Foreword

In the online bookselling Dreamtime about a decade ago, there was Interloc (the larval stage of Alibris), Bibliofind (very clean of limb), and ABE (like fresh Canadian spring water). The Bibliofind list was a great place to talk privately about our profession, and we used to speculate on trends. We envisioned corporations buying these book-loving companies up, and we hoped that one or more of the search services would survive as strong independents and good partners.

Ironically, Bibliofind was bought out and exterminated first by Amazon in a roundabout but purposeful manner, the early Alibris centralized business model sought to hide booksellers from our customers, and the evolution of ABE could serve as a study of creeping corporatism, though to be fair many of our problems are based on The Glut (millions of books dredged up by an army of overnight booksellers), and not solely on the depredations of the 3 As.

And so it was on a quiet first of August before a three day Canadian weekend that we received notice Amazon had acquired ABE, pending final approval, and no it was not another April Fool’s-type jest. Over the years our ABE fees have doubled or quadrupled while our sales were halved or quartered, and we wonder how much of those revenues derived from our hard work and expertise went toward improving the balance sheet and making this property ripe for picking.

This rather seismic event might have raised greater fears and more resentment years ago when ABE was pure, but things have gone so far downhill with mega-lister clogged search result pages, the credit card processing grab, and a score of other professional and technical problems that many of us are hoping equally impure Amazon can save the day. Unless Amazon gets religion all of a sudden about the difference between unique used/out-of-print/antiquarian books and shiny identical new ones fresh from the publisher’s warehouse, however, there’s a good chance we are jumping from a sinking ship to a ship of fools.

I have given up debating enthusiastic Amazon supporters, who believe that the phenomenal branding and number of eyeballs Amazon delivers absolves the company of all sins against our noble profession. I shop there for cheap music and new books, but I usually don’t do my research or important buying there due to all the dumbing down and distractions, and I suspect it is the last choice for serious book buyers who know about the alternatives. Amazon’s customer base is not as sophisticated either. We just heard the following rationale for a refund from an IOBA bookseller: “I was ignorant of the fact that the product that I was buying was a book.” This is what makes the loss or diminution of ABE worrisome. Amazon makes it very easy to order books and it delivers them quickly on the back end, but it also makes it difficult to list books and to find books on the front end. And for “better” titles, Amazon’s dirty little secret is that these selfsame books can often be ordered directly, easily, and safely from independent booksellers, without the big Amazon markup added to cover the costs of doing business there, or added by those who realize that most buyers don’t know about this alternative. “Customer-centric” sounds great at first blush, but it often involves brutalizing your suppliers, undermining other businesses in the quest for monopoly, degrading traditional standards that are usually there for a good reason, and actually increasing prices in unseen ways.

I have two visions of Amazon. The first is of a galactic horn of plenty sluggishly moving through the universe devouring star systems with the same guiding principles that inform WalMart. The other is of the Pythonesque Ministry of Silly Walks that must be their used books department, deep down in the bowels of the rude cornucopia. I picture the office door at an angle, up off the floor a few feet with a whacky doorknob and painted some bright color, with people inside jumping through flaming hoops and putting out small fires all day, which is what they make us do with technical inefficiencies (uploading, etc.) and bibliographic atrocities (truncating descriptions, etc.) far too numerous to list here.

There is a third hopeful vision, long cherished, of our nice books smoothly interfacing with Amazon’s enormous potential. Will they start from scratch with used books and integrate AbeBooks into that, or will they make AbeBooks the premier arm of their bookselling empire? Will they squeeze us for profits, hide our identities, and coerce us into lowering standards, or will they respect the profession and treat us as business owners rather than shipping clerks? Will either company even listen to us? One thing for certain is that IOBA will try to make them listen, as when one of our Canadian members reported on challenging the head of AbeBooks heading for his sports car out on the street after a good but rather restrictive radio interview on hurtful new shipping commissions “like an Ent lecturing Saruman.”

In this issue, three online bookseller insiders weigh in on the ABE takeover; a New Hampshire bookman says farewell to a beloved children’s author; IOBA supports our South African colleagues; a cool letterpress Q & A; and Joe Perlman writes about Great Unexpectations. The Reference Desk performs a strip search; the book review comes with Goodspeed; and we open a new drawer for exciting interviews with up and coming authors. The Tool Box gets into a bind and fights corruption. IOBA Bookseller Profiles say Havre de Grace, MD; go leather in Devon, U.K.; yet bow to royalty in Palm Desert, CA. If that doesn’t stuff you, how about a large slice of Addenda for dessert?

I am late on this issue for the first time (July in October), and will try to catch up, though it’s always so tempting to save untold hours with two little words—“combined issue.” You can help. Send articles about your specialties, send brief pieces, send something. Please see “Solicitations” in the back pages for more information.

PS: Sorry to take care of internal business in a foreword, but it has come to our attention that a good portion of IOBA members are not receiving our Announce List messages, probably because they are being filtered into a trash or junk folder. You can opt out of other lists, like Discuss or TradeBooks, but we ask all of you to make sure you are receiving Announce List messages, as that is our official conduit for important announcements, the annual August renewal notice (for the membership year September through August), voting on board elections, etc. We try to use it sparingly but we need it to reach all of you. Please consider this PS as a ping test. If you received word of this new issue of the Standard through the Announce List, you are golden. If you found your way here through some other means, take action to make sure Announce List emails go into your In Box. We can help you with this if you need it. Thank you kindly. We now return you to more standard programming.

What Is Wrong With Today's Amazon?

What will happen now that Amazon owns ABE?

Generally speaking, AbeBooks sellers who list on Amazon are hoping there will be no automated migration of AbeBooks listings to Amazon; and AbeBooks sellers who do not list on Amazon are, in the main, hoping for the opposite.

We would love to see Amazon's techno-wizards reduce ABE’s glitches and help them facilitate the long-promised optional exclusion of new books and/or PODs from searches.

Beyond that, our hopes and speculations are widely scattered.

In the meantime, Amazon could actually use some help from ABE in the following areas.

Dreadful Seller Storefront

The left hand portion of the Amazon Seller Storefront screen is decent. This includes the Info & Policies, a feedback summary, and a link to more information (though this is primarily Amazon's own Returns and Shipping statements).

The manner in which Amazon listings are displayed is the dreadful part. This page is clearly aimed at the visually-oriented shopper, but it fails miserably in execution. This portion of the Storefront consists solely of product images with the title and author given in hypertext. This limits the number of listings per page, but the most serious drawback is that the screen in many cases consists of blank "no image available" place-holders (most unattractive), or, perhaps even worse, it shows whichever image Amazon has assigned to that book. For newer books this will be the stock photo, but for others it will be a former "customer share" image that Amazon has copied and placed in the "official" image spot (which is then beyond the control of the original contributor). This image may or may not resemble the book being offered. From the main Product Page on Amazon, it is easier for shoppers to guess that the image probably does not represent all the listings, but when coupled with the title on the Seller Storefront, the image may be quite misleading. This is especially true when the shopper clicks on a title. The page that comes up resembles the main Product Page, but the links to the listings page show only the one listing. At this point, only someone well familiar with the Amazon system will realize that the image shown often does not represent the book being offered.

The Storefront layout has the potential of making an interesting display for those sellers who do make extensive use of image share, but that potential is generally not realized. The only instance of the seller's image accompanying their title on the Storefront will be in the case of Created Product Pages (those deliberately created online—not the page images created automatically upon upload).

Although Amazon started out as a bookselling site, its spell check function in the caption and notes for shared images (kudos there) does not recognize some common bookselling terms such as endpaper. The caption and notes also do not allow some rather crucial words, such as binding, spine, jacket, and title.

Too Many Roll-Ups

Amazon's method of accommodating uploads of non-ISBN books from various sellers often results in a horrendous array of Product Information Pages. Since date, rather than publisher, is used as the primary identifier to separate various editions of the same title, books from any publisher that include a print date (as opposed to those that give only the original copyright date) may run into dozens of Product Pages for the same title. It also means that an attempt to create a page for a Grosset & Dunlap reprint that uses the same date as the Little, Brown original will result in an Amazon message that the product already exists, blocking the attempt to create a separate Product Page for the reprint edition.

The date identifier is not always a negative. Sets such as the International Library of Technology may sometimes best be matched with similar copies by printing date. Date is also a reasonable divider for different editions of Betty Crocker's Cookbook.

The emphasis on date also leads to extra Product Pages when sellers can’t determine the date of a book. They can’t leave this field blank, so they have learned to plug in such dates as 1000 or 1111. New pages are also created by including or not including subtitles, and by adding inappropriate comments to the title field (Very Good!, one page creased, etc.).

This problem is exacerbated by sellers who understand and manipulate the system by deliberately forcing new pages for their listings rather than selecting an existing ASIN and correcting any wrong information.

The result of all this is an excessive number of roll-ups and endless clicking and hunting. The Prince of the House of David, for example, has 63 Product Pages, plus a few nested roll-ups. A Kindle edition may be masking the original publisher Product Page, showing only as an "Unknown Binding" link next to the Kindle on the search results page. Furthermore, if there are several of these embedded roll-ups, even a knowledgeable shopper may have to chase around to find the complete list. These roll-up linkages sometimes result in such oddities as the product review for a 1932 first edition telling us what a great voice the 2001 talking book reader has.

Searching for a book like Stevenson's Treasure Island is going to require a bit of experience on any search service, but Amazon's maze is much harder to penetrate. There are over 1,000 roll-ups listed after the simple author / title search! Adding "Wyeth" as a keyword only brings it down to 28. The ordering system in the search results USUALLY leaves the empty pages last (those Product Pages with no listings), but that's not dependable.

The author field in particular is well handled when listing directly on Amazon, or when creating a page on Amazon, allowing multiple author listings, plus illustrator, editor, photographer, etc., with each being properly identified. The pages created by seller upload are not so nice, as the following author field examples demonstrate.

Harriet.; Harvey Fuller (ill.) Ouida; Golden (Author)

Thornton W. (Thornton Waldo) (1874-1965) - Related name: Kerr, George (illus.) Burgess

The Advanced Search has a few serious shortcomings. Date refinement seldom works well, for no discernable reason.

After finding the desired Product Page, it is often troublesome locating signed copies or first printings. Ideally the Collectible division should be the place to look for these, but rampant abuse by sellers pushed Amazon to set a standard based on price. This might actually work for books of at least moderately high value, but it doesn't work well at all for the large number of lower end collectibles, such as signed copies of common titles that make them a bit more valuable. There may be many such books that you feel should sell for $20 to $30, but they cannot be listed as Collectible in that price range. Amazon does not make it particularly easy to determine what their lower end Collectible limit is for a given book, and I have heard that these limits shift and listings get deleted.

April Hearn operates The Bookworm in Oroville, CA and can be contacted at bkworm2@cncnet.com.

The Problems with Amazon as an Antiquarian Seller Site

What is wrong with Amazon? This is a question that is not possible to answer with any degree of objectivity for either buyer or seller since Amazon is a megamarket for an enormous variety of goods and services.

So this, for what it’s worth, is the view of a bookseller. Or, to be more precise, an internet-only bookseller of vintage and antiquarian books.

It should be stated right at the top that Amazon is one of the best known online markets in the world. If it has not already, it will certainly soon be replacing eBay as the foremost. In its early days it went deep into the red spending hundreds of millions on advertising, and has only recently achieved profitability.

Part of the reason for its success has been the diversification of product lines since its origins as a seller of new books, and its highly proactive stand on customer service.

Amazon is a large publicly traded corporation, and as such perhaps the most notable flaw is its inherent bureaucratic inertia and primary focus on shareholder approval. This means it is slow to respond to market dynamics, and when those changes come the first priority is short term profits rather than long term strategies. But most importantly, its corporate mindset has often led to the creation of general policies that do not fit particular situations—the classic “cookie-cutter” approach. More on that later.

