers are programmed for 100% punishment, so the entire reliability rating is unfairly skewed toward fulfillment alone, neglecting more important professional standards.

So how can a good professional bookseller lose stars? Lots of ways. You sell a newly listed hot title on one service and it gets ordered through other services before you can remove it. A formerly slow title is suddenly in demand because somebody dies or something happens, with the same result. (We could skip having a personal life or going to sleep, just to be sure two services don’t process the same order.) You own a store (and/or do book shows) and your internet stock gets moved around, or is sold before you can un-list it. (We can play it safe by removing all web stock from the shelves, but that’s just another nail in the coffin for actual bookstores worth visiting, so phooey to that practice!) You don’t have a store but you do have a lot of stock and some of it is bound to be misplaced. The online customer had no intention of keeping the book to begin with, was super finicky, or tripped up the bookseller in some other way. The customer is perturbed because you have added state sales tax to the final bill (eBay handles this aspect much better by letting you send the invoice to begin with, whereas Alibris does not allow you to charge sales tax at all). I don’t mind losing a little on shipping for a good sale, but for many booksellers if the price is low, the shipping reimbursement really low, the distance great, and the weight high, something’s gotta give. AbeBooks no longer counts cancellations based on sales tax and high shipping costs against booksellers, but not all booksellers know this. I recently asked for extra shipping on a heavy book to the U.K. for the first time ever. The buyer cancelled his order, claiming he found it cheaper somewhere else (don’t think so), but he was unable to cancel it through AbeBooks. I spent over half an hour on hold today before I could get tech support to do it from their end. If I could have tailored the shipping myself first the order probably would have gone through.

To be fair to AbeBooks, they have been somewhat responsive to the griping and I get the impression that they will try to help you maintain a high rating, but I still don’t think they quite get the whole picture. While I had the support person on I asked her how quality booksellers end up with fulfillment problems. She cited mistakes in the price, mistakes in the listings, and never letting the customer know the book was not coming, making them so angry when they received a refund weeks later instead of the needed textbook or whatever that they went out of their way to complain. When I said that answer was misleading because these are things mega-listers do, not professionals, she correctly informed me she’s there to help with specific problems and not to speculate on larger issues. Her answer was telling though, and smacks of the party line.

I’m not exactly sure how quality booksellers get down to three stars, let alone one or two stars. Some of them are probably disorganized, or they cancel orders and make the sales privately in order to avoid the commission and high credit card processing fee. For others the system is probably more to blame. We will be happy to gather and print particularly egregious low rating woes in a future issue if they have the ring of truth and if there is any interest.

AbeBooks and Alibris could and should make it much more apparent that the “reliability” rating is based on fulfillment alone, but these corporations can’t be expected to take the additional step of explaining that low fulfillment is not always the fault of and a reflection on the bookseller; or that high reliability ratings do not always equate to high standards, guaranteed fulfillment, and good service. One option would have been to record and react to these ratings privately, but it’s too late for such a retreat. The best solution at this point would be to fully ape their Amazon deity by setting up a true comment and response-based rating system. In the community debate leading up to AbeBooks’ foray into ratings, some booksellers expressed a preference for dispassionate fulfillment ratings over a true feedback system which hangs all of the laundry right out on the line, but in my experience good professional booksellers have little to be afraid of. AbeBooks and Alibris would see this evolutionary step as a potential headache, but it’s about time they shared a little pain with us. After all, we are paying much more for much less over the last several years, and this comes as another slap in the face. How would they feel if they were being rated by us? Let’s find out, because the first article in this issue of the Standard provides a very handy (and personally adaptable) bookseller and consumer-oriented five star rating tool of our own, courtesy of Stuart Manley. [And thanks to Chris Volk for feedback on this piece, as I don’t list with all the services.]

IOBAn Ellen Brown joins our semi-regular cast of contributors with a nice back to school report on the Rare Book School (not to be confused with the Colorado bookseller boot camp); Nancy Johnson ruminates on the value of price guides; there’s an interview with Judith Tingley of Meetinghouse Books and the Massachusetts and Rhode Island Antiquarian Booksellers; and after all that let’s share a cuppa Peruvian Joe. In the ephemera department, dumb diaries; and the book review goes Maine stream. Ellen Brown repairs to the Tool Box; where Chris Volk presents the third installment (Amazon) in her series on search service Pros and Cons. IOBA Bookseller Profiles wash ashore in Maryland, Oregon, and the U.K.; and Addenda once again takes up rear guard action.

Have a holistically five star fall, and te veremos en enero.

IOBA Standard, Fall Edition 2007, Volume 8, No. 4

The ABE Bookseller Ratings Deception

Stuart Manley

How on earth can it be that David Brass Rare Books, a well respected ABAA antiquarian book dealer in California of over 40 years experience, is rated by ABE as a one star bookseller, yet obviously inferior re-listers such as Anybook, Best Bargain Books, Bargain Book Stores, etc., with their millions of low-grade boiler plate listings polluting the ABE site, are rated as four or even five star booksellers?

The answer, of course, is that they are not bookseller ratings at all. They are simply “fulfillment” ratings. But the presentation and the implication of the wording is that it is the overall quality of the bookseller that is being assessed by a caring ABE.

Anyone from the outside world looking at “Bookseller Rating” would assume that it meant the overall quality of the bookseller—the quality of stock, the expertise, the quality and honesty of descriptions and the quality of service. Therefore a five star bookseller is better than a three star bookseller and so on. We all know the many reasons why ABE has chosen fulfillment as the criteria and “Bookseller Rating” as the purposely misleading title, and they are all selfish to ABE, rather than for the good of their customers or member booksellers.

Is there anything we can do about it? I think there is.

For a number of years now (from when ABE started going bad) we have given our customers information on which listing sites do and don’t charge commission and how much.

We do it via a give-away leaflet in the bookshop, via a “tail” on the emails we send out, and via the book searching information page within our website. A number of other book dealers have joined us in these efforts, which is very helpful.

And it is working. Over the past three years our web-based sales have risen by almost 100%. Direct sales and sales through non-commission sites have risen dramatically over this period, but ABE sales have remained stagnant and have therefore diminished significantly as a proportion of our overall web sales.

So, slowly but surely customers are learning about, and don’t like, the extra charges, and are beginning to understand that if they go direct to the seller, or through non-commission sites, they will make significant savings.

I believe that the ABE Bookseller Rating needs a similar approach and to this end we have introduced “Booklisting Site Ratings” to our website:

http://www.barterbooks.co.uk/bb/barterstaticpages.nsf/web\staticpages/booksearch

Just as ABE chose the criteria that suited them (fulfillment) and chose to call it “Bookseller Rating” rather than “Fulfillment Rating,” we chose the criteria that we felt were most important to us and our customers: quality of listings and amount of commission charged.

The main purpose of this article is to encourage others to follow suit. Feel free to copy or link—you would be doing your customers a service. Your own version can be completely different from ours, with extra sites added and others removed as each bookseller chooses. And with your own criteria and awarding of stars.

If you have a blog, then blog it—Steve Gertz of David Brass Rare Books and friends are already hitting back:

http://www.davidbrassrarebooks.com/?p=59

http://www.bookpatrol.net/2007/08/abebooks-goes-live-with-deceptive.html

And others are on the way.

As I write, I can almost hear the moans:

“What’s the point? We’ll never beat the big sites.”

If that is your attitude, you deserve to be fleeced. Collectively we have the power to force change. True, it cannot be done head on as booksellers are notoriously difficult to gather behind a common policy, but if enough sellers take action of this nature, a slow erosion takes place and one by one customers are weaned away from the high-charging sites. And once they leave, they rarely go back. Education, education, education.

“Why pick on ABE? Alibris does the same thing.”

ABE probably gets more criticism because it was once the best book listing site on the web and was built up by that quality and through the promotion of the participating booksellers. So every adverse change, of which bookseller ratings is only the latest, tends to fuel the sense of betrayal that many booksellers feel. In any case, the Booklisting Site Ratings is aimed against all the high-charging sites, not just ABE.

Get it clear in your head: ABE is a listing site. It owns no stock, and is therefore vulnerable to better or more economical listing methods becoming available, be it Google or a new player emerging. It has made the conscious decision that bookseller loyalty and support is unimportant compared with making money. Like Amazon, eBay and Alibris, ABE has found that taking a percentage of the stock of someone else is very profitable.

Make no mistake—they are right. The path ABE has taken is considerably more profitable than the previous model, but the downside is that it includes the seeds of their own eventual destruction. Customers will find that it is cheaper to shop elsewhere, and as ABE has no loyalty to the booksellers that helped create them, those booksellers need feel no loyalty to them. If a better listing method comes along, they will desert ABE in droves.

Meantime, the best that the independent bookseller can do is to keep on supporting the independent sites such as ILAB, IOBA and TomFolio; and in the UK, PBFA and IBookNet. Give them price preference as they don’t charge commission (or uplift your prices to the commission charging sites). Give your new listings a two or three week start on their sites. Promote their qualities and integrity whenever and wherever you can.

And keep spreading the word about commission charges and Booklisting Site Ratings!

Booklisting Site Ratings

Booklisting site ratings are based on the quality of the listings (accuracy and honesty of listings etc.)
The expertise, ethics and quality of service of participating booksellers
Booklisting sites with higher ratings charge no commission fee over and above the bookseller's price and do not allow what are known as megalisters and relisters - booksellers who use 'boiler plate' descriptions because they either do not have the book in stock or have not bothered to catalogue it properly, leading to indifferent service for the customer.

ABE (Advanced Book Exchange)

Alibris

Amazon

Biblio

Choosebooks / ZVAB

eBay

IBookNet (Independent Booksellers' Network)

ILAB (International League of Antiquarian Booksellers

IOBA (Independent Online Booksellers Association)

PBFA (Provincial Book Fairs Association)

TomFolio

UKBookWorld

Key:

No commission charges and strong quality rules

Low commission charges and strong quality rules

Medium commission charges and strong quality rules

High commission charges and variable quality rules

High commission charges and weak quality rules

Stuart Manley is the co-owner of Barter Books in Alnwick Station, Northumberland, England and can be contacted at http://www.barterbooks.co.uk.

IOBA Standard, Fall Edition 2007, Volume 8, No. 4.