As a website, Amazon is well designed with the classic triple columns, and there is a lack of technical gimmicks (a good thing). It is a bit cluttered though, as it takes full advantage of the latest in targeted marketing by trying to sell you things that are even remotely related to your past purchases. This can become very annoying, when it is not humorous. Amazon is currently trying to sell me three CDs in three foreign languages I do not speak and have never browsed in. I have never even bought a CD from Amazon, and the ones I sold were all in English. It is also trying to sell me hand tools and things I will never use, like the ubiquitous (on Amazon) Kindle.

Perhaps Amazon's worst flaw is its horrendous search function. When I key in JOHN DICKINSON LETTERS into the default search bar I get 390 results with everything from CDs to legal pads, all jumbled with books, in no discernable order. Even the many duplicate titles are not sequential. Most do not even contain all three keywords in the title.

But most troublesome and annoying is that Amazon insists on displaying items that are not in stock, effectively wasting everybody's time.

And for books there is that ever obnoxious “UNKNOWN BINDING” designation. For some reason I cannot upload listings without a stated binding, but others apparently can, or if grandfathered, there has never been an attempt to clean these listings.

Particularly vexing is the lack of an Advanced Search link on the main page, until one clicks on an actual book in the search results. Here my above-mentioned search terms bring up only eight listings. Three are the same title, and five are unavailable, with only two actual choices. If I click on one of those titles I am brought to a Product Details page in which an image, if it exists, will be the one uploaded by Muse (or a related service) if it is ISBN, or by anyone if it is pre-ISBN. And there is no clear way to indicate exactly which book this is on the Product Listing pages. This is the One Picture Fits All method of selling books. This is clearly dysfunctional for the antiquarian market, where a single edition may have multiple varieties of bindings.

Even worse is that the product description on the Details page is determined by whoever was the first one to upload it. This is not a problem for newer books with their publisher-supplied descriptions, but it’s a clear problem for pre-ISBN titles where the description may be simply wrong, but most frequently is mercifully omitted.

This page also gives customers the opportunity to rate the title, to write and vidcam reviews (often supplied by commercial services for newer books), and even to start a discussion about it. This may be a positive thing, but gives the appearance of unnecessary clutter for older books where these are rarely if ever filled out.

The link for the offerings is in a small font, and when clicked will bring up all listings (with optional tabs for NEW, USED, and COLLECTIBLE)—cheapest (including shipping) first. Amazon always encourages third party (3P) sellers to list cheapest (more on this when we get to selling).

This is the page where Amazon falls flat on its face as a bookseller, and where the cookie cutter approach creates problems for buyers and sellers alike. Newer books sometimes share ISBNs. Older books are occasionally incorrectly bundled under an incorrect ASIN, Amazon's kludgy part number for items without ISBNs. Basic bibliographic information such as Title, Author, Publisher, and Date are not included on the listings page, unless the seller uploaded in UIEE, in which case the listing will be missing the Title and Author. Descriptions, called “Comments” by Amazon, are completely optional. Many vendors do not even use them. And those which are supplied display only around 150 characters (out of 1000 allowed) before the customer must hit the >>MORE button to see the rest. As a result the typical description on Amazon is pathetic by any industry standards.

Amazon is more interested in displaying vendor ratings and shipping options than encouraging sellers to display a working knowledge of their products. It is a method great for selling toothpaste, but miserable for selling books from 3P vendors who are not selling brand new items.

From a seller's perspective, Amazon is, simply put, annoying. Its fees aren’t too bad for Marketplace vendors (“rent” is not based on quantity, and the commission includes credit card purchasing), but the $1.35 shipping skim, now called by another name for legal reasons, significantly adds to their slice of the pie for lower end items. In fact, by encouraging penny sellers it is the sole commission from them. However, this can be compensated for by raising prices there.

Amazon has about a half million “booksellers” out of a seller total of around 1.5 million, but from general observation and from the message forums it appears that the vast majority are simply hobbyists or those persuaded to hit the “Sell Yours Here” button based on a desire to clean out their basement. Perhaps no other market is so utterly deluged by so many who are so clearly clueless about the nature of their product.

Sellers are encouraged to undercut. The first thing Amazon displays when a seller goes to list a book is the lowest price, independent of condition or other information about it. A beat up uncollectible copy of Harry Potter may well be fairly listed at $2 or so, but the next person listing the title will be encouraged by Amazon, albeit implicitly, to list their Near Fine copy at $1.99, with the inevitable result that the book will sooner or later descend to a penny.

And then there is automated repricing software like Monsoon. When two sellers are using Monsoon at the same time for the same book, the price will tank. As they are undercutting each other, anyone else listing the same book will likely undercut them, and within a short time the perceived value of a normally fairly priced item will become worthless. This is not such a problem for items that are desirable as they will quickly be bought up, especially by dealers, but for scarcer items on the long tail where two megalisters who don’t even own the book in question still list it, the price stays wrecked.

Books are divided into two broad categories: USED and COLLECTIBLE. Amazon has decided that no ex-libs can be collectible, and that they cannot be listed under $10. And that designation cannot be edited online or in any manner except by uploading through Amazon's native CSV format. Amazon does not accept its numeric condition codes in UIEE.

But most amazingly is that Amazon has never bothered to release a simple database conversion utility to convert standard book database formats such as HomeBase or UIEE into its native format, and indeed the instructions for doing so in Excel with a CSV export are only available when requested directly through their (excellent) customer service department.

The result is that sellers who find the categorization useful (we do not) have traditionally been forced to purchase somewhat expensive commercial software or services. BookHound is now available free through Biblio, but it is somewhat hobbled by its system requirements (XP+) and lack of network capabilities.

Amazon now requires, at least from smaller listers using either online listing or UIEE (as we do), that all major bibliographic fields be filled in: Author, Publisher, Date, and Binding. This is problematic for titles published without dates, or authors, and where Amazon does not bother to learn bibliographic terms such as ¾ leather, or comb bound. Fortunately dummy values can be inserted either online or in export files, and bindings can be replaced to either softcover or hardcover.

It is particularly troublesome that Amazon does not allow FTP uploads, so a simple script cannot upload deletes to it as part of a normal data management routine that can be used for other sites. But worst of all is the fact that Amazon will parse the file uploaded through its web site and reject any listings with missing fields before looking at its availability status. In short, this means that a file of deletes will include some that are not deleted because they have been rejected before the sold status was even evaluated.

Not all books uploaded will be accepted by Amazon. Other than problems with fields, it also has problems with certain characters like ampersands. Incredibly, if a book is already listed on a foreign site it will be rejected by Amazon, for no known reason that makes any sense. Amazon also has its version of political correctness and will bar certain listings. It will accept most ARCs but later delete them and issue warnings.

Another irritation is that for listings with descriptions of over 1000 characters it deletes the entire description rather than simply truncating it. Titles are truncated at 80 characters, yet some at the site have around 150.

Amazon has a quality control algorithm that appears to be aimed at smaller sellers. Megalisters often get by with lousy feedback, while smaller listers with higher than 5% refunds get “warned.” The screws have been turned recently and now problem orders will generate that warning at 1%.

Amazon is doing everything possible to hide email addresses from sellers, who are forced into using an obnoxious form in which the actual message may be hidden behind a fear inspiring tirade by Amazon to try to prevent direct transactions. This has effectively eliminated shipping emails from us. They have an automated software order retrieval which will show emails but it is, for us, impossible to use when tried on three machines and two operating systems.

The Phantom Bookseller cannot be contacted.

What Should Amazon Do with AbeBooks?

Most importantly, Amazon should take its time and look at AbeBooks carefully, recognize its unique strengths (and its many easily-cured weaknesses), and come to the wise decision that AbeBooks should remain a stand-alone website. Some of the main strengths of AbeBooks include the breadth and depth of book and ephemera listings, the superior advanced search functions, the unique wants matching function, the cross-listing of books on websites in five languages, and what remains of dealer goodwill.

Now I'm not saying there shouldn't be some cross-site promotion—there should. But AbeBooks should fill a niche that Amazon isn't set-up to properly deal with—used books and ephemera from used book dealers. While Amazon has entered this market and succeeded to some extent, their database built around rolling up everything into ASINs (Amazon Standard Identification Numbers), while perfect for dealing with widgets, is not well-suited to unique items. Several other Amazon policies and practices also cause problems, especially for the rare/collectable book buyers (character limits on descriptions, no books over $2500, etc.). AbeBooks has long enjoyed many advantages for used and rare/collectable book buyers which would be lost if the AbeBooks listings were simply integrated onto Amazon.

If I were Amazon, I would refocus AbeBooks back into serving the needs of used and rare/collectable book buyers and dealers while perhaps offering AbeBooks buyers the option to see new books and/or Amazon inventory (but not as they currently do). How should they do this?

Technical Assistance

Amazon should immediately offer technical (systems/programming) assistance to AbeBooks to start addressing the many recent technical problems with the AbeBooks website (both the general functioning and how the site appears across different browsers), the accounting and e-mail problems, and the problems with database processing of uploads and inventory. I'd also have Amazon get the endlessly-delayed gift certificates back on schedule so that they're finally ready for this holiday season. The staff lent/rented by Amazon could also assist AbeBooks with the current clean-up of the website and with building automated queries to help AbeBooks staff identify problems on an ongoing basis.

This shouldn't wait until the acquisition is final. AbeBooks has programming positions open currently (and has for quite some time) and should simply contract with Amazon to fill those positions with Amazon staff now.

Decluttering AbeBooks

Amazon should remove clutter from the AbeBooks website—no more photocopies, no more e-books, no more supposedly free shipping, no more duplicate accounts, no more kitchen appliances, no more slogans and propaganda in listings, and no more over-priced new books and PODs.

Photocopies don't belong on AbeBooks, especially the high-priced ones currently there which generally can be obtained either free online or free or at little cost via interlibrary loan. They simply clutter searches with things buyers generally don't want.

E-books could probably best be handled by just forwarding buyers into Amazon—this is an area where their widget-based system is probably better-suited and where they already are pushing their Kindle product. A little advertisement box on the homepage would be all that's needed.

Free shipping in its current form on AbeBooks is so often not free. This is easy for any buyer to see since duplicate accounts (one without free shipping and one with) make it clear that a fair number of dealers aren't really offering free shipping but instead just inclusive shipping or reduced shipping. False or misleading advertising isn't helpful to anyone and the whole concept of free shipping feeds into the race to the bottom in pricing—again something that's not helpful to dealers nor AbeBooks/Amazon in the long run.

Duplicate accounts are simply a way for dealers to page-hog—something that's not helpful to anyone, especially buyers.

Refrigerators, microwave ovens, and everything else which doesn't fall into the basic books and ephemera category needs to be removed. AbeBooks has taken some steps to do this but could do much more. Hopefully Amazon will help as mentioned above.

Slogans and propaganda in descriptions on AbeBooks need to be removed. If this information is seen as being useful to some buyers, then it needs to be moved into a separate field, as it was before AbeBooks revamped the Book Details page, to not clutter descriptions for all buyers.

New Books and Print-on-Demand Books (PODs)

AbeBooks was right that new books and PODs are of interest to many used book buyers but was wrong in their implementation. Unfortunately what AbeBooks has currently is a large quantity of horribly over-priced readily available new books and PODs, too many poorly described new books, way too many poorly or deceptively described PODs, page-hogging by some sellers, books listed for sale that aren't truly available anymore, no reasonable way for buyers looking for real used books to eliminate new books and PODs from search results, and no way for buyers to easily know for sure which books are actually in hand at a dealer's premises and which will be ordered/shipped from a distributor/publisher/wholesaler.

Hopefully Amazon will completely rethink this. Amazon could certainly fill these needs in a variety of ways.

Amazon should start by immediately booting off all new book and POD relister sellers who have a consistent pattern of over-pricing on readily available in-print books and PODs. These sellers do no service to anyone here and don't deserve a second chance. Amazon should review pricing by relister sellers on a regular basis to ensure that any relister sellers on the site are offering value to buyers rather than a negative experience.

If Amazon decides to allow some new book and POD relister sellers to stay, I hope they will also set a very high fulfillment requirement (perhaps something like 98%). I also hope they will require a higher level of detail in all listings—providing all the details wanted by buyers of new books and PODs and without a bunch of slogans tacked onto the descriptions. Since the relister has no inventory-holding costs, it's quite reasonable to expect them to be able to keep their catalogue accurate, detailed, and up-to-date and to expect them to be able to source their books in a way that ensures deliveries are made on time. I'd also recommend Amazon create a clear way for buyers to see which books are on hand versus books which will be ordered/shipped from third parties (and ideally the location from which the books will be shipped).

An alternative is for Amazon to boot off all the new book and POD relister sellers and keep that inventory on Amazon. AbeBooks could then offer several ways for buyers to find those books: an advertisement on the homepage that simply redirects buyers into Amazon, offering buyers the opportunity at the search menu to include all Amazon results or just Amazon results for new books and/or PODs, or Amazon could re-work the search results screens so that Amazon results appear automatically at the end of search results with a clear dividing line stating that the results which follow are from Amazon.

Another alternative is to boot off all the new book and POD relister sellers and just put Amazon's own inventory onto AbeBooks, along with their In Stock indicators and all.

Stopping Dealer Exodus

Amazon needs to stem the tide (a small but increasing flow) of good dealers exiting AbeBooks. AbeBooks reached a peak of about 13,500 dealers but over the past year or two that total has slowly and steadily fallen. While changes to help buyers will make dealers happy, Amazon also needs to rethink some of the AbeBooks decisions which directly impacted dealers (and often buyers) over the past few years.

A. First, I'd recommend some rethinking about credit cards. Professional dealers could and should be allowed to take back processing of credit cards. Amazon would do well to add some qualifications to this both to protect buyers and themselves, while encouraging use of the AbeBooks Payment Processing services. One simple idea (not mine) would be to only allow dealers to process cards after they've been with AbeBooks for awhile and have a proven track record—initially all orders using cards would be processed by AbeBooks and after a certain point the dealer could opt to change to processing cards themselves. Dealers with a proven track record elsewhere (or who had left AbeBooks previously and then returned) could perhaps be allowed to skip this "time at AbeBooks" requirement.

If this is a non-starter (which it shouldn't be!), then at a bare minimum the card processing needs to work better for both buyers and dealers. The 5.5% fee to dealers is unreasonable and needs to be reduced. A new card processor should be chosen who fails less often and who can provide exact reasons for rejections, when possible, that can be passed along to buyers and reviewed in aggregate by AbeBooks, so they can address potential problems like multiple orders at the time of the order by providing guidance to the buyer.

All AbeBooks websites should allow buyers the option to choose from a selection of charging currencies. This would ensure that Canadian buyers buying from Canadian dealers aren't paying double-conversion spreads on their orders (likewise for Australian buyers buying from Australian dealers, etc). This would also allow Irish buyers to place their orders on an English-language AbeBooks site but be charged in Euros and Spanish-speaking buyers could use IberLibro but be charged in US$ (or £ or whichever currency is appropriate). The charges should be processed via AbeBooks/Amazon in the country of the charge, when possible, so buyers don't get hit with additional foreign and/or ISA fees by their card issuers. Ideally, the card processor chosen should offer services to authorize the charge (but not complete the charge) at

the time of order placement. Upon processing by the dealer, the charge is completed. If the charge is reduced or extra charges are requested and approved, the card processor should be able to adjust the charge and complete the charge (they should be able to accomplish this most of the time without re-authorizing but if need be they would reverse the initial authorization and request authorization again). This would help buyers know right away if they've made an error entering their details without the annoying practice of putting through the charge before the order is confirmed, and it would help dealers avoid the annoyance of card rejections.

B. The recent decision to charge commission on shipping and handling charges should be reversed. This isn't good for so many reasons but perhaps mostly because it does exactly the opposite of what AbeBooks says it was intended to do (lower the shipping fees paid by buyers).

C. The order process should be enhanced to allow for automated tax collection (both GST for Canadian dealers and Sales Tax for US dealers). If card processing by dealers isn't allowed, this is a must and should be a breeze for Amazon to implement.

D. The shipping matrix should be enhanced to allow dealers to opt into a tiered matrix that takes weight into account. For dealers who wish to opt out, the tiered matrix would have a "same" option so all tiers would be set to the same rates. The extra charges process should remain for sets and extremely heavy books.

E. Amazon would do well to try and bring back some of the reseller programs, but I fear many of those companies won't be interested in forging alliances with Amazon (given the damage done to their businesses by competition with Amazon).

International Focus

Amazon should refocus AbeBooks on international expansion using one brand name and should continue to use one database across all AbeBooks websites. AbeBooks' foray into Gojaba is likely to continue to be a drain on resources for quite some time so I'd suggest that experiment be ended, though several of the ideas behind it should be used to better AbeBooks.

The multi-character support of Gojaba's database and website should be built into AbeBooks so that AbeBooks dealers listing Chinese or Russian or Croatian books could use the proper characters to list them and so that buyers using the proper characters to search for them could actually find them.

The idea of expanding more rapidly into other languages/countries with a streamlined website (as Gojaba was doing) is also a good idea that AbeBooks should make use of, but with all of their listings showing on those sites. As business increases the websites can be developed further, but the streamlined websites would at least provide the basic tools so a buyer can search and purchase in their own language and so a dealer can set up and manage their account in their own language.

Wants Matching

This was and still is, even in its hobbled state, a fairly unique advantage AbeBooks has, especially when combined with their superior search function. Amazon should work slowly and carefully on fixing and improving the AbeBooks Wants Matching function. AbeBooks hobbled the function several years ago by cutting back on the number of e-mailed matches to a maximum of two per want per e-mail—a rather odd thing to do given that at the same time eBay (the only site with a near comparable function) was increasing the number of matches appearing in their e-mails for saved searches.

Many more aspects of the service could and should be improved to benefit buyers, dealers, and AbeBooks, but this should be done carefully and only with the input of buyers and dealers (especially those who have large numbers of wants placed).

Bookseller Ratings

Amazon should remove "Bookseller Ratings" from the AbeBooks websites. The description of the ratings has never been accurate, the calculation has never been fair, and the above-mentioned improvements will have removed the bulk of failing dealers from ABE. A website of professional dealers doesn't need ratings, and a website with ratings certainly doesn't look like the home of professional dealers.

Search Function

Amazon should be impressed with the AbeBooks search function—both the speed and the ability to enter quite complex searches. This important and rather unique function should only be enhanced as mentioned above and with the involvement of a diverse group of dealers and buyers. This and the Wants Matching function are two of AbeBooks’ strongest assets and extreme care should be taken in altering them.

That said, several things are far past overdue, such as the ability to exclude new books, PODs, and ex-library copies from searches, etc. It is time to create these exclusions and to create and enforce policies which will make the exclusions work properly.

Dealer/Buyer Input

AbeBooks has had both dealer and buyer groups that can be surveyed for information, and it runs message boards that are a treasure trove of good ideas. Unfortunately this free resource has not been utilized in the past. A smart company would make use of it.

After saying all this, I should also say that another part of me wants Amazon to integrate AbeBooks' inventory onto Amazon and close all the AbeBooks websites. Why? Because perhaps this might be the final kick needed to get many more dealers to finally understand that rather than making another for-profit website the place where we all list books, we might be better off supporting a non-profit website run by people in the trade, rather than continue to be subject to the whims of people who make decisions based mainly on constantly improving profits.

David Wilson can be contacted at davidcwilsonbooks@comcast.net.

A Bookseller’s Tasha Tudor Remembrance

I add my voice to the many others who note the passing of Tasha Tudor with sadness. Many lives have been touched by Tasha's art and her stories, including my own. I extend to the family and those who may have known and been close to Tasha and the kids my condolences and offer prayers and blessings upon their hearts and lives in their time of loss.

My own story with Tasha began early one morning in September of 1994 when I received a phone call from a friend in Vermont who had heard that Tasha would be doing a book signing not far from her home. A few days later I found myself, dressed in a suit (those who know me know I do not do suits often), standing in front of Tasha, with books in hand and asking if she would grace my new (just opened) used bookstore with a book signing. Unknown to me at the time was the fact that she had just severed her long time relationship with Jenny Wren Press, and her response was a simple "yes.” A few days later we talked on the phone, a date was set, a plan laid down, and the journey has not stopped.

I can only say now, in hindsight, I had little idea of the tiger's tale I had grabbed on to. It was only a few weeks later when over 300 people showed up at my store on the most beautiful November day one could have ordered. It was only after I had sold—through phone orders, mail orders and in person—some 2,000 books that it hit me: this lady is really liked and people buy her books. I had been baptized into book selling by one of the major names in the children's book market in a manner I had not expected. And to think I'd had the outrageous idea of inviting Tasha and both her daughters back to my store in 6 months!

In the interim I moved my store down the street and laid plans for what would turn out to be my confirmation as a bookseller. No one had ever had all three Tudor women together on stage and I now knew that this was a big deal. We called the event "A Magical Moment in Time" and held it on Mother's Day 1995. Over 400 participants and again thousands of books later Tasha and her daughters had provided me with a truly "magical moment."

I had moved into a 2,500 square foot space, not yet full of books, with plenty of floor space, and yet it was the only time I have ever asked people to leave the store unless they were in line to have a book signed or in line (yes, I do mean a line deeper than I have ever seen) paying for books. I actually became concerned about the safety of the situation.

On a personal note, the best gift of the day was seeing how much joy my parents had in being the personal escort and drivers for the Tudor women. Mom & Dad showed up with a very plush recreational van with bucket seats. In my youngest days, my parents operated a taxi business, at that time, in the heart of New Hampshire's tourist destination, the White Mountains. Knowing that their own personalities would help in setting the tone with Tasha, Bethany & Efner, I left the delivery of the Tudor women to the auditorium in Nashua in their good hands. To this day my folks talk about that time and when I am in touch with Bethany and Efner they always ask for my Mom & Dad.

I have always been appreciative of what my relationship with Tasha and her daughters has meant both personally and in my business. There are many stories around Tasha and many individuals who have shared in the "Tudor Experience." The Tudor fans are as loyal and respectful as any group of supporters and book buyers I've known.

The gift of art and story that Tasha created is documented in the Tasha Tudor Bibliography by John & Jill Hare. I call it the most detailed bibliography ever done on a single author. But I expect what will live beyond her creative work are the stories of Tasha, her charismatic nature, her determination and tenacity in living a life style choice that had few of the modern comforts, yet was portrayed as a simple, comfortable, fun loving, and just glorious way to live.

I expect most of us live our lives knowing that we may help or touch someone beyond our own families; Tasha touched many more than can be counted or than she herself ever knew. The theme of her work reached out to many who admired and revered Tasha. Her loyal fans will be saddened. And the book trade has been a large benefactor of Tasha Tudor's life. Even if you do not sell children's literature, Tasha gave reason for many to frequent bookstores who may have not entered without the Tudor appeal.

Richard Mori operates Mori Books / Just Read Books out of Milford, NH and can be contacted at http://www.moribooks.com.

Richard is also quoted in a 6/20/2008 Concord Monitor article on Tasha Tudor, which is the local newspaper closest to her Webster, NH home.

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE SELECT COMMITTEE ON SECURITY AND CONSITUTIONAL AFFAIRS, PARLIAMENT OF THE REPUBLIC OF SOUTH AFRICA

9/3/2008

Dear Committee Members,

This is in regard to the proposed Second-Hand Goods Bill [B2-2008] and the effect it would have on independent booksellers in South Africa. The Independent Online Booksellers Association is an international trade association composed of professional booksellers, and we share the deep concern of our South African colleagues over this bill.

While we recognize the importance of this proposed legislation in combating illicit trade in precious metals, stolen car parts, and items of that nature, we trust the committee will recognize that used bookstores should not be lumped into the same category. Without exemption for the second-hand book trade, the required procedures would make compliance virtually impossible due to the very nature of our noble profession, and many booksellers would be faced with the difficult choice of ignoring the law or going out of business.

Thanks for your consideration, and best wishes in your deliberations.