Rare Book School: A Week Among Bright Bookish Minds

Ellen Firsching Brown

In years past, aspiring book dealers learned the trade by apprenticing with experienced ones. Today, with so few “bricks and mortar” antiquarian book shops in business, those entering the field must seek out other ways to master this complex and challenging profession. In terms of formal educational opportunities, many dealers look to the highly acclaimed Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar as a means of learning the nuts and bolts of the rare book marketplace. If you find yourself looking for an historical perspective of the rare book world or an academic approach to specific areas of the field, Rare Book School (RBS) is unquestionably a good choice.

RBS, headquartered at the University of Virginia (U.Va.), is a non-profit organization offering non-credit courses on “bookish and bibliographic” subjects. All RBS faculty members are recognized experts in the rare book field. The week-long classes are scheduled throughout the summer on the U.Va. campus and at other times of the year in New York, Washington, D.C., and Baltimore. Affiliated RBS programs are located in Los Angeles and London. The tuition for each RBS course is currently $870.

Topics covered in Rare Book School run the gamut from ancient history up through modern technology. While many of the classes are geared towards special collections librarians, there are numerous courses of interest to those in the used and rare book trade. For example, this past summer session included classes in book illustration processes, descriptive bibliography, and the history of the London book trade.

Students are accepted to RBS courses by application. You must complete a questionnaire detailing your work history and submit a short essay describing your interest in the particular class you would like to take. Applications are accepted on a rolling basis beginning four months prior to the course start date. While the application may be off-putting to some potential attendees, the process unquestionably benefits the program by ensuring that all attendees understand the subject matter and have an articulable interest in the field.

Beyond top-notch educational opportunities, RBS offers book dealers the chance to meet people in the rare book world that they might not otherwise encounter. In addition to dealers, attendees include rare book librarians and collectors from all over the United States and several foreign countries. The chance to meet special collections librarians, whose career paths offer interesting parallels and intersections with rare book dealers, is a particularly valuable opportunity for dealers. Getting to know these librarians is a wonderful way to learn about institutional book collections and what the collections of the future might include.

In operation for 24 years, the program at Rare Book School is well-run and seamlessly organized. The schedule follows the same general format each week. Attendees arrive on Sunday night for a reception and a light supper. The evening is capped by remarks from Terry Belanger, founding director of the Rare Book School. (In 2005, Belanger was named a MacArthur “Genius” Fellow for his work at RBS.)

RBS courses run Monday morning through Friday afternoon. The days are full, with classes beginning at 8:30 a.m. and ending at 5:00 p.m. In the evenings, students have the opportunity to attend optional events, including guest speaker programs and book-related movies. There also is usually a bookseller night during which local used and rare book shops stay open late especially for RBS students. Friday evening closes with a reception.

Charlottesville is a lovely town with a wide range of accommodations available. While many RBS students chose to stay in local hotels, U.Va. offers RBS students the opportunity to stay on “The Lawn,” part of Thomas Jefferson’s historic Academical Village. While Lawn rooms may seem primitive (no air conditioning or attached bathrooms), they offer abundant charm in the form of hardwood floors, fireplaces, and rocking chairs from which to watch the sun set on the brick colonnade facing Jefferson’s famous Rotunda.

The curriculum at RBS is not for the faint of heart. Each class has a required advance reading list. The course registration materials explicitly state that registrants should consider withdrawing if they find themselves unable to complete the reading before the class. This preparation is a challenging but essential component of the information-packed program. The pace of the classes at RBS is brisk. Instructors hit the ground running and expect the students to do the same. Some of the courses even include evening homework assignments.

While attendees work hard at RBS, the effort is well-rewarded. Beyond being one of the only places in the world where you can take these types of courses, RBS offers valuable opportunities to build relationships with some of the brightest minds in the rare book field. You can read more about RBS and its offerings at www.virginia.edu/oldbooks.

Ellen Firsching Brown operates Liberty Hall Books out of Richmond, VA and can be contacted at http://www.libertyhallbooks.com/.

IOBA Standard, Fall Edition 2007, Volume 8, No. 4.

The Price Guide Is Right (or Is It?)

Nancy Johnson

Come on down, book dealer (with apologies to Bob Barker)! I’ve got a collection of books for you—price guides on antiques, some old Mandeville’s and a few really pretty auction catalogs. Or you can have what’s behind Door Number Two.

As a bookseller specializing in books about antiques and collectible subjects, I would be looking through the boxes like a kid under the Christmas tree. But I expect many of you would see the copyright dates and subject matter and decline to purchase, regardless of the price of the lot.

What value do price guides about antiques have in the out-of-print book market? And how do we evaluate them? The date of publication is not the most important factor.

We need instead to consider first whether the price guide is a general one, like Kovel’s and Book Prices Used & Rare, or from a more specialized field such as Tomart’s Illustrated Disneyana Catalog and Price Guide. The general antiques price guide is published in excess of 50,000 copies each year, so unless your customer is looking for a particular year in order to complete a set or looking for an individual listing that appeared in only one edition, these books are not in demand and have little value. More specialized works, however, are generally not published on a yearly basis, and seldom in quantities of over 10,000 copies. (A “bestseller” in our field may equate to a total of 2,000 copies sold!) How many copies were indeed published, and in how many editions? How many other books are there on the subject? I always check the bibliography or sources when evaluating a book to ascertain its place in the timeline. If a book is the first on a given collectible topic, it matters little what date is on the cover. That’s “raw” material for the collector, and the information it holds (correct or incorrect) may have been the basis of guides that followed. Always desirable.

We then need to look at the subject matter. Books are published because an antique or collectible is popular at the time, and it needs to still be popular now. In the 1970s, people were collecting telephone pole insulators and ceramic containers that liquor was sold in. Today, there is little interest in the routine majority of those collectibles. If there is not any collector interest in a field, you won’t create any handling the reference book, nor will offering an old pricing guide at an extraordinary price create any interest in the collectible.

Is the book an illustrated value guide, or does it just list items with a brief description and then assign a value? (Note: this question is not as applicable to price guides about books.) If a reference book has good information and quality illustrations but was published in 1985, it may have more merit to the collector (and more demand for you, the seller) than a 2007 publication that does not have as much depth. Many of the most useful and consequently desirable books we stock are out-of-print titles we have purchased at shops and sales. Often there is an old date right in the title and the seller obviously did judge the book by its cover.

Are the values expressed in fixed amounts, dollar ranges, or scarcity charts or ratings? The latter two categories annoy the book buyer who doesn’t want to think, but in the long run, they are more accurate and will help maintain value in an older guide.

Auction catalogs, with estimated prices printed alongside the item’s illustration and/or description, and often with a “prices realized” sheet laid in, generally have a short life on the book market and don’t gain much value over a period of time. Catalogs from the big auction houses, which originally sold for $20 to $50 on a subscription basis, sell for a fraction of the original price. There are exceptions, and the criteria for evaluating such catalogs is basically the same as for any other pricing reference. Important British Ceramics Sale with only a fraction of the items illustrated (and in black-and-white) was important only to the consignee and Sotheby’s, whether that auction was yesterday or twenty years ago. The catalog of The Glover Collection, an auction that sent Rookwood art pottery prices out-of-sight (and from which they have not declined in almost seventeen years) is an important milestone in the sale of American pottery, and is as useful a reference work as ever was published. (Catalogs from subsequent auctions of Rookwood and other ceramics are not nearly in as much demand.)

I have made reference to Mandeville and Book Prices Used & Rare in this article, placing them in context to books on other collectible subjects. Like the rare breed of person we booksellers are, books about books is a field that doesn’t always behave like other categories. Especially with the advent of the internet. Who would have thought that AB Bookman’s Weekly, the Holy Grail for booksellers, would be one of its first victims, though in hindsight we can see why. You can cover most types of antiques in a single encyclopedic volume, but there are millions of books out there. As I try to apply the questions asked about antiques-related price guides to book price guides, I find that some questions are appropriate, while others are not. Thus, at this point in the discussion, I’ll be satisfied that I got the price of the washer and dryer correct, and let my learned colleagues gamble everything on the cruise to Jamaica. In other words, somebody should write a future IOBA Standard article on the issue of the printed price guide, new and old, for values of books.

Nancy Johnson operates Nancy Johnson, Bookseller out of Denver, CO and can be reached at http://www.nancyjohnsonbookseller.com.

IOBA Standard, Fall Edition 2007, Volume 8, No. 4.

An Interview with Judith Tingley of Meetinghouse Books and MARIAB

Shawn Purcell

-Hi Judith. What is your life story before getting into bookselling, in one paragraph (and no cheating with a fifty page paragraph)?

Hi, Shawn, and thanks for giving me this opportunity to blab about myself. I grew up on a farm in rural Indiana. Dad taught high school science, while Mom was in charge of the homefront.Both Mom and Dad took care of me and my big sister Jane, and all of us together took care of a passel of chickens, cats, and dogs, plus Rackety the raccoon and the occasional rescued bird—not to mention a couple of vegetable gardens and lots of flowerbeds (Mom has always had a special touch with flowers). After finishing 9th grade in the local school (our entire class consisting, if I remember correctly, of five girls and seven boys), I was trundled off to boarding school in Wisconsin. There, surrounded by sweater sets and pleated skirts, I became the rebel girl I remain today. From there it was college at the University of Chicago where my time was spent less in bookstores (though there were some wonderful ones in Hyde Park and still are) and more in the stacks of the U of C's magnificent Regenstein Library where I spent hours chuckling over original copies of the New Yorker from the 1930s and falling in love with S. J. Perelman when I should have been researching water imagery in the works of Virginia Woolf. Ah, well.

-What are your first memories of books?

Well, since so many family members on both sides were teachers I always got the Newbery and Caldecott award winners for Christmas and birthdays. But my very earliest recollection of books involves cuddling with my Mom while she held a book open so I could look, too, as she read to me in her soft voice. Eventually, and to my utter amazement, I began to understand the words as she read them and then we were really reading together. That's about the most lovely memory of my early life. Thanks, Mom.

-What attracted you to bookselling?

Sturgis, the town closest to our farm, was across the state border in Michigan. In this town was a stationer's shop. In the back of this shop was a section of books. The place was owned by a wonderful old English couple. I wondered then and I still wonder how it happened that they settled in this place of all possible places. At any rate, I loved everything about their shop—paper bundles in various sizes and colors, writing instruments, beautiful leather journals, curious objects of diverse uses. And, of course, the books. I was a shy child but they made me feel at home. They saw that I was in love with books and they let me look, even though I could afford to buy very little. They had a wonderful collection of Dover and New Directions books. They introduced me to the works of Stevie Smith and Will Cuppy. Their shop had books which were so much more interesting to me than the dreary teen romances and series books available in the county library. I'll always remember that shop as one of the most magical places of my childhood. I believe it instilled in me the idea that selling books could be a rewarding and honorable profession.