Respectfully,

Shawn Purcell, President
and the Board of Directors of the Independent Online Booksellers Association http://www.ioba.org

A 9/3/2008 Email Response from Paul Mills of the Southern African Book Dealers Association

Many thanks for this message of support - it is much appreciated by the committee and members of SABDA. We will add it to our submission.

I am in Parliament again tomorrow morning to listen to the committee discuss our submission. As I understand it we can only listen at this stage but cannot comment although there is a possibility that we may be asked questions.

We think we have a good chance of having books removed from the Bill.

I will keep you informed.

All the best,

Paul Mills
Clarke's Africana and Rare Books ABA-ILAB, SABDA, IOBA

From the 9/11/2008 Issue of Sheppard’s Confidential

South Africa: SABDA and Secondhand Goods Bill

Good news from South Africa. Cape Times has reported this week that the government is dropping all ‘books’, not just those over R100, from this legislation. As we reported in previous editions, a huge effort was mounted by the SABDA, on behalf of all the whole book trade, to win this point. This shows that trade organisations can be very effective and why members of the book trade should join an association at the earliest opportunity.

Geoff Klass of Collectors Treasury told Sheppard's Confidential, ‘I described the attempt to include second-hand books as being the equivalent of using a sledgehammer to squash an ant. This did cause a ripple of laughter in the otherwise rather staid and humourless Parliamentary Committee!. We are one of the most over-regulated societies, and any concession on the part of Government is a welcome step towards restoring sanity and balance in the process of administering the law.’

Owner of Clarke's Africana & Rare Books and member of SABDA, Paul Mills, said the removal of books from the list was a “triumph”. SABDA had been “positively received” at the last meeting, he said. ‘It had been a collaborative effort by SABDA on behalf of the entire trade.’

An Interview with Robert Fisher of Echo Letterpress

-First of all Robert, thanks for taking time out from your very busy schedule, and congratulations on the recent addition to your family. By way of introduction, tell us a bit about Christina and yourself.

Christina and I are both graphic designers. She has a BFA in Visual Communications from Virginia Commonwealth University and I have a BFA from the University of South Carolina and an MFA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, both in graphic design. We spent ten years in Manhattan working in the design world. Christina’s work was focused on textile graphics and corporate design work in both print and interactive. I started in NYC as an art director in publishing doing book design and magazines (with a 3.5 year stint at Martha Stewart Living) and then moved into interactive as the dot com bubble grew. We both worked on major brands such as Crayola, Little Tikes, Fed Ex, Nissan, Gucci, Prada, United Airlines and Motorola. We also have a passion for not-for-profit and educational work, which never pays well but is very rewarding.

-Why did you decide to leave the fast lane in Manhattan for upstate New York?

We needed a change. The high-paced lifestyle was all-consuming. Christina was a creative director at Foot, Cone and Belding and I was VP Creative Director at IconNicholson and we both felt like we’d moved away from our roots, a love of typography, paper and creating beautiful things that people cherish and covet. We felt removed from our craft and wanted to get back into the hands on process of designing. In June of 2006 we moved to our country house near Jeffersonville fulltime.

-What drew you to the noble art of printing?

A love of letters and paper. We both learned letterpress as part of our design training (typography as we know it today really started with the invention of movable type c.1440). We are both type nerds and can spend hours fussing over typefaces, leading, kerning and the endless machinations that come with a love of letters. We are kind of snobs when it comes to printing. If it’s not letterpress we rarely get excited.

-How did you acquire your equipment?

Christina quit her Job on January 1, 2006 to start the process of setting up our new business. She began researching presses online, spending a lot of time at Briar Press (www.briarpress.org), a great resource for letterpress aficionados. We learned a lot about what we really needed to get started. Every week we would look for auctions on eBay, or presses for sale on Briar Press. We realized that we had to find a press that wasn’t too far away as moving it would likely cost as much, or more, than the press itself. While looking for a single press to start out on we found an amazing auction: it was an entire shop. The pictures looked too good to be true. We started asking the seller questions and found out the auction was actually for two Chandler and Price platen presses, a paper cutter, and lots of type. We watched it for days and waited until the last day to bid. The auction was to end at 8 am and the free open wireless internet that we relied on in our apartment was down so Christina had to run to the local coffee shop to place our bid. I had a client meeting uptown so I wouldn’t know the outcome until hours later. Christina left me a flat message on my phone to call her for an update on the auction. Of course I assumed we were outbid at the last second, but she was only baiting me for a big surprise.

We won the auctions for just over $4100. Two weeks later we drove to Auburn, MA and found, to our surprise, a two level backyard print shop packed to the rafters with equipment and paper. With hardly enough room to walk around, we started the process of loading up our very large U-Haul truck.

What we actually found under the boxes of paper and ephemera was: two 8 x 10 Chandler and Price Old Style platen presses (circa 1901 and 1904), a Kelsey Star 5 x 7 platen press (circa 1901), a very small table top Kelsey press, a 19.5 inch Oswego guillotine paper cutter (c. 1890s), 100+ drawers of metal foundry type, 28 drawers of wood type in various sizes and fonts, a saddle stitching machine (circa 1910), and all the essential tools of the trade one needs to run an authentic letterpress shop. We felt very lucky.

After two long and exciting days of discovery and packing we were almost done. The third morning we tied up the load and drove to Liberty, NY where we stored everything. We left the presses and paper cutter behind, and hired a rigging service to move them three weeks later. Total moving costs were just over $4000. We saved thousands moving all the type and small equipment ourselves.

-For those who are not familiar with the hand printing press process, bring us through a typical job from beginning to end.

Letterpress is a process of creating a relief image and pressing it into or onto a surface—much like a rubber stamp. Typically you need to set the type one letter at a time (backwards and upside down), locking up the type into a chase (a metal frame). Any artwork to be printed must be made into a relief image as well (either using magnesium or photopolymer plates). Once everything you want to print is locked up it is called a form. This form is placed into the bed of the press. Here the press rollers will ink the form and transfer the image onto the paper. Before printing one must set gauge pins (also called quad guides) on the press platen to keep the paper aligned with the form. Once the alignment is set the pressure of the press must be adjusted (according to the paper weight and the size of the form to be printed). This is called makeready. Paper packing on the press must be adjusted to create an even impression over the entire printed surface. Once the makeready is done the job is ready to print, one sheet at a time. The average makeready process usually takes about 10-30 minutes, but sometimes we can spend hours getting it just right.

Of course if the job is more than one color this process must be repeated for each color. Printing on both sides of a sheet also requires multiple passes through the press, and a new makeready process.

-What type of work are you doing now?

Our presses are on the small side (8 x 10 inches), so we are limited to smaller works. We design and print wedding invitations for clients around the world (recently completed jobs were for weddings in Cape Cod, West Point and Singapore). We also have our own line of greeting cards that we sell in our stationery store. We will begin selling wholesale greeting cards later this fall. High-end business cards and birth announcements also make up a smaller portion of our monthly work. We also print woodblock posters (10 x 16 max size) on a limited basis because we need to print them in two halves. We’re in the discussion stage with a few authors to create a series of chap books this winter.

-Do you advertise, or is word of mouth enough?

We do not advertise. Most of our work comes from word of mouth or passersby in Jeffersonville. The stationery store is a loss leader for us—it barely breaks even, but it gives us a lot of visibility on Main Street. The past year we had invitations featured in two national magazines: Martha Stewart Weddings and Real Simple Weddings. Obviously this kind of exposure can really kick start your business. We are quite sick of printing these featured designs at this point.

-Tell us about your favorite papers and typefaces.

Paper: Crane Lettra. It’s the only paper DESIGNED for letterpress. It’s a super fluffy 100% rag paper that takes a really nice impression. It’s made from textile scraps and cotton left in the seed pod, and it’s (sort of) local. The mill is in Dalton, MA and is very eco-friendly. It’s also relatively inexpensive compared to imported Italian papers.

Typefaces: We love the classics. News Gothic, Garamond, Caslon, Frutiger, Helvetica, etc., but we also use some of the newer typefaces. We’re purists, but we’re not THAT pure when it comes to type. We’ll even use a drop shadow when we need to pump up the kitsch factor!

-Do you create your own design work plates?

No, we use two plate makers. Boxcar Press in Syracuse for photopolymer plates and Owosso Graphic Arts for metal plates. We email our work out and the plates arrive two days later. It’s not worth it to have all that plate making equipment.

-Although your operation is starting to get into full swing, and you bring a real graphic design edge to the business, it must be frustrating sometimes puzzling over techniques that were commonplace back in the heyday of hand presses. Are there any modern day expert practitioners you can turn to, and do you belong to any fine press organizations?

This is a big problem. All the old practitioners of letterpress are either dead or getting up there in years. We’ve met some old timers in Sullivan County and we call on a few of them for help when we feel stumped on a job. We’ve also been in correspondence (via snail mail) with the former owner of our presses. He’s taught us some ‘tricks’ over the years, although his eyesight is failing and he’s going into a nursing home. He’s 90 years old and started printing when he was 16. He ran his backyard print shop for over 50 years. He’s a wealth of information that we’re going to miss. We hope that one day we can teach someone else what we are learning now (our four month old son will no doubt be our first target).

-Sullivan County is my ancestral home, and I found your business while doing some preliminary research on who might publish a compilation of local Civil War letters I purchased at auction. Have you tackled any books yet?

Not yet, but as I previously said, we are working on a project to create some chap books of poetry this winter. It’s a very cool project. We are looking for a larger press which will put us in a better position to tackle books. Christina has some experience in book binding that she’d like to get back into. It’s something we’d like to offer, but letterpressed books can be very expensive to produce.

-Your print shop is right on Main Street in Jeffersonville, NY. Tell us about the town, and about the Segar Building.

We purchased our building in August, 2006. It was a 1950s Sinclair gas station, home of Segar Oil, a family run business that closed in the late ‘80s. It’s an American classic with a porcelain enamel facade. The building was vacant for 18 years when we purchased it from the Segar family estate. For the first time since 1883 the property changed hands.

The building needed a lot of work, but we wanted to restore it rather than remodel/alter. After six months of work we moved the presses in and started setting up shop, which took another six months. We opened to the public on September 1, 2007.

The building sits at the end of Main Street in Jeffersonville, NY, a small Catskill village of about 350 souls. It’s a sleepy little town that comes alive on weekends due to a large second home market. We’re certainly the most unique business in a town full of eateries, home décor and antique shops. Jeffersonville is only two hours from Manhattan, so we can run down for a quick ‘city fix’ which usually involves a meal at our favorite sushi restaurant.

-Thanks again Robert. Best wishes with your growing family and wonderful business, don’t work too hard, and save some time for trout fishing.

Robert and Christina Fisher run Echo Letterpress in Jeffersonville, NY and can be contacted at http://www.echoletterpress.com.

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE SELECT COMMITTEE ON SECURITY AND CONSITUTIONAL AFFAIRS, PARLIAMENT OF THE REPUBLIC OF SOUTH AFRICA

9/3/2008

Dear Committee Members,

This is in regard to the proposed Second-Hand Goods Bill [B2-2008] and the effect it would have on independent booksellers in South Africa. The Independent Online Booksellers Association is an international trade association composed of professional booksellers, and we share the deep concern of our South African colleagues over this bill.

While we recognize the importance of this proposed legislation in combating illicit trade in precious metals, stolen car parts, and items of that nature, we trust the committee will recognize that used bookstores should not be lumped into the same category. Without exemption for the second-hand book trade, the required procedures would make compliance virtually impossible due to the very nature of our noble profession, and many booksellers would be faced with the difficult choice of ignoring the law or going out of business.

Thanks for your consideration, and best wishes in your deliberations.

Respectfully,

Shawn Purcell, President
and the Board of Directors of the Independent Online Booksellers Association http://www.ioba.org

A 9/3/2008 Email Response from Paul Mills of the Southern African Book Dealers Association

Many thanks for this message of support - it is much appreciated by the committee and members of SABDA. We will add it to our submission.

I am in Parliament again tomorrow morning to listen to the committee discuss our submission. As I understand it we can only listen at this stage but cannot comment although there is a possibility that we may be asked questions.

We think we have a good chance of having books removed from the Bill.

I will keep you informed.

All the best,

Paul Mills
Clarke's Africana and Rare Books ABA-ILAB, SABDA, IOBA

From the 9/11/2008 Issue of Sheppard’s Confidential

South Africa: SABDA and Secondhand Goods Bill

Good news from South Africa. Cape Times has reported this week that the government is dropping all ‘books’, not just those over R100, from this legislation. As we reported in previous editions, a huge effort was mounted by the SABDA, on behalf of all the whole book trade, to win this point. This shows that trade organisations can be very effective and why members of the book trade should join an association at the earliest opportunity.

Geoff Klass of Collectors Treasury told Sheppard's Confidential, ‘I described the attempt to include second-hand books as being the equivalent of using a sledgehammer to squash an ant. This did cause a ripple of laughter in the otherwise rather staid and humourless Parliamentary Committee!. We are one of the most over-regulated societies, and any concession on the part of Government is a welcome step towards restoring sanity and balance in the process of administering the law.’

Owner of Clarke's Africana & Rare Books and member of SABDA, Paul Mills, said the removal of books from the list was a “triumph”. SABDA had been “positively received” at the last meeting, he said. ‘It had been a collaborative effort by SABDA on behalf of the entire trade.’

Embracing the Unexpected

One of the best things about being in the used book business is that you never know what to expect. When you get up in the morning, you can never predict what the day will bring. Usually, the first thing I do when I get out of bed is check my e-mail for orders that came in overnight. Earlier this year I noticed a pattern that most of the orders were coming in at the beginning of the week. By Thursday, the orders slowed down to a trickle, and the weekends were pretty quiet. Now that I am used to this pattern, it has begun to shift, and lately the opposite has been true. The early part of the week is slow, and the bulk of my sales are Thursday through Sunday. I know that as soon as I adjust to this it will change again.

The same holds true for book scouting while traveling. The one thing I have learned in all of my travels is that I never know what to expect from a day on the road. Here, then, are a few examples of Great Unexpectations.

Sometimes good things happen when I have no expectations whatsoever.

A few weeks ago I was on vacation with my wife in rural Texas. We were driving from El Paso to Big Bend for a river trip, and my expectation was that this would be a bookless holiday. We stayed overnight in Fort Davis so we could go to the "star party" at the McDonald Observatory, and the next morning we stopped for late breakfast in town before heading on to Big Bend. As we drove up and down the small main street looking for a place to eat, I saw a sign that said "BOOK SALE." I instantly learned two things that morning about rural Texas. First, you can't get breakfast anywhere after 11 A.M., and second, sometimes you find books where you least expect them. My first meal that day consisted of barbequed brisket and biscuits, which I ate quickly so I could head over to the bookshop.

The shop, Bookfeller, was small, and all hardcover books were $3 each. I did not have as much time as I would have liked to peruse the stock, but I did manage to find half a dozen nice books to bring back for re-sale. The owner told me he had been in the book business in larger cities, and when he retired back to his home town, the community persuaded him to open a shop.

Naturally, on the river trip through Santa Elena Canyon, there were no bookshops in sight. I did not even bring any reading materials with me, which turned out to be a good thing since they would have been soaked along with the rest of our things when the canoe we were in overturned during that long, last mile before we reached the end of our journey.

En route from Big Bend to Austin we stopped in Fredericksburg, at what looked to me like a tourist information center that turned out to be the local historical society. We had a long chat with the docent, and left with a lot more information than expected, along with some of the local histories that were for sale in the rather extensive bookstall.

Unfortunately, not all unexpected events are positive.

When I was in Cleveland last month, I organized an evening around a visit to Half Price Books, a used book chain that I had visited with much success in Austin last fall. My first disappointment was the size of the shop. In Texas, the stores are as big as supermarkets. In Ohio, they are more the size of a drug store. I found quite a few books I wanted, but when I asked to have the items shipped, I was told that the store did not offer shipping. When I mentioned to the manager that the Austin stores shipped books for me, he replied, "You have seen the size of the Texas stores. We are a much smaller operation." I was traveling all carry-on and my bags were already stuffed, so I sifted through my selections and left about half of them on the counter.

"I guess sometimes bigger really is better" I told him as he rang up my purchases.

Cleveland may bill itself as the capital of rock 'n roll, but when it comes to books, it does not rock 'n roll like Austin does.

At other times, things happen that are just as good but totally different from what I am anticipating.

On President's Day we were driving back to New York from Vermont, and I wanted to stop at a bookshop I had been to a few years before in Western Massachusetts. It was in an old New England building off I-91 with a lady proprietor and it contained stock from multiple dealers. I had remembered buying some really good books there. I had the MARIAB booklet, and looked up the name of the shop. I saw Meeting House Books, it was in the right area based upon a rather rudimentary map, and the proprietor had a female name. The shop was normally closed on Monday, so I e-mailed her earlier in the week to see if I could stop by, and she graciously offered to open the store for me. I printed off the directions from the internet, but as soon as we got off the highway and my wife began directing me, they did not seem correct. The place I remembered was right off the highway in the midst of farmland. I was being directed to a small New England town. When we arrived, I realized that this was the wrong shop. I had to go in because I had an appointment.

The shop was aptly named since it is located in a former church, and when I told the owner I was interested in literature, she guided me upstairs. I think this room had originally been the main sanctuary, and it was filled with wonderful, well-priced books. I bought quite a few items, and sold a number of them the following week at the Greenwich Village Book Fair. I now know two interesting shops well worth a stop in that part of Massachusetts.

Last but not least, sometimes I expect good things will happen and something even better happens.

This past year I have spent a lot of time in Minneapolis. On my first few visits, I spent most of my free time at the bookshops within easy reach of downtown. Eventually, I began venturing further out, and into St. Paul. I found a wonderful shop—Midway Books. It was a half hour bus ride, but its three floors crammed with books made it well worth the trip. I always managed to find at least a carton of books to ship back home. I usually went there on Sundays because that was the one day that I had the time to book scout. The last time I was in the Twin Cities, the only free time I had was Saturday evening. The shop was open, and when I introduced myself to the "new" man at the register he told me that he was not new, but the actual owner of the store. I systematically went through each floor, stopping periodically to bring him stacks of books to set aside for me. As I handed him the last stack and pulled out my checkbook, he said to me, "Has anyone ever showed you where the better books are?"

"Better books?" I replied. "Not that I know of." He guided me through some narrow corridors, then up a back stairway, and pointed to a long hallway I had never been in before filled with bookcases of modern first editions. "Take your time, Ill be downstairs," he said. I spent quite a long time going through the shelves until I had selected another armful of books and found my way back to the main floor after only a few wrong turns.

After I handed him the pile he led me through another corridor, this time leading to an immense basement, again filled with books. This was the stock used for the internet and book fairs. Again, I returned to the counter with more books. While I had been to this store several times before, unknowingly, I had only scratched the surface of its inventory.

In short, book scouting is not for those who relish the tried and true. I have a Wall Street colleague who spends his vacation every year in the same hotel in Disney World. A week before he leaves he makes restaurant reservations and pre-orders his meals. He leaves nothing to chance. He could never be a used book dealer.

There is an old Yiddish expression that translates as "Man plans, God laughs." While some may find this troubling, for me, it is part of the fun and excitement of the hunt. One of the things you quickly learn when you become a book dealer is to embrace the unexpected.

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

Ephemeral Assays: The Funnies (Part 1)

Brief mention was made in the Summer 2006 issue of my Mother of All Paper Hordes house call in a piece on pulp magazines. This family saved everything in a dry basement, and I couldn’t get it all home in one trip. As the distance was far and I wouldn’t be back for some weeks, and things you buy and leave often sprout legs, I decided to take away the pulps, vintage magazines and other paper, and to retrieve fifty or so boxes of old Sunday newspaper comic sections on the return journey. I calculated they had the least value and interest, incorrectly.

Once safely home where I could spread them open on my outside work tables (more room, good light, better ventilation, Mother Nature), I quickly realized how wonderful and ephemeral they were. Here were the color comic sections of great New York Sunday papers, syndicated locally all over the country, like the Brooklyn Daily Times, the Sunday News, the Long Island Sunday Press, the New York Journal American (which printed color comics on Saturday and a huge section called the Comic Weekly on Sunday), the Sunday Mirror, and several others, many in duplicate. They were all nicely packed flat in old cardboard boxes with flaps on the top, which was the key to their survival, suppleness, and strong color (with occasional edgewear and some age toning, but not much different from when they were printed). The dates ran from around 1928 into the late ‘50s.

My only complaint with their stewardship is that a good number of the sections were disassembled for some reason. I put as many of these back together as I could, taking great care not to arrange any false marriages. This often involved looking for the small date in one of the strip panels, making piles by date, and reassembling them that way, which was trickier with the early sections that did not use page numbering. After several months of this I counted myself as perhaps the leading expert in the country on collating mid-1900s newspaper comic sections.

The next challenge was marketing. I soon found out how well they did on eBay, but there were time-consuming steps involved. It pays to list every single strip, as you never know what people collect. One guy insisted on the subtitle for each Hawkshaw the Detective (e.g., “The Episode of the Pickle Barge”), though I gained the impression he was more of a bibliographer than a buyer. Some of the very early sections were only four or six pages long, but as time went on they expanded to 12 to 24 pages, and up to 36 in this batch if I recall. A rare Dr. Seuss full page from a short-lived 1935 strip called Hejji went for $315 (some guy asked me if he could Buy It Now for $25 in time for a birthday present for his wife—ha!), and Krazy Kat often realized over $100 per, but queries came in about even the most obscure titles, so all were listed. You’d think templates for certain newspaper eras would help, but most of them changed the strip order from one issue to the next by design or necessity, and it became easier just to retype than to do all that cutting and pasting. Some examples follow.

LONG ISLAND DAILY PRESS NEWSPAPER COMIC SECTION (4/28/1928).~ Complete four page section, comic strips include Laura; Felix; The Nebbs; Nicodemus O'Malley; Just Kids; Dizzy's Eating House; and Freddie the Sheik.

SUNDAY NEWS NEWSPAPER COMIC SECTION (1/25/1931).~ Complete eight page section, comic strips include The Gumps; Old Doc Yak; Harold Teen; The Absent-Minded Professor; Little Orphan Annie; Private Life of a Cat; Moon Mullins; Kitty Higgins; Winnie Winkle; Looie Blooie; Little Folks; Baby Sister; Smitty; Herby; Gasoline Alley; and That Phony Nickel.

NEW YORK JOURNAL AMERICAN COMIC WEEKLY NEWSPAPER COMIC SECTION (1/14/1934).~ Complete 16 page section, comic strips include Rosie's Beau; Bringing Up Father; Jungle Jim; Flash Gordon (Flash and Dale catch a break when their ship crash lands into an Earth-threatening comet at full speed, they survive the impact, and they don't even need oxygen once outside); The Van Swaggers; Tillie the Toiler; The Family Foursome; Blondie; Sentinel Louie; The Ambassador; Always Belittlin'; Skippy; Bunker Bugs; Way Out West; Mister Jack; Little Jimmy; Bill by Rube Goldberg; Boob McNutt; The Kid Sister; Tim Tyler's Luck; Bunky; Barney Google; Laura; Felix and Felix Funny Film Strips; Dinglehoofer Und His Dog Adolph; and The Katzenjammer Kids; advertisements include full page Ralston Tom Mix Lucky Spinner offer; etc.

NEW YORK EVENING JOURNAL NEWSPAPER COMIC SECTION (8/17/1935).~ Complete 16 page section, comic strips include Popeye in Thimble Theatre; Buck Rogers; Just Kids; And So They Were Never Married; Polly and Her Pals; Brick Bradford; Mandrake the Magician; Donnie; The Pussycat Princess; The Kewpies by Rose O'Neil; When Mother Was a Girl; Krazy Kat; Ted Towers Animal Master; Tippie; Snorky; Pete the Tramp; and Mortimer; advertisements.