-Where have you toiled in the field, and where did you run your own shops?

After college I stayed in Chicago for a while, working for the Little Sisters of the Poor (and no, I was never on my way to becoming a nun myself!). I would often stop at a used bookshop on my way home and one evening the owner said to me, "You're always in here anyway, why don't we just hire you?" And they did. I worked there as a part-timer for a few years, working my way from looking up paperback prices in Books In Print to handling the front counter while the two owners (the both of them quintessentially curmudgeonly booksellers) drank Guinness and pontificated to each other. I became friendly with a co-worker, whose dream (since realized) was to open his own shop. I'd never considered this as a possibility for myself before, but soon realized that my own bookshop had to be, almost inevitably, my eventual goal. But I needed more experience, more money, and, well, more books—at least more books that I was willing to sell from my own private stash. When I made the momentous decision to move to Boston, I knew I wanted to work in a bookstore full-time. I applied to a well-known shop and was told that since the job involved lifting books, and since I was a girl, I couldn't be hired (those were the days, eh?). After several Kelly Girl stints I finally found a home at the Avenue Victor Hugo Bookshop on Newbury Street in Boston, where owner Vince McCaffrey and manager Tom Owen became my employers, mentors, and friends to this day. The Avenue Victor Hugo closed its doors a few years ago and is sorely missed, although both Vince and Tom are both still fighting the good fight and selling books on the internet.

Of course, I spent as much of my salary as I could on books, both for myself and for my dream shop. While I was still working at the AVH I started my own little business of quoting to books-wanted ads in the AB Bookman's Weekly. I looked forward with breathless anticipation to receiving the AB on Thursday, then spent most of that evening in a comfy chair with my feet up and bright yellow highlighter in hand, seeing what was on hand that I could quote out. Of course, the actual quoting involved laboriously writing, by hand, several postcards a week, most of which were ignored. Still, I sold enough to make some extra money on the side and to maintain my optimism.

Eventually I took the big step, bade farewell to the AVH, and opened up my first shop in the middle of Davis Square, Somerville, MA. It was the size of a walk-in closet, and something of an experiment. If I could make this work, I thought, I could possibly make enough money to open a "real" store. At first people would wander in looking puzzled and asking "encouraging" questions like, "Is this all there is?" and "This is the tiniest store I've ever been in!" But I persevered and managed to cram a lot of books into that tiny space. After my three year lease was up, I got a lease on a larger place down the street where I stayed for six years. I had a nice landlord and Davis Square was (still is) a great place, filled with interesting people and things to do, close to Tufts University and just a few subway stops from Harvard Square.

-Ken Haverly is your book mate. How did you meet, and do you find it fairly uncommon for couples to be equal partners in the bookselling business?

Book mate and life's companion! Ken and I met through mutual friends in Boston soon after my move there. I remember going to a party at his house in Somerville and thinking, wow, what a great music collection! But Ken himself I found somewhat intimidating, as he sat with his cronies in a corner of the room, surveying the scene from behind a very large beard, looking cool and enigmatic, making the occasional witty remark. Later I ran into him in line at the Boston Public Library, of all places, where we were both checking out books. He walked me home, we discovered that we liked lots of the same things, and became friends. When my Dad had a stroke and I took a leave of absence to take care of him in Indiana, Ken was wonderfully supportive even at long distance, my best correspondent by far. When Dad had recovered and I was able to come back east, both Ken and my job (thanks, Vince!) were waiting for me.

Ken and I didn't start out as working partners, although we do both love books. Ken actually worked as an electronics technician for a long time, including a stint working with Henry Kloss on prototypes for audio systems. When we came out here, Ken pared away the electronics and started spending more time with books, and now has his own business selling books and occasionally records. He also keeps his hand in the technical side, designing computer programs for our own use and occasionally doing consulting work for other booksellers.

-You loaded up the truck and you moved to South Deerfield, in Western Massachusetts, that is, Happy Valley, the sleepy west of the woody east, one of the coolest regions in the whole dang country. How did that happen, and tell us about the history of the building you are in.

We knew we didn't want to pay rent forever, either on an apartment or on a shop. And rents were skyrocketing in Davis Square at the time. Since Cambridge no longer had rent control, the Somerville landlords were getting a lot of business and went a little crazy themselves. We were also looking for a bit less asphalt and a bit more green in our lives. At first we tried a stint in Wellesley, where I operated Blue Moon Bookshop for a few years. But it didn't take long to figure out that the suburbs were not for us. In the meantime, rent and overhead were going up, up, up. We decided we needed to own our own building for our own peace of mind, and we could not afford what we needed in the Boston area.

We'd been going to the Oinonen Book Auctions in Northampton every few weeks, leaving early on Tuesday and not getting back sometimes until the middle of the night. We kept telling Dick Oinonen that the trip was too much, we'd just have to move out west eventually if we wanted to keep coming to his auctions. He thought we were joking, but as it turns out, we weren't. We fell in love with this area of Massachusetts, which struck us as having a more rural, more laid-back version of the Davis Square vibe. Lots of interesting people—working folks, artisans, musicians, academics, and eccentrics of all sorts—lots of great places to visit—five nearby colleges—great music and great food. The only differences were 1) it's actually easy to park in the towns of the West; 2) the place is filled with fresh produce; and 3) you are never far from a lovely tree-lined winding road which is fun to navigate, either by car or on bike.

We'd already spent a lot of time looking at "commercial properties" in our price range by the time we encountered our Meetinghouse. Tired of slogging through squishy basements (quaint!), measuring the dampstains on old walls (original Victorian wallpaper!), and inhaling lungsful of the dust of good old rotten timber (rustic!), we decided to see what we could find in the way of more unconventional buildings. This led us to our Meetinghouse, which we visited as a sort of afterthought on our way back from an afternoon's ramblings. As soon as we entered, we knew this was the place. When we left, we looked at each other and both said, "Could you live in an old church building?" and grinned that yes, we could. And now we do.

According to county records, our building dates back to 1850, but the Congregationalist Church across the street from us says it's more like 1870. In any case, it's a sturdy old two-story clapboard building originally intended as a chapel, then used as a Sunday school, then (1920s - 1970s) a Masonic lodge and finally a Grange building used for various community events such as Girl Scout sales, roast beef dinners, dances, etc. A building, in other words, with a most interesting past, and I hope a long, long future as an open bookstore.

-Any ghostly vibes there late at night?

No, dang it! Ironic, since I love all things spooky, and am a big fan of Victorian (and other) ghost stories. I hereby invite all friendly ghosts to submit their resumes. I'd love to play host to a blithe spirit (no poltergeists need apply). Of course there are those ghosts of authors and owners of our books lingering between the covers—wisps of hearts and souls and minds that went into the writing and the reading of them.

-No bosses, and now no landlords. Congratulations! Did you have to make any improvements?

Thanks—but I'm afraid I have to admit that both Ken and I are terrible slavedrivers as employers and, as the downtrodden employed, we're both constantly threatening to go on strike. As landlords go, we're pretty cool and let our tenants, us, decorate the place any crazy way we want to.

First thing we had to do was get the building approved as "mixed use" by our town's zoning board. For this we drew up lots of diagrams, consulted with building engineers, and made several trips back and forth to attend meetings. Let's see—we had to put in sufficient parking for five cars out front, and firewall in between every contiguous surface between our apartment (the back portion of the first floor) and the rest of the building (to be used as the store). This included putting in a new wall across the huge room taking up most of the first floor in order to separate our apartment. We put in a state-of-the-art smoke alarm system, and had an electrician come in to inspect wiring and replace some of the old stuff. There was much discussion of bathrooms. At first we were told we'd have to put in two bathrooms upstairs AND two bathrooms downstairs for customer use, but thankfully we were able to refer back to official code requirements which allowed us simply to keep the one that was already in place. Our apartment, of course, was a whole other story. We were very fortunate that there was already a huge kitchen in place (remember all those aforementioned roast beef dinners?) and a bathroom, so all we had to do was put in a shower and a new sink and we were pretty much set. The apartment is more or less one big space separated by bookcases, which takes me back to the old days of living in a loft.

-What about shelving?

In Boston we'd acquired our shelving bit by bit as we needed it. Plain, functional pine cases only, which we got cheap and which we are still using to this day. Since our move we've continued to add cases and have an excellent source for them right here in town. It's a company where developmentally challenged young people are given the opportunity to become expert craftsmen, making very sturdy, economical pine cases to our specifications.

-What quirks does the building have?

We have very nice old etched window panes which, however, we cannot see out of. Sometimes it can get a bit claustrophobic. Thank goodness that over the years some of these panes were broken and subsequently replaced with plain panes. I can, for example, look out at our backyard as I'm doing the dishes and wave hello to the squirrels.

-What are your specialties?

We've always said we specialize in good, interesting books in lots of categories. Mostly humanities, mostly inexpensive, though we do get the occasional high-priced rarity. Our customers tell us that we have excellent collections of literature, science fiction and fantasy, cultural history, and performing arts. We also have some vintage prints for sale—I especially love the wonderful old botanicals and early Victorian animal prints, but basically if it's interesting and we like it, we try to acquire it for the shop. That goes for books as well as prints! I keep trying to talk my sister Jane, a talented nature photographer, into letting me sell some of her work in the store, but so far I've had no luck with her. Still hoping you'll send me some of your stuff, Sis!

-How do you acquire most of your stock?

Just about every way you can think of. We buy some of our books from customers, of course, when they decide to winnow or when they move (this being an academic community, moving does happen fairly often). We buy books at auction, and at benefit book sales, and from institutions. We make house calls and we travel throughout New England to do so. We buy from other booksellers. If we see a yard sale, we stop to see if there are any books. And I must also report that in the past few years we have had the bittersweet experience of buying books from several bookstores that were in the process of closing their doors.

-Can you share some stellar finds and sales with us?