SUNDAY NEWS NEWSPAPER COMIC SECTION (11/26/1939).~ Complete 20 page section, comic strips include Dick Tracy; The Gumps; Moon Mullins; Kitty Higgins; Smokey Stover; Pepsi and Peta; Spooky; Harold Teen; Tiny Tim; Smilin' Jack; Terry and the Pirates; The Ripples; Winnie Winkle; Looie; Sweeney & Son; Smitty; Herby; Little Joe; Gasoline Alley; and Little Orphan Annie; ads include Lionel; Tom Mix Parachute Plane; Erector Set; etc.

SUNDAY NEWS NEWSPAPER COMIC SECTION (4/25/1943).~ Complete 16 page section, comic strips include Dick Tracy; Little Orphan Annie; The Gumps; Harold Teen; Smilin' Jack; The Ripples; Terry and the Pirates; Sweeney & Son; Smitty; Herby; Smokey Stover; Tiny Tim; Winnie Winkle; Gasoline Alley; The Teenie Weenies; Moon Mullins; and Kitty Higgins; ads include Camel WW II Alligator armored vehicle; Cheerios Mischa Auer; Dumb Dora for Ralston; Coca-Cola Ask the Paratrooper; etc.

NEW YORK JOURNAL AMERICAN NEWSPAPER COMIC SECTION (1/27/1945).~ Complete 16 page section, comic strips include Popeye in Thimble Theatre; Johnny Hazard; Brick Bradford; Pete the Tramp; Just Kids; Teena; Polly and Her Pals; Mandrake the Magician; King of the Royal Mounted; Elmer; Buck Rogers; Tarzan; Walt Disney Mickey Mouse; Sergeant Pat of Radio Control; Etta Kett; Rocky Mason; and The Pussycat Princess; advertisements.

NEW YORK JOURNAL AMERICAN COMIC WEEKLY NEWSPAPER COMIC SECTION (1/11/1948).~ Complete 16 page section, comic strips include Snookums; Bringing Up Father; Flash Gordon (Flash and Dale escape Kang's clutches in the unused tunnels of the undersea mongonium atom mines, which are lovely that time of year); Dick's Adventures; Blondie; Prince Valiant; Uncle Remus; Little Annie Rooney; Tim Tyler's Luck; Seein' Stars; Room and Board; Dinglehoofer Und His Dog; Tillie the Toiler with great doll cut-out; Right Around Home; Tippie; Buz Sawyer; Jungle Jim; Little Iodine; The Little King; Donald Duck; Barney Google and Snuffy Smith; The Lone Ranger; Ripley's Believe It Or Not!; The Phantom; and The Katzenjammer Kids; advertisements include Wild Root Adventures of Sam Spade; Bub bubble gum.

SUNDAY MIRROR NEWSPAPER COMIC SECTION (9/26/1954).~ Complete 16 page section, comic strips include Li'l Abner; Steve Canyon; Mickey Finn; Kerry Drake; Long Sam; The Flop Family; Bobby Sox; Rex Morgan, M.D.; Louie; Priscilla's Pop; Captain Easy; Henry; Freckles and His Friends; Hector; Boots; There Oughta Be a Law; King Aroo; Dixie Dugan; Our Boarding House; Out Our Way; and Joe Palooka; ads include a great full page Superman Playsuit; Wheaties Bob Lemon of the Cleveland Indians; etc.

The other key was taking good, uncropped photos of the front page, several sample strips, and any special advertising, the most notable of which are cereal premiums and celebrity endorsements, depending on the celebrity. Anything three dimensional or bigger than my scanner bed is shot outside in bright sunlight on a secluded green shuffleboard court in a large and beautiful town park. Clouds and wind cause some delays, so you look for those perfect 400-500 digitals days that should last right through the winter liked canned preserves. An Asian woman hits golf balls very far away but there’s always a slight chance she could brain me. I was shooting some cheesecake stuff once and before I knew it a girl’s track team ran right around me like a herd of wide-eyed does. I feared for the safety of an out-of-place Goth who went into a hot July day porta-potty on the horizon once for half an hour! Other than those minor alarms, it’s a safe and quiet place hard up against some nice woods. There was the time I was approached by an older fellow carrying dried milkweed who said he has wondered for years what I’m doing, and I ended up taking all his books in two different sessions.

Anyway, I really got into these things. These are funnies like I used to glance at a few decades ago, with the difference being that they are actually interesting and funny. Give me the slapstick everyman lunacy of early Louie over the angsty devotionals of late Dondi any day. They were big, bold, colorful, racy (especially before WW II), and often politically incorrect or subversive. Sexism on one page would be followed by female empowerment on the next (though racial equality did not fare so well). Some of these strips were dumb and offensive, of course (to each his/her own), but it’s surprising how many were truly touching or laugh out loud funny, and how many of the mediocre ones had their great panels and nice moments. They provided tips on living, they lampooned, and they helped people get through the week. You notice all kinds of interesting little things. An amazing number of strips used the words “little” or “tiny” or “teenie” in the title. What’s up with that? Dinglehoofer Und His Dog Adolph turned into Dinglehoofer Und His Dog when Hitler started misbehaving. Many had associated one line “toppers” like Maw Green that usually ran at the bottom of the full page Little Orphan Annie. Momentous events in the strips like births or marriages could employ an enormous single panel. For a while in the 1930s cut-outs were all the rage. The advertisements are hilarious by today’s standards, like all those athletes pimping for Camels, and they also serve as great documentation of our mid-1900s goals and insecurities. There must have been many rivalries between the artists. The early noirish Dick Tracy strips were really fantastic, and when he knocked The Gumps or Moon Mullins or whoever off the front page in the 1930s, I felt the same little thrill many around the country must have noted at the time. “Look, Marge….”

Many of these vintage comics are memorialized in fan websites. I got a kick out of the early debonair aviator Smilin’ Jack, for example, which ran in some form from 1933 to 1973. His creator, Zack Mosely, attended the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts and the Chicago Arts Institute, and was an accomplished pilot. The following excerpt comes from a site hosted by his daughter Jill.

“Smilin' Jack kept current with all the latest developments in aviation. He traveled all over the world getting ideas and information for all the different episodes that Jack was involved in, whether it be the Air Force, CAP, Navy, Army, Space Flight, Air and Sea Rescue, Undersea Research, World War II, Vietnam War, Sky Diving, Car Racing, Water Skiing and on and on!

“Some of the most remembered characters are: Fat Stuff, Downwind, Stretch, Joy, Jungle Jolly, Cindy, Dixie, The Head, The Claw, Limehouse, Teekeela, Tomaine, Tish the Dish and many others!

“Jack was in a number of different disguises over the years (Powder, Hammerhead, Nevada Jack to mention a few). He was first married to Joy, that is an exciting episode! She is lost at sea, rescued, becomes the Coral Princess on a south sea island, where she gives birth to their son, Jungle Jolly. Of course, Jack almost marries Mary, Dixie and Cindy but something always comes up to keep the ceremony from finishing! Later he marries Sable (taken after my mom) and they have a daughter, Jill (after me). Later on, she becomes a stunt flyer, not after me! I chose to marry young and was blessed with three wonderful children and now grandchildren. That would have been too boring for the strip!”

This site also reprints fan letters.

Dear Ms Mosley -

I just had to tell you that I am 72 years old, a pilot for many years and Zack Mosley has been, and still is, my hero. As a child on a farm in Maine, I was (and still am) obsessed with airplanes. Not having electricity or telephones, we were quite cut off from the world. However, we did buy the Sunday edition of the local newspaper which contained your father's famous cartoon. There was no one in my life as important as Smilin’ Jack and his creator. Zack's beautiful drawings of the airplanes of the thirties and forties were absolute treasures to me. I would cut them out and save them. I would study them by lamplight and imagine myself in the cockpit flying so high in those gorgeous chines. Your dad filled a great void in my otherwise drab farm life and his cartoon inspired me to become a pilot, in spite of almost insurmountable obstacles. I owe him a great debt. I repeat again, he is my hero.

And from another letter.

Why did I like Smilin’ Jack so much? Well because it had very good story lines, gorgeous gals, wonderful humor and PLENTY of action!!! Jack was a far cry from the much dreaded politically correct heroes that we see everywhere nowadays. There was no “message” in Smilin’ Jack. He was a man of action. Whether it was delivering a good knockout punch to the bad guys, or turning a spoiled heiress over his knee for a well-deserved lesson in manners (if a hero did that today you could just imagine all the letters that the newspaper editors would get), yes indeed Smilin’ Jack was certainly a man of action!!!

There is also a funny and informative Wikipedia entry on Smilin’ Jack, as there is on most of these strips, and Mosley wrote an illustrated autobiography entitled Brave Coward Zack.

These comic strips were so captivating because they had an entire third, half, or full page to develop plot lines, and because the artwork and coloring were often spectacular. Comics helped sell the paper, so competition was fierce. This was high entertainment before radio (at first), television and countless other modern entertainments and distractions that led to their general demise. The industry had its roots in political cartoons and stood on the shoulders of Richard Outcault’s late nineteenth-century The Yellow Kid and all his imitators and descendants, and the first comic books were actually compilations of comic strips. In the beginning they were in the “gag a day” format, but thrilling adventure serials and soap operas helped ensure reader interest from one issue to the next. Favorite comic strip artists passed away, and big cities went with a smaller tabloid format that could be read on the subway, but the real killer was dwindling page space, beginning with WW II rationing, followed by changing tastes and attendant cuts. Prince Valiant was the last full page holdout, falling to the editorial sword in 1971.

To me, modern comic strips are highly anemic. I guess certain ones are beloved, but I just can’t get into them with the exception of a few political strips, and occasional oddities like The Far Side (1980-1995). Bill Watterson’s frustration with the modern constraints placed upon his Calvin and Hobbes (1985-1995) is a good case study in the degradation of the art form. In my genuinely humorless weekday newspaper comic page today, for example, the strips get two pages, but they are shared with Dear Abby, a horoscope, crossword and Sudoku puzzles, etc. It is very hard to be funny or touching in two to four small panels. The only relics I see from among hundreds that once roamed freely in syndication are Beetle Bailey and Blondie (they are both using computers on the day I looked even though the humor is mired in the 1950s). Last Sunday’s color section was equally unimpressive. It brings to mind the new adage, “Where have all the interesting people gone, and why have they been replaced by Paris Hilton?” This is not to say that the old ones were uniformly great, or that dumb humor or old fashioned serials are necessarily better than today’s more sensitive and ironic content which you can go to the newspaper’s comics blog and make sensitive and ironic comments about, but something’s missing. Maybe it’s the little history lesson you get from old stuff, or maybe there is something more social and romantic about gathering around the radio or a comic section like people used to do than there is about iPods and cell phones and other modern modes of detachment. I think it’s largely about the space and the overload though. They used to have acres of space on which to paint their canvasses, and mental stimulation was in shorter supply than it is now.

Some of the vintage strips like Dick Tracy have been preserved in scaled down reprints of their runs, and a few are even full sized (Tarzan, Little Nemo, and Prince Valiant), but how much of this “sequential art” has been lost forever? Newspapers are hard to store and difficult to protect, which is why they have earned the special scorn of most libraries, even though they are the most logical repository for something so ephemeral. That institutional disdain goes double for comic sections, even though they reflect the times as much as the articles and the advertisements do. For further reading on this topic, Nicholson Baker—novelist extraordinaire and patron saint of library periodical and newsprint preservation—turned a personal rescue mission (the British Library was about to deaccession and break up one of the last remaining sets of the greatest American newspaper ever published) into a splendid large format book entitled New York World: Graphic Art on Sunday (1898-1911) (NY: Bulfinch Press, 2005).

The other logical place newspaper comic strips will reside is with collectors, of course, and the hope is that these experts will place them in a good repository at the end, rather than scattering them to the winds again. The one regret I had during a couple years of selling these sections, besides letting go of them to begin with—though I kept some good samples and I have thousand of digitals—is that at least one of the buyers was a breaker, slicing them up into individual strips. It used to pay to massacre magazines for advertising tearsheets this way, but those prices have plummeted, and hopefully the same thing will happen with newspaper comic strips, as most discerning collectors would rather have them in context than in taxidermy.