A few of my favorites are the Borges 1st US edition of Other Inquisitions which was filed in with the religious books at one benefit sale (moral: look at every section, no matter what you assume will or will not be there); and some original handbills dating from Dr. King's 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery which were tucked inside a box of books on African American history bought at auction. And then there's the rare book we found in an obscure bookstore on one of our trips to to the Midwest. The bookstore was not in any guides; we just happened upon it in the middle of nowhere, surrounded on all sides by corn fields. The most rickety, decrepit place you can imagine, from the outside it looked like an old chicken shack, but the sign said "Books" so in we went. The inside wasn't much better, dark and gloomy with cobwebs covering the bottom shelves and a grizzled little man behind the counter who informed us of the glories of his military history books. These all seemed to be, regardless of any distinguishing characteristics such as flyspecks, mold, or missing pages, priced at $50 each. No more, no less. $50 seemed to be his price for these treasures and he was sticking to it. Now, I hate to leave any bookstore, no matter how doomed and pathetic it appears to be, without buying something. But in this case a little something, not a $50 something, would really have to do. If I could only find a "little" something, that is. I poked around some amongst the cobwebs in the fiction section on a lower shelf and uncovered an early novel by an important woman author in dust jacket, somehow having survived its years on this shelf undamaged, with nary a nibble from any critters that were undoubtedly roaming about the floorboards. But, was it going to be $50 like the military history books? Or even more, because of its condition? No! I should have known! This was a novel by a woman, so must therefore be a romance and so was priced at a mere $5. Probably the cheapest book in the store. I bought it immediately, not asking for a dealer discount, and we fled. I sold the book for a healthy profit immediately upon our return to a first edition specialist who put it in a catalogue at very much more than he paid for it, and it has been merrily changing hands ever since.

-Tell us about the one(s) that got away.

Just last week Ken found a copy of a rare book having to do with 16th Century Portugal at a sale of a local professor's estate books. Ken got the book home and looked it over more closely. It had some stamping on it from a well-known university library and, since it was not stamped "withdrawn" Ken checked the library's records to make sure the book was okay to sell. As it turned out, the book had been listed as "lost" for years. Ken contacted the library, which was happy to have its copy back (sent by FedEx immediately). Ken was a bit sad to see it go, but happy to help the library out. I figure his karma rating is now way off the charts and I am expecting him to find something glorious on our front step any minute now.

-What percentage of your inventory is online, and is that mixed in or kept separate?

Funny you should ask, Shawn! Just last week I was considering how I hadn't changed my online listings for a very long time (having been kept busy most of this year with the bookshop and various MARIAB doings). I came to the conclusion that the thing to do would be to wipe the slate clean and start almost from scratch. So we deleted listings that had been online and not selling for up to ten years or so, and now I'm left with exactly 70 titles online. Seventy. That is, let's see, .2% of my total inventory. Not two per cent mind you, but point two per cent. I reckon that when my tenure as MARIAB President ends in a few months I'll have more time to do stuff online and eventually I'll get back to my "normal" few thousand titles, or about 5% of the shop's inventory.

That said, I try to keep my walk-in customers foremost in mind. I figure that if they've made the effort to visit the shop they have a right to see what I have for sale, whether it's listed online or not. So unless a book is exceptionally fragile I shelve it right in with the "regular" inventory. I have a primitive system (penciled checkmark on fep) for keeping track of what's online, and a book where I enter sold titles so they can be deleted efficiently. Of course, if I ever achieve more than a few thousand titles online I will probably have to adopt another system, but I've always seen the open shop as my first love, and my walk-in customers as my first priority. I don't, in other words, see how I'll ever have enough time away from the shop to maintain an enormous database of online listings.

Ken, on the other hand, sells books and music regularly on eBay, and has some of his own listings on the online databases.

-On average, how many visitors do you have each day, which will vary seasonally of course, and roughly what percentage of them are known to you?

I've never been able to figure out averages of anything. I do know that there doesn't seem to be rhyme nor reason to what days will be busy and what days won't. Having a shop here is certainly different than having it in the middle of Davis Square or (as in the case of the AVH) on Newbury Street in Boston. Not as much walk-in traffic, to be sure, but the folks who do come, come on purpose to look at books—not to get out of the rain or pass time while waiting for a bus. We've had days here when NO ONE has come in, not a single soul. Followed by days and days of steady traffic.

This area has readers who live here all year long. It also has a large academic community which shifts around a bit from term to term. We get tourists who visit for different reasons during the course of the year. It's a nice day trip from either Boston or NYC. People come for the antique shops, the antiques auctions and fairs, for the brilliant fall foliage, for events held at the colleges and museums, some even come especially for the bookshops!

Need I mention that Yankee Candle, right here in South Deerfield, is one of the biggest tourist attractions in New England? And of course, Historic Deerfield is right down the road from us and holds some very interesting exhibitions.

-Some unusual things you've seen in bookstores?

I've seen people dancing in the aisles of my own bookstore, which made me very happy. I've also seen desperate men trying to sell moldy books retrieved from dumpsters, which made me very sad.

-There is a fairly high concentration of quality booksellers in the Pioneer Valley. Were you well and hospitably received?

Yes, there are some great booksellers in the Valley, and several of them got together and gave us a party on our arrival. Not only that, they actually put an ad in the paper for our newly opened shop! Now, that's hospitality. I think most of us Valley booksellers look at it as a real plus that we have so many open shops. The more shops, the more people are drawn to the area for book-buying trips. The New York Times has done an article on the Pioneer Valley bookshops, and the local free weekly the Valley Advocate came out with a guide to shops along Route 5/10 just a few weeks ago. We're all booksellers, but we all have our own methods and our own inventories. Each store is a reflection of its owner's personality, interests, energy, and expertise. Together, we complement each other; we refer customers to one another's shops all the time; and we get along quite happily here in the Valley.

-And what about the South Deerfield reception?

Even though we had jump through hoops for the zoning committee, our reception in general was great. People brought us bouquets of flowers and lots of well wishes. A considerable number have become customers and even friends.

-Where should one have lunch after visiting your shop?

What do you feel like? Right here in town there's a place for organic pizza, an old-fashioned luncheonette, and a cafe with internet access. Down the road apiece (as we say in the country) is some of the best BBQ I've ever had (chicken, pork, or beef) at Bub's—which also offers such delicacies as ostrich burgers and alligator tail. If you're willing to drive the few miles to Amherst or Northampton, you can have anything from Thai to Mexican to several varieties of Indian to vegetarian to burgers and fries. Not to mention ice cream. Loads of good ice cream, including the homemade kind, from local dairies.

-You are the current president of the Massachusetts and Rhode Island Antiquarian Booksellers. Tell us your understanding of the history of this organization.

MARIAB started out in the mid-seventies as a small organization of bookseller friends who put on an annual book fair in Cambridge. Since then it has grown to include every sort of bookseller, from fair-goers to online-only sellers to catalogue dealers, to open shops, to every possible combination of these. We have evolved from putting out a slender directory of booksellers to quite a sophisticated version, and have also developed a useful website at www.mariab.org.

-How many members do you have, and what does it take to join?

Right now we have 140 members, with a few applications pending. To become a member you have to be a bookseller with a place of business in Massachusetts or Rhode Island. You must provide written references from two current MARIAB members, and you must also provide a letter of your own in which you describe your book experience, type of business, areas of expertise, and anything else you think we should know about you. You must assert that you will abide by the MARIAB Code of Ethics as presented on the MARIAB website.

-MARIAB is in the middle of New England Independent Booksellers Association country, and right next to fellow entities such as the New Hampshire Antiquarian Booksellers Association. Does Rhode Island ever talk about seceding?

Gosh, I sure hope not! I think it's great that Rhode Island and Massachusetts have clubbed together and I LOVE Rhode Island booksellers! Actually, what discussions I've heard have had to do more with collaboration than secession. I'd love to see some sort of regional organization develop which could incorporate all the New England states. There's strength in numbers, people! NEBA, I should add, is a very useful organization which serves primarily independent sellers of new books.

-What services do regional bookseller associations such as MARIAB provide?

Regional bookseller organizations can provide congeniality and cooperation between booksellers, and greater recognition and trust from the public at large for the booksellers serving it. MARIAB prints an annual directory of dealers, with an index of specialties and a map so it's easy to find a particular bookseller, a bookseller with a particular specialty, and the open shops in different communities. These directories are helpful to both booksellers and book buyers, and they are distributed widely. We also maintain a website with all the information from the directory plus upcoming events, any changes in dealer information since the last printed directory was published, and other announcements. We also maintain a MARIAB online mailing list for email communication between members.

Regional organizations can also create opportunities for booksellers to get together and discuss issues in person. We have four quarterly meetings to which every member is invited, and at which we have lively discussions of ideas and proposed projects. A little bit like, in fact, a good old-fashioned New England town meeting. Sometimes ideas spring out of the synergy of face-to-face meetings that no one would have thought of on his own. We also have guest lecturers from time to time at our quarterly meetings, including specialist dealers, representatives of other aspects of the book trade, and museum curators.

This past spring we held a very successful workshop concentrating on online selling for MARIAB members. We went in with an outline for morning and afternoon sessions and mainly held to it, in a pretty informal but guided "brainstorming" style. The success of this workshop was due mainly to the willingness of participants to share their experiences with the various online venues. We quite deliberately did NOT set up the workshop as an opportunity for any venue to promote itself, counting on our own members and our webmaster for their expertise. There were participants ranging from absolute beginners to seasoned online sellers and believe me, we all came away knowing something we didn't know before. Plus, it was fun to get together for a frank and open discussion of online issues. Now I hear that the Vermont Antiquarian Booksellers Association will be holding a similar workshop, and I say good for them!

As for MARIAB, we've voted our desire to have future workshops. We have a number of topics which have been suggested as possible subjects for future workshops and we'll be discussing these at our next quarterly meeting.

And, of course, we still sponsor two book fairs a year, as we have done from close to the beginning.

Judith studying compact book storage, starting late!

-What duties do you have as president?

What I've tried to accomplish during my tenure as president is to promote all kinds of bookselling, since they're all vitally important to the trade. Whether you have an open shop, or sell strictly online, or only issue catalogues, or haul your books from fair to fair—as long as you act professionally and ethically as a bookseller, you are an equal member of our team. As president, I've tried to stress the importance of inclusion and cooperation. We booksellers are colleagues, not competitors, and everyone benefits from this attitude—especially the book-buying public.

-Anything exciting coming up for MARIAB?

Yes, indeed. We'll be having our annual Pioneer Valley Antiquarian Book Fair on Sunday, October 21, at the Smith Vocational and Agricultural High School in Northampton, MA. This has always been one of my favorite fairs, with its scores of excellent booksellers offering a wide variety of merchandise in the setting of a town known for its own offbeat style as well as a sense of its history and its commitment to culture. The Book Fair will be held at the height of the fall foliage season, and all in all I would recommend this as a great weekend trip for just about anyone.

On a smaller scale, local MARIAB members have been invited by the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association to take part in its "Big Read" event to be held Saturday, October 6, in Old Deerfield. This happens to be the final day of this year's "Banned Books Week" and since our community's "Big Read" book is Fahrenheit 451, the PVMA has organized an event which will allow us booksellers not only to sell our wares, but to display our commitment to the "Freedom to Read." For example, our South Deerfield neighbor Schoen Books will be there not to sell at all, but will display an exhibit on Book Burning and the Holocaust. I'll be bringing along some information on banned and suppressed books, as well as books to sell, and MARIAB will have its own display having to do with upcoming events and community outreach.

-Thanks for your time Judith. Keep up the good work, and best wishes.

Thanks for inviting me, Shawn. This has been fun. I should mention that the Standard has been a consistently outstanding resource for years, thanks to your own excellent work and that of your predecessors. Also, all good wishes to IOBA, an organization I much admire and which I believe holds many of the same goals and ideals as does MARIAB.

Judith Tingley and Ken Haverly operate Meetinghouse Books in South Deerfield, MA and can be contacted at http://www.meetinghousebooks.com.

IOBA Standard, Fall Edition 2007, Volume 8, No. 4.

A Book Dealer Visits Peru, or, How I Spent My Summer Vacation

Joe Perlman

In July I fulfilled a life-long dream of visiting Peru, accompanied by my wife and two adult children. The trip was exceedingly difficult to prepare for as we were traveling to a wide variety of locations, altitudes, and climates, but with stringent luggage limitations.

As usual, I bought a few books to prepare myself for the journey. The first one was a rather dry, brief traveler’s history of Peru. If I had read this before I planned the trip, I might have changed the destination since it made the country seem rather boring. I then skimmed through two guide books: Footprints, a rather snobbish British one, and the ubiquitous Lonely Planet. If I had bought them before I planned the trip, I might have been scared off, since both were replete with warnings about the difficulties of traveling in so poor and crime-ridden a country as Peru. As the old saying goes, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

This lack of information necessitated numerous calls to the travel agency I booked the trip through, but none of its staff had been on this particular tour. They advised bringing a down jacket and ski hat for the evenings in the Andes (July is their winter) and towels since some hotels charge extra. Fortunately, I spoke to my corporate travel agent, who had been to Peru in June of 2006. She told me that in all her photos she is wearing shorts, and maybe a sweatshirt, and assured me there was no need to bring a winter jacket. She also said that she found the country had an ample supply of linens, so out went the warm clothes and the towels. I was able to breathe a sigh of relief, since I now had room in my suitcase for some extra reading materials.

We flew into Lima, the capital of Peru, and spent the following day touring the old city. Lima was never part of the Incan civilization. Rather, it was a city designed and built by the Spanish. The architecture is Spanish Colonial, and most of the historic buildings are religious in nature. The monastery of San Francisco houses one of the largest and oldest libraries in all of South American. Our guide showed us the main reading room and spoke with great pride about the treasures on the shelves. I looked around and was aghast, as this famous library would make any ardent bibliophile weep. The climate in Lima is overcast and humid most of the year. The building has no climate controls and after centuries of neglect, most of the books are covered in must, dust or a combination of both, and the beautiful leather spines are starting to peel off. I wanted to remove my T shirt and use it to begin cleaning some of them off, but the rest of the crew was in a hurry to get to the Archeological Museum before closing time. Before we left, we did go down into the monastery’s catacombs to see the large collection of skeletons. In contrast to the books, the bones are still in remarkably good condition.

The Museum taught us how little is actually known about the early Peruvian civilizations. None had a written language so much of the information about the rise and fall of the various tribes, including the Incas, is largely speculative. We did learn that they kept census records by weaving knots into fabric.

The Cuzco Cathedral described by Che as an overly made-up old woman

The next day we flew to Cuzco, the center of the old Incan empire. By now, I realized that the guide books were misleading. This was not Dickensian London, so I did not have to keep my eyes out for pickpockets around every corner. Museums the guides rated as not to be missed were, in general, rather ho hum, while other sites that were merely mentioned turned out to be much more interesting.

We did encounter some unexpected difficulties, not mentioned in the guide books, because the country was experiencing major strikes and protest demonstrations. The unrest began when the government announced that it would require all teachers in the country to be re-certified with a new certification exam. All of the teachers went on strike and were joined by several other unions. We heard two different arguments. Some people said the education standards are low and in dire need of improvement. Others said the examinations would be political and serve as an excuse to eliminate teachers with views to the left of the present, conservative government. I don’t feel qualified to take sides, but given the level of unrest, I would not be surprised if motivation for the legislation is more political than educational. We were lucky to arrive in Cuzco when we did, because the next day the demonstrators actually succeeded in closing the airport for a few days by starting brush fires nearby.

While the protestors were busy disrupting air traffic, we managed to spend several days touring the Incan ruins in and around Cuzco and the surrounding area which is known as the Sacred Valley. Within the city, the Spanish managed to destroy the Incan temples and build their churches on top of the old foundations, but there are still some large archeological sites out in the countryside, such as Saqsaywaman which overlooks the city. Some guides say it was a fortress, others say there were no fortresses at that time in South America, but they all agree on its nickname, and it call it “the Sexy Woman,” though the word is from the Quechua language and actually means “Satisfied Falcon.”

There are one or two bookstores in Cuzco which I had hoped to visit, but the local tour company was very disorganized which meant we got a late start every morning and did not return to the city until after the bookshops had closed. The gift shops, in contrast, remained open until the last tourist in town was tucked safely into bed.

Fortunately, I brought extra reading material so I was in no danger of running out of books. Several of the hotels we stayed in had small libraries where you could take a book you wanted to read and replace it with one you had finished. Naturally, I carefully examined all of these rather motley collections. The English language selections were rather scanty, and there was never anything worth swapping for. I did learn that most travelers, no matter where they come from, prefer the same light reading (i.e., John Grisham and Danielle Steele) as Americans do. These books are widely translated, and dog-eared paperbacks in many languages were readily available in every hotel.

The most useful book I brought to read turned out to be Che Guevara’s The Motorcycle Diaries. For those unfamiliar with this wonderful work, Mr. Guevara and a friend took some time off from medical school to travel around South America on a motorcycle in the early 1950s. Their travels took them through Peru, Brazil, Bolivia, etc. and his experiences helped radicalize his political thinking. Many of his observations are as true today as fifty years ago when he wrote them. For instance, as a medical doctor he was appalled at the sanitary conditions in Peru, such as the custom of not flushing toilet paper but placing it in a basket next to the commode, a practice that continues in some areas to this day. He also found the Spanish churches in Peru gaudy and cheap looking, compared to the simple symmetrical beauty of the Incan architecture. He wrote: “Gold doesn’t have the dignity of silver which becomes more charming as it ages, and so the cathedral seems to be decorated like an old woman with too much make-up.”

According to the Incas, gold was the sweat of the sun, while silver was the tears of the moon. I highly recommend the book to anyone traveling to South America.

After two days in Cuzco, we took the famous zigzagging train up to Aguas Calientes, a small town at the base of Machu Picchu. There were no bookstores there, but I did manage to buy the memoirs of Hiram Bingham, the American who is credited with “discovering” Machu Picchu (the Native Americans knew about it for centuries—they just never bothered to tell their conquerors), and an interesting collection of Incan myths and legends. I also managed to soak in the mineral baths that the town is named after, although I found them closer to tepid than caliente.

Joe and family at the Sun Gate overlooking Machu Picchu

Machu Picchu is one of the most spectacular archeological sites that I have ever seen, and for me it was the highlight of the trip. It ranks up there in my personal pantheon with the Acropolis in Athens. It is built high up in the Andes, and when you stand far away you can gaze at it for hours, as the constantly changing light keeps revealing different patterns and structures.

When you walk around the site there are mountain views and interesting architectural angles in every direction. Because the Incas left no written records, even the name of the city remains a mystery. Machu Picchu is actually the name of the mountain that the city was built on, but the city’s name has been lost to the ages. After a long day exploring the site, we sadly boarded the train for another long zigzag ride back down the mountain to Cuzco.

The following morning we boarded a bus for Puno, which is the central town in the Lake Titicaca region. We spent the day traveling through the Pampas, or high flatlands. This is the home of alpacas and llamas and you see them grazing on both sides of the road with snow-capped mountains in the distance. In some sections the altitude is as high as 1400 feet above sea level.

Puno is a small, bustling city that serves as the major Peruvian port for Lake Titicaca, the highest navigable lake in the world. The main reason to stay in Puno is to take a boat tour around the lake. The tour takes you to visit the Uros, a Native American tribe that was dispossessed by their enemies many years ago so they moved to the lake district and built their own small islands out of reeds. About ten families dwell on each island, which lasts for seventeen years or so and then needs to be rebuilt.

Almost everything is constructed out of reeds, including their houses, their boats, and their furniture. We visited two different islands, watched some of the women making dinner over reed fires, and bought some decorative reed mobiles from the children.

We then took a long boat ride to the middle of the lake to the natural island of Taquile. This island while larger than the reed islands is still small. Its inhabitants still farm and weave the way their ancestors have done for centuries, without electricity and modern technology. Occasionally there is a house with a solar panel which is used to power a television set.

When we returned to Puno, I had some free time to wander around the town. I saw a few signs that said “La Libreria,” Spanish for bookstore, but they turned out to be stationary stores that primarily sold school supplies along with a small selection of paperbacks, comic books and magazines.

Proud papa with his children’s academic honors

On the way to the airport for a flight back to Lima, our tour guide took us to visit one of the local farmers. His farm was a multi-generational compound which consisted of communal cooking and storage facilities, along with individual mud brick sleeping houses for each family. They raise alpacas, and potatoes and quinoa. We sampled some of the fresh baked potatoes, though I declined the offer to dip them in sauce made from mud containing salt deposits that they use for seasoning. They tasted delicious enough without any condiments. He took us inside to see his sleeping quarters, and to my surprise one whole mud brick wall was filled with his children’s academic honor roll certificates and school medals. He was very proud of them, and it was encouraging in so rural an outpost to see such a profound respect for education.