In a world with decent priorities, all of these old newspaper comic sections would be viewable online for free, and full sets of originals would be safely housed in multiple locations.

I began to learn which bidders liked which strips, and I accommodated them by combining shipping, sending (adding, actually) extra pics upon request, and providing brief summaries (the Flash Gordon collectors were very serious, for example, and would ask questions about the content like is there a space gun in the strip). Toward the end I thanked all of the bidders and issued a brief homage to the swell items we were trading in. “Let us take a moment to appreciate the wonderful artwork of these vintage comic strips; the mighty newspapers that published them; the historic immediacy of popular art in a hurry; the glow of youth and the corny freshness of the era; the hopes and dreams of the 1930s; the patriotic themes as the war drew to a close and we knew we would be safe and soon home; the euphoria and materialism of the 1950s; and the young man who saved all this stuff beginning with 1920s pulps and who watched me from his sick bed as I carried it all up and out; his simple but effective preservation efforts; and his wife for not making him throw it all away over the decades. Well done all!”

I somehow limited myself to thirty examples of comic strips below. The next time we will feature close-up panels, and the time after that examples of premiums and special offers from the pages of these great smelling good selling fantastical newsprint survivors.

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

Books About Bookselling: The Bookseller’s Apprentice

The Bookseller’s Apprentice, by George Talbot Goodspeed. Philadelphia, PA: Holmes Publishing Company, 1996.

As the publisher’s foreword points out, “Anyone who has gone to Boston to look for rare books in this century will have memories of Goodspeed’s Book Shop.” The history of this establishment, founded in 1898, was recorded by Charles Eliot Goodspeed in his 1937 Yankee Bookseller, and here son George takes up pen to bring the narrative forward in a limited edition of 750 copies. As George worked his way up at Goodspeed’s from 1924 until the shop’s closing in 1995, it appears that the apprenticeship was successful.

Though a little slim, a bit disjointed, and lacking an index, The Bookseller’s Apprentice makes for a fine read. The first appendix reprints his father’s 1935 foreword to Catalogue 250; the second is a supplement to a 1948 fiftieth anniversary catalog that features wonderful photos of the Goodspeed operations; the third contains a 1950 obituary of C. E. G. by Michael J. Walsh; and the fourth has a few more recent photos of the Beacon Street location.

The first four following excerpts are from the foreword by David J. Holmes.

-“During its long history, the book shop occupied a number of locations, beginning in a basement at 5A Park Street adjacent to Boston Common and, after existing at various sites on Beacon Hill, returning finally and fittingly to rooms upstairs at 9 Park Street, where it closed in February of 1995. From 1927 on, there was also an ‘Old South Branch’ of Goodspeed’s, a spacious underground book shop equipped to handle large libraries of good used books, in the basement of the Old South Meeting House at No. 2 Milk Street. Most of the rare material, however, was sold on the Hill.”

-“But Goodspeed’s was unquestionably the dominant firm on the scene. Its prominence, both locally and internationally, coupled with the fact that the shop, in good Yankee tradition, kept its secrets to itself, made Goodspeed’s the subject of frequent rumors and speculations in the local trade, many of them unfounded and not all of them kind. Indeed, the shop, had a kind of mystique which lured me strongly, as it had countless others.

“Whenever I felt shop-bound, I left my office, walked to Boylston Street, crossed the Public Gardens and climbed the Hill to Goodspeed’s. There was always a feeling of excitement when I reached the corner of Park and Beacon Streets and saw the shop’s sign, elegantly printed in black and gold with its famous logo depicting a horse and rider and the words ‘Anything that’s a book’ which hung above the door. With luck, the window displays on either side of this door would have freshened up since my last visit to include new items from a recently acquired Old Bostonian library.”

-“Like every scout who visited Goodspeed’s, I always hoped that my arrival at the cases coincided with the shelving of new acquisitions, since books at Goodspeed’s were modestly priced and often sold swiftly. I bought my first book as a new bookseller from one of those cases. It was a copy of Eden Phillpotts’ best-known novel, Children of the Mist, for which I paid $7.50 and which I sold, not long afterwards, for $15.00. A great success!”

-“To a young non-New Englander, there was an appealing ‘Yankee’ feeling about the shop, a kind of aloofness or reserve. It was a place where people were still called ‘Mr.’, ‘Mrs.’, or ‘Miss’, and certain matters of form were taken for granted. Discounts were not loosely given to the trade, and one had to earn a thirty day credit. (You were notified of this achievement by letter from the bookkeeping department.) As a matter of course, the shipping department was located somewhere out of sight. And there were the private areas to which only the privileged were invited. It was several months before I was shown into George Goodspeed’s second floor office or permitted to view the treasures of the vault hidden beneath the stairs on the first floor.”

-“Edwards had with him a sheaf of bills which he had been unable to collect from his American customers. When Wells found the name of his new employee among them, he sent a radiogram to his shop, firing Gambet. I believe this is the only instance on record of a bookshop employee being discharged from the middle of the Atlantic. At one time or another, Gambet worked for Rosenbach, James F. Drake and Thomas F. Madigan. He died in 1948 having, I suppose, established some kind of record for the number of booksellers by whom he had been employed, though as early as 1931 he wrote that he had made ‘a graceful exit from a wretched business . . . in which the only one who has a chance of making a decent living is the man who owns the shop . . .’”

-“Lowell’s library was a very large one. He fancied himself a bibliophile, but on the whole his collection was rather that of a reader. He had nevertheless some taste for old books, which he annotated with notes of their rarity and significance. One such was an edition of Homer printed at Basle in 1551. He had acquired this handsome folio in the spring of 1839 shortly before he met Maria White, to whom he was married five years later.

“Looking through the early chapters of Scudder’s biography of Lowell to see whether there was any mention of the copy of Homer, I came upon this passage in a letter dated June 13, 1840: ‘She [Maria White] is a glorious girl with her spirit eyes. On the mantel is a moss rose she gave me which when it withers I shall enshrine in my Homer . . .’ I turned back to the old folio and found the rose, after a century, still there pressed between the leaves. A charming miracle of survival, it still remains there.”

-“Wilson having been first in the field, it was natural for us to feel that he was entitled to the first crack at desirable pieces, but his resources at the time were comparatively limited. He was realist enough to know that this placed him at some disadvantage, and took it in grace when an occasional prize was awarded to Howe, the man with the ready money. Nevertheless, there were times when we had to decide, arbitrarily, as to which of the two was to be offered a particularly desirable object. I like to think we were sufficiently diplomatic in handling such situations. At any rate, I remained friendly with both gentlemen.”

-“Ryan was a compulsive spender rather than a collector. He bought largely on impulse and rarely with judgement, but it was inevitable that he picked up many choice things along the way. On one day in March, along with a fine lot of natural history, he bought a fine copy of the first edition of Walden and a copy of Thoreau’s Cape Cod in literally new condition, so fresh that it might have been kept in cotton batting from the day of publication. This latter he determined to have put in a sumptuous binding by Sangorski and Sutcliffe, for which the binder was instructed to submit drawings for Ryan’s approval. I remonstrated with him, suggesting that a less brilliant copy would do equally well for rebinding, but he was adamant, since he wished the original cloth covers to be bound in at the end, and it was essential that they be pristine. I have always regretted being a party to this desecration.”

-“One such ‘sleeper’ to which I have referred earlier appeared in the Harmsworth sale at Sotheby’s in 1949. The catalogue entry read as follows:

Cotton, J. Milk for Babes drawn out of the Breasts of Both Testaments, 811., First edition, red levant morocco by Riviere, g.e. [Church cat., 473; not in Sabin], Rare. 8vo. 1646.

“A magnificent specimen of undercataloguing by omitting to quote the subtitle: ‘Chiefly, for the spiritual nourishment of Boston Babes in either England: But may be of like use for any children,’ not only was the flavor of the book lost, but the fact that this was without doubt the first American juvenile. Nor was it pointed out that the little book was an ancestor of the New England Primer in which it was reprinted many times after 1690. Nor, indeed, did the catalogue do justice to the rarity; only two other copies were (or are) known: one in the British Museum, the other (wanting two leaves) in the Huntington Library.”

-“The only defense a bookseller has against thieving is constant vigilance, whether it be in keeping a close watch on strange customers lest they make off with his stock, or in buying, to question as closely as possible the history of the occasional book brought in for sale. Either way there is the risk of offending perfectly innocent people, and still, after all reasonable precautions are taken, the grave danger of being victimized remains.”

-“The number of books to which the adjective may be applied in the absolute sense is not large; and such are of infrequent occurrence on the market. A good example in modern literature is Robert Frost’s first printed book Twilight of which the poet had two copies printed. We have his word that he destroyed one of the two. The remaining copy he sold in 1940 to Earle J. Bernheimer. It appeared in the auction rooms in 1950, when it realized $3500, a price which seemed to me at the time very modest, indeed. That it went so cheaply was due, as Mr. Barrett writes, ‘to an egregious blunder.’ I let Twilight get away. I thought it should have been worth four or five times that amount, and before the sale I tried vainly to convince two of my collector friends that they should bid on it accordingly. Failing to convince them, I lacked the courage to back up my conviction and pursue the prize for stock. Time proved that I was right when, after another decade, it finally passed into the great Barrett collection, it did so at a figure not far from my original estimate.

“In any event, unique is a word to be used sparingly; and the conservative cataloguer is likely to qualify it as ‘unrecorded and presumably unique.’

“In this category is the original American printing by Benjamin Franklin of Richardson’s Pamela. Charles Evans, in the second volume of his American Bibliography listed three separate printings in 1744, one in Boston, one in New York and one in Philadelphia, the latter printed by Franklin. No copy of any of these printings had ever been found. It was Evans’s practice, on occasion, to list books as possibly printed in the country because he had found them listed in advertisements or catalogues of American booksellers. It has often developed that no such American printings ever existed: the bookseller was merely offering imports of English books from his stock. Such are referred to by bibliographers as ‘ghosts,’ i.e., books described by bibliographers, but which are indeed nonexistent.

“This American Pamela had for years been held as one of Evans’s phantoms, as indeed it was, since, insofar as we still know, there was no edition in 1744. It developed, however, that Benjamin Franklin had indeed printed an edition of the book, a copy of which had reposed for years in the library of Simmons College in Boston. It had been found and recorded in manuscript by the W.P.A. imprints survey conducted during the years of the great Depression. It was dated 1742 (1743 on the title-page of Volume II) but the printing was not completed until late in the summer of 1744.

“Neither we nor, so far as I am aware, anyone outside of Simmons knew of the existence of this copy until 1968 when Dr. Park, then President of the College, called me on the phone to inquire whether there might be a market for it and at what price. It was hard to understand how the entire edition of such a substantial book (394 pages) could, with the exception of this one copy, have disappeared entirely. C. William Miller’s researches, since published (Benjamin Franklin’s Philadelphia Printing) may give the answer. That 36 sets were still on hand when Franklin sold his stock in 1748, suggests that the publication was not a commercial success and that many copies may have been scrapped.

“There was obviously no problem in disposing of such a book—the earliest work of fiction printed in the American colonies, by a printer who was later to become one of the great founders of the republic. As often happens in such instances, the difficulty was in dealing with a board of trustees all of whom became, of course, instant authorities on a subject of which they had the day before known little or nothing. The method of sale, the profit to be allowed the entrepreneur, and the identity of the ultimate purchaser were all of concern to each and every individual on the board. We felt fortunate, indeed, to be permitted to handle the transaction, even though under the circumstances the profit involved was nominal, and though we had to get the seller’s approval of our customer as an appropriate repository. We chose the American Antiquarian Society on whose shelves the book rests happily today. It is properly dignified by inclusion in that great institution’s brochure A Society’s Chief Joys.”