The last day in Lima I finally had the opportunity to visit some bookstores. We stayed in the section of the city called Miraflores, which is a cosmopolitan, up-scale residential district. The bookstores were modern, clean and well-lit. I decided to try to buy some serious Peruvian writers in English translation, but did not have too much success. The English language sections were small, and consisted mainly of books appealing to tourists with a preference for popular fiction and tour guides. They did have translations of Mario Vargas Llosa, but he is widely published in the United States, and I already have all of his books. I managed to find one or two obscure, serious Peruvian novels in English translation. I also bought a few books in Spanish—a special commemorative edition of One Hundred Years of Solitude, one of my two favorite books of the second half of the 20^th Century, and a miniature Don Quixote.

Miniature books are very popular in Peru, and there is a publisher who puts out a whole collection of tiny books, mostly classics. They have decorative covers, and are about two inches by one and a quarter inch in size. Don Quixote comprises two volumes. To my surprise, the best selling volume is a Spanish translation of the Kama Sutra. Both of my children wanted one, but we were able to find only one copy. It is the one book in the series that you don’t need to speak Spanish to appreciate, since it has a lot of pictures, which as they say, are worth a thousand words.

This is one of the few times that I arrived home from a trip without regretting books that I neglected to buy, since I think I bought all six of the books that I was at all interested in. In fact, what I regretted was some of the books I bought before I left. I quickly put the dry history and useless guide books up for sale on Half.com and rearranged the G section to make a place of honor for The Motorcycle Diaries. Occasionally as I pass by the shelf, I see the book, look up at it, and say, “Yes, Che, you were right. Problems abound, but the people and the sights and the architecture are still spectacularly beautiful.”

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

IOBA Standard, Fall Edition 2007, Volume 8, No. 4.

Ephemeral Assays: Self Listing

Shawn Purcell

When making a large haul, all kinds of things turn up in the net. Even if it’s only books, rather than loads of paper, inscriptions and the things that fall out of books often give you some picture of the previous owner.

While whipping through a load of estate books recently, I nearly threw a newer-looking one in the discard/recycle pile, rather than the price, check, keep for myself, or donate piles. That’s because it was written in. The title was List Your Self: Listmaking as the Way to Self-Discovery, by Ilene Segalove and Paul Bob Velick (Kansas City, MO: Andrews and McMeel, 1996). Now one could goof on this book at length to begin with, as an interactive example of cheesy self-help titles, but the authors kind of make their point in the introduction, and in this case they got results. The owner was moved to record personal facts and thoughts. Most of her personal papers were simply discarded, and although she mentions teen diaries and adult journals several times, it is thought that she either destroyed these or instructed her executor to do so.

There are ten categories: Yourself, Daily Life, Business, Change, Culture, Men and Women, Greater Truths, Health, Growing Up, and Suddenly. Each includes thirty or so topics with a full lined page for responses.

Some of the headings are pretty silly. List all the smells that make you scream. List what’s under your kitchen sink. List what kinds of people should never drive cars. List what’s consistently in your garbage. List all the greetings you’ve used to answer your telephone. List all the warnings you’ve heard about the evils of business. List the dangerous things you have done for money. List those restrictions, from stop signs to gravity, that you can’t stand living with. List the way you feel when a car alarm goes off. List all the things that could happen to you when you park in an underground structure. List what you like to do after sex. List your surefire sexy moves and lines. List the drugs you’ve tried. List what you know about the human body. List all the things you do to stop hiccupping. Suddenly you’ve arrived on Jupiter. List the things you can’t live without.

Many are good though, and some of her responses are recorded as follows.

List the places you go in your mind when you want some peace and quiet.

-Back to our camp on the [X] Pond—many happy memories.
-Fishing with [husband] in Quebec, Canada 250 mi. N. West of Montreal. What beautiful country.
-Church—when children are quiet & well-behaved.
-My easy chair in living room.

List all the names you’ve been called, endearing and not so.

-Bitch
-Know it all
-Opinionated
-Judgmental

List what always makes you laugh.

-Tickling my ribs & feet. Doctors are forewarned!
-Children when happy and/or surprised.
-A good joke.
-At or to myself over some stupid mistake of mine—example, putting mail in fridge.

List the ways you don’t care to die.

-Burn
-Auto accident
-Drown
-Long term cancer

List the animals that really scare you.

-Snakes
-Chickens
-Feathered creatures
-Horses and cows
-Rats

List the heroic feats you’ve performed.

Olive says I saved her from drowning. I don’t remember.

List the things you’ve said that you’d like to take back.

Once when I was a wise, know it all teenager, I asked my mom—“Why do you hate me?” She surprised me by breaking into tears. So did I!

List the brand names you buy and swear by.

-Tylenol & Tylenol P.M.
-Hannaford tissues
-Helmbold’s hot dogs, bologna & liverwurst
-Pam
-Tide or All
-Charmin
-Most of Schwan’s products
-Breyers ice cream

List all the modes of transportation you’ve taken.

-Horse & buggy
-Horse & cutter
-Model T, Maxwell, Auburn (cars)
-Tricycle, toy auto-bike, 2 seater bike
-Bus (school), bus (Greyhound)
-El train, N.Y.C. subway, train
-Auto
-Jet plane
-Ferry boat (Alaskan), river boat (nite line on Hudson), outboard motor boat
-Dump truck
-Snowmobile
-Elevator, escalator

List the first thoughts that run through your mind the moment you get up.

-It’s another morning. Thank you God!
-Let’s see what the weather is.
-Paper here yet?
-Where is my list for today’s activities? What am I doing today?
-What’s for breakfast?

List the biggest turning points in your life.

-The ultimatum my mother gave me after I graduated from high school. “Get a job or enroll in a college!”
After checking over the Help Wanted ads, I enrolled in [X College]—August 1937.
-Graduation from [X College]—1941.
-1st teaching job—1943, loved it!
-My 1st marriage—I now embarked on 2-3 careers—housewife, teacher & secretary of our construction business.
I enjoyed # 1 & 2—but soon had to give up #3—I disliked it intensely.
-Loss of [husband 1]—moved back home & worked on a Master’s Degree.
-When I said “Yes” to [husband 2] after only 2 months courtship. Married Dec. 1963.
-Loss of [husband 2]—when I had to go it alone. Never had to stay all alone in my life before. It is scary.

List all the times you’ve gone off the beaten path.

Not too many, but I don’t care to list them.

List how you’ve contributed to the welfare of the planet.

-Teaching 10 yr. olds for 30 years.
-Tried to lead a “good” life by helping others in many ways.
-Collected & recorded many historical facts—preservation for future.

List all the celebrities you’d like to sock in the face.

No room for all.

List all the celebrities you’d like to have sex with.

None—thank you.

List the ways the government lies to you.

Too many to list. Latest scare tactic by Bush Administration re Social Security, etc.

List all the magazines you subscribe to.

-Guide Posts
-Good Old Days
-Reminisce—a gift
-Ladies Home Journal—going to drop

List the movies you’ve seen that were really worth two hours of your life.

-Gone With the Wind
-Mame
-South Pacific
-Oklahoma

List the cultural spots you’ve visited that move you so much you are speechless.

Am usually not speechless.

List the times you said yes when you wish you had said no.

The times I sold off all the farm lands.

List the times you have consciously endangered your life.

Driving Dad’s Auburn back & forth to [X College]. It could really fly.

List those unanswered questions that have been plaguing you since childhood.

-What is heaven like?
-Is there really a hell such as many “olde time” talked about?
-Why do people mistreat animals—esp. kittens & puppies?

There are dozens of blank copies of this book available online starting at a dollar, and they had a couple of spin-offs, like List Your Self for Pregnancy, and More List Your Self. A few of these are written in, and there’s even an ex-library copy for sale!

What to do with this biographical book of lists? On the one hand our journalist seemed to want her privacy. On the other, it is a hokey yet poignant repository of late thoughts on a long good life, and better than many listless 1800s diaries I’ve seen that are mainly concerned with things like the weather. I know one of the women she included under “List all the people who love you for who you really are,” and it will go to her.

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

IOBA Standard, Fall Edition 2007, Volume 8, No. 4.

Books About Bookselling: A Backward Look
Shawn Purcell
A Backward Look: 50 Years of Maine Books and Bookmen, by Francis M. O’Brien. Portland, ME: Anthoensen Press, 1986. My first impression of this book is that it’s only 49 pages long, which is good because the deadline is only a week away. And the author spends half the time on non-book topics. His family history. A rather idyllic childhood in the “Forest City.” Many early jobs, including sitting in a tent on a hill near a bridge and recording all the incoming state license plates for the Maine Publicity Bureau. Almost getting fired as an usher. (“Ma’am, we say please in Portland, Maine.”) Going to sea for a few years. Living in New York City; the Left Bank (where he bought a copy of Ulysses from Sylvia Beach and saw James Joyce); Ireland (to write); New Mexico; etc., and then back to Portland. I began to wonder why this was as much about Portland as it was about books, and why it was so slim (Maine brevity?), and then found the publisher’s note I ignored the first time through. “This book is based on a transcription of the fourth annual lecture in the Anthoensen Press Lecture Series, as presented by Francis M. O’Brien at the Portland Public Library, a co-sponsor of the event. The date was Saturday, May 10, 1986, at 1:30 P.M. The Rines Meeting Room was filled with over a hundred interested people with a diversity of literary interests. Mr. O’Brien himself was the unifying point of interest, so much interest that there were many requests to have the lecture published for posterity. It is a pleasure for the Anthoensen Press to accommodate that wish.” And so they did, with a print run of 500 copies. Mine is borrowed from a library whose commercial binder saw fit to remove the original front wrap. There are only a few real copies online, all priced at $100, and one ABAA member was kind enough to let me use his digital image of the cover. I suggested that this late review of the work may stimulate interest in his signed copy. Once I finished reading it, however, I was so stimulated—because it was half about all the little experiences, kindnesses, and bookish influences that went into the creation of such a bookseller—but another of the copies is not only signed but includes the author’s corrections “so noted on last page.” From the description though it appears it’s hardcover, probably the author’s personal bound copy, probably missing the original front wrap, so I’m up in the air, but will decide before this comes out. I could buy all three copies, keep the one I like, and price the other two at $150, which will look pretty good compared to the ridiculous Anybook phantom copy ridiculously priced at $499.88, but that doesn’t always work out, and besides, I’ve blown my cover. At any rate, Mr. O’Brien must have been gratified to produce such an interesting and collectible Maine book. Excerpts follow. “Books were precious in our neighborhood, and there was a great deal of swapping and borrowing, and we thought nothing of walking a mile or two to get them, no matter what the weather. I attended the Cummings School on Ocean Avenue, which was built in the 1890s. It had a small library, which had been closed up for some years, for what reason, I don't know. Another boy, Leslie Hassell, and I got permission from Ma'am Elwell, our principal, to open it up, dust off the books, and act as librarians. Leslie was severely handicapped and on crutches, so I did most of the physical work. (I might add that Leslie became an outstanding horologist and in World War II was commissioned a navy commander and was in charge of some very important navy clockwork.)” “We, and I mean a number of girls and boys, developed a great thirst for reading, and somehow or other, we managed to find most of the books that the bibliographer, Jacob Blank, forty years later, listed in his excellent checklist of American juvenile classics called From Peter Parley to Penrod, except that we didn't know they were classics, just good reading. They were the books by the prolific Maine writer, Jacob Abbott; Hawthorne's A Wonder Book; Goulding's The Young Marooners, laid in Georgia; the books by Oliver Optic; Horatio Alger; Harry Castleman; Cudjo's Cave by J. T. Trowbridge, who later attracted other writers to summer at Kennebunkport; Norway, Maine's Charles Asbury Stephens, who wrote wonderful stories about life on the old farm; glorious Mark Twain; Dan Beard, one of the founders of the Boy Scout movement; Kirk Monroe; Howard Pyle; Kate Douglas Wiggin; W. O. Stoddard; Ernest Seton Thompson; Frank Baum; Henry Shute; Jack London; Owen Johnson; Lewis Carroll; Booth Tarkington; Grimm's fairy tales; Arthur Rackham; Robert Louis Stevenson; Lang’s color fairy tale books; and so forth and so on. We boys even read girls' books, like the ‘Flaxie Frizzle’ stories that were written by Rebecca Clark, another Maine writer who lived here in Portland at one time, in Park Place, just below Danforth Street.” “For the first time I had a chance to explore Portland, and I ranged it from Cleaves Monument at the top of Munjoy Hill to the streets and alleys between, all the way out to Libbytown and beyond. I discovered the public library and its children’s room, then under the charge of Miss Linda Hackett. We became friends, and remained so for the rest of our lives. The First World War was in progress, we had just entered it the previous year, and even at ten years old, I suppose that I was caught up in the mutual intoxication of war fever, and it was to take me a long time in the future before I began to wonder why the decent people of the world allowed their leaders to work out their designs for murder, a question that is still not answered. “We boys dug trenches in my aunt's back garden next to the mews behind the Park Street row houses and played with homemade arms. At that time, there was a charming little park, with benches and a fountain that was used in warm weather for the benefit of the owners of the houses on Park Street. Three of the houses, then called the Baltimore Flats, were occupied by men whose libraries I bought many years in the future. There were Isaac Watson Dyer, a bibliographer of Carlyle, whose great Carlyle collection is at Bowdoin College; Alfred Brinkler, noted organist and teacher; and Thomas Eddington Calvert, a former editor, and to me my ideal of what a man of letters should look like.” “Huston’s was a treasure house. He was a steady buyer of old collections, and some very important books went through his hands. It was a grey, battered, dusty establishment, with unpainted floors. The general categories were on the first floor, and above were two rooms filled with Americana. In the basement, which was off-limits, were piles of remainders of various Maine books (many printed on Exchange Street itself) which A. J. had bought cheaply when the sales had slowed down. Brown Thurston Company, about opposite where the Anthoensen Press is now, the leading printers of the time, had published many Maine town histories and genealogies as well as Williamson’s bibliography of Maine. “I became a customer of Huston’s in a very small way. He would fill his window with five- and ten-cent books, and I used to buy them consistently. A. J. commented on this once, and predicted that some day I would be buying books for a dollar or more.” “At last, there was a break. Under the new Roosevelt administration, there was organized what was called the Civil Works Administration, the predecessor of the WPA, a make-work program. An advertisement appeared calling for ten people to catalogue books, manuscripts, and other items at the Boston Public Library, that had been donated to them over a period of fifty years, but they had never had the funds to take care of. Many applied and I was one of the lucky ones. We were ensconced in the Treasure Room, the rare book division of one of the great libraries of the world, with access to a superb reference collection. Miss Swift, the director, and Zoltan Haraszty, a droll and eccentric Hungarian scholar, showed great patience with us. For me, it was really the first important learning experience that I had with books as tools. “Our group consisted of nine men and one woman. Most of us were typically angry young people of the times, disgusted with the system, rather leftish in our views. Merle Colby, who had written two best sellers and taken his family to Europe, had come home broke. He and Oliver LeFarge had been the literary white hopes of the Harvard Class of 1926. Merle had managed the old Alfred Bartlett Bookshop in Boston out of college and always wished to return to the book business. He later became administrator of the Federal Writers Project for New England; still later he went with Ernest Gruening when he became governor of Hawaii, and then later of Alaska. Colby edited the Federal Writers' guidebooks for both emerging states. He wrote another novel dealing with Washington intrigue called The Big Street, but died in the 1960s. “Mike Aronsberg was an excellent photographer and later fought in the Spanish Civil War. He had had a bookshop at one time. Charles Flato, not much more than three feet in height, with a hunchback and crippled legs, was a colorful man with a beard, who wore a broad-brimmed black fedora and a black cloak and got around with the aid of a walking stick, with which he would whack people who got in his way. He had great wit, had written for the Hound and Horn, a leading quarterly of the time, and was an authority on Brady photographs. Frank Leveroni had managed Goodspeed's Park Street Bookshop. “John Cheever had had one or two things published up to then, but was destined to become the finest short-story writer of our generation. I corresponded with John a few times over the years, and wrote him a letter just before he died a couple of years ago, and got back a sad reply, one line, ‘Francis—carry on.’ He died about a week later. “We all got along well, and a constant topic was the joy of being able to open an old bookshop as the way to an independent life.” “The very first day I opened a man came up from the waterfront and said there was a barrel of books in an old building that he would deliver for a dollar. A dollar was a magic figure in those days. He brought them along, and I looked them over and found three or four books of interest, but one intrigued me because it had been printed in Portsmouth in 1802. The title was Julia, or The Illuminated Baron, by ‘A Lady of Massachusetts.’ This is one of the rarest books in American literature, and was in wonderful condition in the original leather binding, but of course a neophyte like myself would not have known of it. It was one of the first Gothic novels published in this country and the author was really a lady of Maine, Sally Barrell Keating Wood, our first novelist, who later wrote other books in the same vein. I'm glad to say that Dorothy Healy has a copy of it in the Maine Women Writers Collection at Westbrook College. “One of my first callers was Garland Patch who worked at the navy yard, but was also the custodian of the Thomas Bailey Aldrich House and Museum nearby, and a budding antiquarian. He said he was interested in early Portsmouth printing and I sold him the book for thirty-five cents. That was the standard price for old fiction in those days and I hadn't learned to differentiate. The book would bring about a thousand dollars today.” “The depression was still on, and a lot of people were moving elsewhere. One man from a wealthy local family who lived in one of the finest houses on the Cape shore called me one day to look at his books. They filled a fine library room, mostly fiction and more or less current things. And when I asked him if he wanted to put a price on them, he said: ‘Look, I’m going to fulfill the dream of a lifetime. I’m selling the house, my wife and daughter are going to have an apartment in New York, and I’m going to paint and live on one of the smaller islands in the Caribbean, and I’m going to restrict myself to a very limited budget. I’ve got most of the fare down there, but I’m lacking’—and here he named a relatively small amount. I’m ashamed to say how little it was—‘If you want to give me that, you can have these books, and those on the third floor.’ Well, I don’t know whether this is reprehensible or not, but I’d never been one to look a gift horse in the mouth. The books on the third floor turned out to be some wonderful art books that he had bought as an art student in Paris before the First World War. I often wondered if he had ever fulfilled his dream. Fairly recently, a relative told me that he stayed on the island only a few months and then joined his family in New York, dying a few years later. “The shop promised to be very successful. I got serious about bibliographies, and started buying and reading them. I acquired my original copy of Williamson’s Bibliography of Maine, published in 1896, which lists and describes over eleven thousand books of Maine interest, published up to that date. I got my copy from A. J. Huston who had a small remainder, for the price of seven dollars. This work is indispensable to a bookseller, or a librarian, and is regarded as the finest state bibliography in the country. Many states do not have one, including, surprisingly, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Connecticut. Vermont has a pretty good one, Rhode Island an attempt at one. People desiring a copy of Williamson in recent years, have paid as much as two hundred fifty dollars for one, but the state library, with a special grant, has recently had the work reprinted in excellent style on good paper, in a limited edition of two hundred fifty copies, at sixty-two dollars postpaid, no discounts to anybody. This is a real bargain. About half the copies are sold, and I would rather invest in this book than any stock on the New York Stock Exchange, for they will rise in value when the edition is gone.” “Another spring rolled around and in April of 1940 I opened up once more at 668 Congress Street, at Longfellow Square, which was Erskine Caldwell's old place, the Longfellow Bookshop of the late twenties. There were a lot of changes in Portland. With the coming of World War II, two great shipyards were built in South Portland, where they were to build hundreds of ships; they employed thirty thousand workers from all over, who were making good wages and had some extra money to spend, on books among other things. “There were dislocations in many other ways. Some of the big old houses of Portland were being converted into war housing, and several times a week I would show up at the shop to unload a few hundred books. “The largest library I ever bought was at the Deering Street house of Dr. William Fenn, the old pastor of the High Street Congregational Church, who had died in 1914. The house had been closed up since, but was maintained by heirs who lived in Delaware, connected with DuPont. There were ten thousand books there, bound periodicals and pamphlets, including what I now realize was a remarkable collection of books dealing with the Darwinian controversy, which had changed the face of revealed religion forever. It should have been kept as a collection but I was too distracted at the time to do so. I think it was probably the most scholarly collection of books I ever had. “Some of the finest books in town began to appear during these years. Hubbard Winslow Bryant, of Boston, had come to Portland to open an antiquarian bookshop and curio business about 1860, but was taken on by John Bundy Brown (then our richest citizen) as a confidential clerk, and remained so for the next thirty years. Sometime in the 1860s, a series of articles appeared in the old Portland Press, entitled ‘The Private Libraries of Portland,’ under the initial ‘B,’ which I have good reason to believe was Bryant. With some self-interest among his opening paragraphs, he stated, ‘It is to be hoped that in the course of time we shall be blessed with all the concomitance of modern civilization, including the old book business and the horse railroad.’ He was not to have his own bookshop until around the turn of the century, when among his occasional visitors was Winslow Homer, who may possibly have been related. Hubbard Winslow was the name of a popular clergyman in Boston, and it was common to name children after clergymen, but there may have been a connection. A. J. Huston said that Bryant pestered—he used the word ‘pestered’—Homer into designing a bookplate, the only one known to have been done by him. I happen to own one of Bryant's reference books with the bookplate, an exceedingly rare article, and I had another copy which is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In the articles, ‘B’ deals with some of the outstanding book collections of the town, listing a great many titles. James Olcott Brown, son of J. B. Brown, had a gentleman's library, with some first editions of the New England writers. Bishop William Stevens Perry had two thousand volumes and five thousand pamphlets, including a great many items relating to the early history of the Episcopal Church in America, as well as a collection of the letters of the Reverend Jacob Bailey, the frontier missionary and Tory of Pownalborough. The Perry collection was a fairly large collection with some very early quartos and folios, including the great Bayle's Dictionary, the English edition of 1724 in five volumes; and Leigh Hunt's copy of Sir Philip Sidney's The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, one of the great classics of English literature. It is hard to imagine how that ever got to Portland, yet we recall the phrase about ‘the curious mobility of books.’ Dana's books were later sold at auction. “John Neal, an outstanding Portland literary figure, who was called ‘that wild fellow’ by Hawthorne, had about three thousand volumes, later mostly destroyed in the Great Fire, although some important works presented to him have come down through descendants who are still living here. “Oliver Gerrish’s books were strong on Swedenborgianism and Freemasonry, but he had some good old books, including much natural history. He also had a number of books bound in Russian leather by the excellent Portland bookbinder, George Coleman, of the 1830s. “William Willis, the historian of Portland, had formed a library ‘to delight the historian, the antiquarian, and the general student.’ In 1834, he had printed a catalogue of his library consisting of almost fifty pages. He had since acquired many additions, and some of the books are listed. He owned the first six volumes of the Falmouth Gazette, the first newspaper in Maine, beginning in 1795. “The first separately printed item in Maine is probably a copy of the ‘Lumber Act,’ which was printed in an early issue of the Gazette and advertised as available at their office. It is likely that it was a broadside, but no copy is known. “For Mainers, a copy of this incunabulum turning up would be almost as thrilling as finding a copy of the Cambridge 1639 ‘Freeman’s Oath,’ the first item to be printed in North America, but of which there is no known copy. A fraudulent copy of this has recently been exposed. “Willis also had many items relating to Maine history as well as to general history and literature, about three thousand volumes in all, with a number of early manuscripts. He also had a book that was taken from Father Râle, the French missionary to the Indians, when he was killed by the English at Norridgewock. I believe most of Willis’s books are now here in the Portland Public Library. “Philip Henry Brown, another son of J. B. Brown, had three thousand volumes, which contained the rarest and most valuable items of all, very strong in fine bindings and illustrated books, and early books of travel, foreign and American. He also owned a copy of Gillray’s caricatures in elephant folio, with the extra volume of suppressed plates (containing scatological humor); also an elephant folio volume of early states of Hogarth’s engravings, which is now in my possession; besides an unusual collection of facetiae (an old-fashioned bookseller’s term for erotica). Brown’s books descended to his daughter, Mrs. Frank True, and were sold at auction in the 1950s, and I was fortunate in purchasing some of them.” “Out of some of the foregoing collections, and many others, such as the great library at the Deering Mansion (the site of what is now the University of Southern Maine); I acquired over the years many fine books for my stock. During this period, I began to send out lists of books to libraries and individuals. In 1945 I had my first printed catalogue. About that time, our two children were born. The books were piling up, both in my shop basement and in my High Street home. In 1949 we acquired an old farm on the Saco River in Hiram. We did a lot of fixing up, and have been using it for storage ever since. “In 1952 my wife and I decided to give up the Congress Street shop and do business from home, where we have since catered to old and new customers and have done a fairly active appraisal business of books and old manuscript material. “I have occupied but a small niche in our book world. What of the others? Locally we had several new bookshops until recently. Now the business is dominated by a single chain, relentlessly efficient and successful, but lacking the warmth that one enjoyed with Charles Campbell, Edith Riley, Janet Palmer, and Leo Boyle, and with the doyens of the wholesale trade, Dan and Ruth McDonough. “The antiquarian trade has risen in twenty years from single numbers to a fraternity of eighty members today, the Maine Antiquarian Booksellers Association. “The circle of book collectors is sizable, and some have made their own contributions to literature and historical research. So far as the devoted quest of books is concerned, I must mention several who should be honored: James B. Vickery, historian of Bangor and Unity, indefatigable book-hunter; William B. Jordan, historian of Cape Elizabeth and mordant critic of Portland’s past; Dorothy Healey, co-founder of Westbrook College’s Maine Women Writers Collection; lastly, a lay scholar who, through stress and storm, has succeeded in building probably the finest collection of works of history in Maine, Bradford Hale. Then there is that mysterious angel of local bookshops, the Bear. “Before I conclude, I must pay tribute to one of the glories of Portland: the Anthoensen Press, which unfortunately is more renowned in the world of bookmen and scholars than it is in its own hometown. That was the fate of Thomas Bird Mosher, who also occupied the present home of the Press, at 45 Exchange Street. I wonder if that great craftsman, Fred Anthoensen, had ever read Lamb’s advice to a printer: ‘A little flowery border, neat not gaudy,’ or Ruskin’s rejoinder that admiration of ‘neat but not gaudy’ is commonly reported to have influenced the devil when he painted his tail green. I don’t think the Anthoensen Press will ever paint its tail green. “Well, I have rambled on long enough, and I thank you for your company and your patience for what undoubtedly is a dull tale. “I don’t know whether you want to take any more time, but if anybody wants to ask questions, I’m ready. But keep in mind the rules of the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, the Vatican Library, probably the first public library in the world: that any reader who asks more than three senseless questions of the attendant is to be removed.” Shawn Purcell operates Balopticon Books & Ephemera and can be contacted at http://www.balopticon.com. IOBA Standard, Fall Edition 2007, Volume 8, No. 4.

Book Repair: Revelations, Decisions, and Disclosures

Ellen Firsching Brown

I recently did something I never thought I would do: I tore a book to shreds. When my children were little, they routinely received harsh punishments for this sort of behavior. What brought me to commit such an act of destruction? It was not a fit of rage or any form of mental breakdown. It was an assignment for a class in book repair.

Over the past year, I have had the opportunity to study book making and repair. Along with my fellow attendees, I shuddered at the thought of ruining a perfectly good book. I nervously sliced into the binding and pulled off the covers. I quickly became engrossed with the

Table of Contents

Foreword

The ABE Bookseller Ratings Deception

Booklisting Site Ratings

Rare Book School: A Week Among Bright Bookish Minds

The Price Guide Is Right (or Is It?)

An Interview with Judith Tingley of Meetinghouse Books and MARIAB

-Hi Judith. What is your life story before getting into bookselling, in one paragraph (and no cheating with a fifty page paragraph)?

-What are your first memories of books?

-What attracted you to bookselling?

-Where have you toiled in the field, and where did you run your own shops?

-Ken Haverly is your book mate. How did you meet, and do you find it fairly uncommon for couples to be equal partners in the bookselling business?

-You loaded up the truck and you moved to South Deerfield, in Western Massachusetts, that is, Happy Valley, the sleepy west of the woody east, one of the coolest regions in the whole dang country. How did that happen, and tell us about the history of the building you are in.

-Any ghostly vibes there late at night?

-No bosses, and now no landlords. Congratulations! Did you have to make any improvements?

-What about shelving?

-What quirks does the building have?

-What are your specialties?

-How do you acquire most of your stock?

-Can you share some stellar finds and sales with us?

-Tell us about the one(s) that got away.

-What percentage of your inventory is online, and is that mixed in or kept separate?

-On average, how many visitors do you have each day, which will vary seasonally of course, and roughly what percentage of them are known to you?

-Some unusual things you've seen in bookstores?

-There is a fairly high concentration of quality booksellers in the Pioneer Valley. Were you well and hospitably received?

-And what about the South Deerfield reception?

-Where should one have lunch after visiting your shop?

-You are the current president of the Massachusetts and Rhode Island Antiquarian Booksellers. Tell us your understanding of the history of this organization.

-How many members do you have, and what does it take to join?

-MARIAB is in the middle of New England Independent Booksellers Association country, and right next to fellow entities such as the New Hampshire Antiquarian Booksellers Association. Does Rhode Island ever talk about seceding?

-What services do regional bookseller associations such as MARIAB provide?

-What duties do you have as president?

-Anything exciting coming up for MARIAB?

-Thanks for your time Judith. Keep up the good work, and best wishes.

A Book Dealer Visits Peru, or, How I Spent My Summer Vacation

Ephemeral Assays: Self Listing

List the places you go in your mind when you want some peace and quiet.

List all the names you’ve been called, endearing and not so.

List what always makes you laugh.

List the ways you don’t care to die.

List the animals that really scare you.

List the heroic feats you’ve performed.

List the things you’ve said that you’d like to take back.

List the brand names you buy and swear by.

List all the modes of transportation you’ve taken.

List the first thoughts that run through your mind the moment you get up.

List the biggest turning points in your life.

List all the times you’ve gone off the beaten path.

List how you’ve contributed to the welfare of the planet.

List all the celebrities you’d like to sock in the face.

List all the celebrities you’d like to have sex with.

List the ways the government lies to you.

List all the magazines you subscribe to.

List the movies you’ve seen that were really worth two hours of your life.

List the cultural spots you’ve visited that move you so much you are speechless.

List the times you said yes when you wish you had said no.

List the times you have consciously endangered your life.

List those unanswered questions that have been plaguing you since childhood.

Books About Bookselling: A Backward Look

Book Repair: Revelations, Decisions, and Disclosures