-“Baum’s great classic, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz has always been a rarity in fine condition. Such a copy, presented by the illustrator W. W. Denslow to Charles Warren Stoddard at the time of publication, and also inscribed by the author, with an original drawing by Denslow, was offered in a Goodspeed catalogue in 1909. Half a century later, on the death of the original purchaser, the copy passed once more into Goodspeed’s hands. On this second go around, it realized exactly three hundred times the earlier price. The same catalogue listed a copy of the first edition of Tom Sawyer, inscribed by the author, also to Stoddard, at the modest price of ten dollars.

“Unlike the Wizard of Oz, Tom Sawyer never came back to us, and remains a memory, though bodily it may be seen in the Lilly Library at the University of Indiana.”

-“In terms of absolute rarity, the first edition of Little Women is not particularly uncommon, but like most popular books for the young, fine copies are another matter. The finest one I have ever handled came from an old collection in the town of Bedford, Massachusetts, the library of a minister which had been kept shelved for years in an unheated room. Not only had the books been little read; when we saw them they were covered with a coating of dust an eighth of an inch thick. When this protective coating was blown away, the original covers appeared in virginal splendor, the gilt lettering shining like new.”

-“During the years, we have had our share of rare juveniles, including two copies of Mrs. Hale’s Poems for Our Children (1830) in which ‘Mary’s Little Lamb’ was first collected; and most recently one of the two known copies (albeit very imperfect) of the first edition (1698) of Benjamin Harris’s The Holy Bible in Verse, in a charming contemporary binding with blind-stamped panel showing an Indian hunting wildfowl with his bow and arrow.

“To one looking back over half a century, it seems as if the supply of rarities in this field is drying up. But a little time is still left, and perhaps one of these days someone will drop in at 18 Beacon Street with a copy of A New Gift for Children, the first known non-biblical book for children, published in Boston about 1756. To date, the only known copy of the first edition is in the Huntington Library. The 1690 edition of the New England Primer is yet to turn up anywhere!”

-“In what way Reed Powell’s name came up, I don’t recall, but Frost remarked that Powell had been up visiting a few days earlier, and in the course of a walk over the hills had said, ‘You’re not really a Vermonter. After all you were born in San Francisco, and spent most of your life in New Hampshire. You’re just a bastard Vermonter.’ Alluding to the sharp tongue for which Professor Powell was notorious, Frost replied ‘Better a bastard Vermonter than a Vermont bastard.’”

-“I have mentioned before the term ‘breaker’ for books frequently broken up for sale by the leaf, or, more usually, for the illustrations which are sold as prints. The most famous and the most expensive today, of course, is the great folio edition of Audubon’s Birds of America. But the prints from this great work were not always so highly esteemed, and it was not until comparatively recent times that complete sets were broken up for their illustrations.

“Odd volumes, however, came on the market occasionally, and, we were among the first to exploit the prints in this way. Indeed, as recently as fifty years ago our supply of them was so ample that we were able to consign quantities to others for sale without seriously depleting our own stock. The Scribner Bookstore in New York and the Henderson County Historical Society in Kentucky were two of our principal outlets.

“As early as 1905 we were able to catalogue at one time nearly two hundred of the bird plates at the extremely modest prices then prevailing. The Snowy Owl, for example, was listed at twenty dollars; the Columbia Jay at twelve dollars and a half; the Great Blue Heron at twenty; and the others in proportion at prices not more than one per cent of what they fetch today.

“We have never broken a complete set of this monumental work. A few months after I came to the shop, we catalogued the fine set from Amy Lowell’s library for $3500 (an advance of only $500.00 over what we had asked in 1903) and not long after a remarkably fine set bound in full levant by Sanford the old Boston binder, found no buyers at the same price. Sanford used to tell of the many months it took him to find skins large enough for the binding.

“The work was originally published by subscription, and some subscribers, for one reason or another, allowed their subscriptions to lapse. As a result, portions of the first two volumes occasionally turn up in the hands of descendants of the original subscribers. One such lot came to light in New Jersey in 1950. It was in February of that year that I had been in New York and called on David Randall, then manager of Scribner’s rare book department. In the course of my visit, he picked up a letter lying on his desk, waved it casually and remarked that it was from a woman nearby who had the first hundred and five plates from the Audubon. The prints were totally untrimmed and first states throughout. ‘I have offered $4,000’ he said ‘but the owner has made no decision.’ The letter, which of course he did not let me see closely, was on a characteristic blue note paper. I should naturally have liked to have a chance to bid on the prints. When I got back to Boston, I found on my desk what was clearly the counterpart of the one Dave had waved in front of me. I called the owner of the plates, made an appointment to see her the next day, went back to New York on the night train, and proceeded down to the New Jersey suburb. It was not difficult to come to terms with the owner at $4,500. Bookselling is a very talky business, and the temptation to blab is sometimes irresistible.”

The last few excerpts are from the aforementioned appendices, in the words of the author’s father.

-“Back in Boston with my few boxes of books I had next to find a store or ‘shop’ as I called it. (Most book dealers had ‘Book Stores’ in those days. ‘Book Shop’ seemed a little nicer to me, and so I adopted the word.) The most direct way of getting a store, I thought, was to go to a real estate office, and I chanced into Whittier’s Agency, where I was politely received. The first question asked was how much rent I wished to pay for the small premises I was looking for, the clerk at the same time pulling out a drawer of his card index. I replied, ‘Not over $50 a month.’ Bang closed the drawer! Driven to become my own agent I wandered around in a district which seemed promising. I had fixed upon the vicinity of Boston Common as being desirable. Walking up Park Street, I saw, about half way up to Beacon Street, a basement window with the sign ‘To Let.’ The rent, $55, I thought I could manage. Christmas was at hand. The beautifully printed books of Stone & Kimball (for the most part not greatly distinguished in contents, but attractively bound) at twenty-five cents were offered as a suggestion of something between a Christmas card and a gift, and I found that the ladies of Beacon Hill and the Back Bay were very appreciative of the opportunity of getting an acceptable gift-remembrance for so slight a sum. The odd volumes of the Stone & Kimball edition of Poe at fifty cents were very popular, and my own private collection of Ruskin and Dr. Thomas William Parsons, the translator of Dante, whose verse had appealed to me and whose books I had collected, gave a slightly superior flavor to the stock. For furniture, I had a chair and also a wooden box, covered with denim and stood on end, which made a sufficient desk. A shelf, nailed inside the box and holding three volumes of American Book Prices Current (all that were published at the time), comprised my reference library. My first day’s receipts were something over $20. (In those days of wisdom, before the government claimed a partnership in the business, I reckoned no transaction in my sales until the books had been paid for.)

“The game was now on. Of course I wanted to have a slogan, and after much laborious thought, I adopted the motto ‘Anything that’s a book,’ the meaning of this being that I intended to try to have something to interest all classes of buyers. The little phrase has been a source of embarrassment at times, however, being quoted against me by disappointed would-be sellers when I have turned down their offers of books which I could not use. A motto should have a trademark to bear it. The Heintzemann Press happily suggested the bookish idea of a tonsured monk absorbed in reading of his homily as he rode. The facsimile given on the following page is from the first rough draft before the motto evolved into its final form.

“Of course the great difficulty with a new bookseller who has little money is to find stock to replenish his shelves. What money I could get I could not afford to put out in a few rare items. I had to have quantity. Even then I found difficulty in getting enough books, so I was for a while driven to the device of constant rearranging of the stock. Monday morning the rear shelves would be moved to the front, the top shelves to the middle, the middle to the bottom, and so on, so that even the most frequent visitor often remarked on the rapidity with which the stock was replenished.”

-“Speaking of junk-store finds reminds me of the experience of Mr. Z. T. Hollingsworth, whose magnificent collection of Washington prints I am glad to say is still owned by his sons. Mr. Hollingsworth collected a fine set of the autographs of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. One day a friend called at his office and said, ‘Here, Hollingsworth, I understand that you are interested in old autographs. I was going through Charlestown today and passing near the Navy Yard I saw an old ash barrel on the sidewalk with some papers sticking out. Here is one which looked interesting and I pulled it out. Perhaps you would like it.’ This gift was an autograph document in the hand of Elbridge Gerry, dated Philadelphia, July 9, 1776. The contents were of no importance, but it was not only written by Gerry, one of the signers of the Declaration, but was also autographed by all the other Massachusetts ‘signers,’ including John Hancock, Samuel Adams, John Adams, and Robert Treat Paine. When Mr. Hollingsworth’s autographs were sold at an auction in 1927, this document was knocked down to me at $1,850.”

-“But I think that the prize offering of the period by Goodspeed’s was in Catalogue No. 6 (April, 1901), where an immaculate copy of the first edition of Emerson’s Nature, with a presentation inscription from Thoreau incorporating a quotation from Burns, was priced at $100. Mr. Wakeman bought this volume and it seems to have been one of the bargains at the sale of his library twenty-three years later, when it realized only $160. In the same year I find we offered what was probably our first copy of Paul Revere’s engraving of the ‘Boston Massacre’ for $650. The French copy had just been sold at auction for $800. I suppose that, in all, we must have had from twelve to fifteen copies of this much sought for, although not particularly rare, print. The crude quaintness, historical significance, and fame of the engraver (greatly enhanced by Longfellow’s famous verses) sustain the demand for this engraving, although its value has not greatly appreciated in the last thirty years.”

-“Three peculiar dangers beset the bookseller, and from these he has little protection save his own honesty, good judgment, and alertness. First is the danger of buying material which has been stolen either from individuals or, more often, from public libraries, and to avoid this danger he must always be on his guard. He is also, from the nature of his merchandise, in constant peril from sneak thieves. He cannot set a watch upon visitors without giving offence, and culprits when caught seldom receive punishment. The courts for some reason are lenient in such cases, and the offender usually gets off with probation or a filed case. The third danger is from the forger. There are forgers of books, forgers of prints, forgers of autographs, indeed fakers of almost everything antiquarian which has a value. A book in which a dozen or so booksellers might contribute a chapter from their own personal experience with these pitfalls would be readable.”

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

Author Profile: Matthew Eck

Matthew Eck is the 2007 runner-up for the Barnes and Noble Discover Award for his first novel, The Farther Shore (ISBN 1571310576), released through Milkweed Editions publishing group. The Farther Shore is a gripping, haunting short novel about the effects of war set in the troubled nation of Somalia. The novel was universally well received, with comparisons to other accomplished novelists such as Hemingway and Tim O’Brien—very distinguished company indeed.

In The Farther Shore, Matthew Eck puts the reader inside the world of a fragmented country where gangs and warlords rule and where there is little regard for life as we know it. In 1992, when a small unit of soldiers from the U.S. Army is separated from their command and left for dead, their only option is to “keep moving” in hope that they will escape those marauding gangs and clansmen who rule the city of Mogadishu with an iron clad fist. In scenes reminiscent of Dante’s horrific description of the journey through the Inferno, Eck expertly moves the reader through horrifying violent encounters where one by one the members of the small American unit are tragically lost. Eck brilliantly engages the reader with ghostly images where the characters are both human and inhuman—a mirror image to the violence of war.

Eck enlisted in the Army in 1992 and served in both Somalia and Haiti. He has a B.A. in English Literature from Wichita State University and a Master’s in Creative Writing from the University of Montana. He currently is a popular professor of Creative Writing at a small college in the Midwest—the University of Central Missouri. Eck lives in the Kansas City area with his wife Katie and young son Cormac (any guess as to who he is named after?). His wife is due to deliver their second child at any time. Eck enjoys teaching and interacting with his students as they also pursue their own writing careers. He has a full schedule at work and home and values his cherished spare time to write.

Eck is currently finishing up his second novel, which does not concern war despite having some violent characters. He has plans to return to a “war setting” for his third novel. I recently had a conversation with the young author where he answered questions not only about The Farther Shore and his upcoming second novel, but also about his writing style and how he goes about his daily busy schedule with little free time available to him.

In a recent review, I described the way I felt while reading The Farther Shore as having a “sickening feeling in the pit of my stomach and a lump in my throat at the same time,” and I described the book as a “crying out for no more war.” Also, for the book’s characters, survival meant they were forced oftentimes to observe war and the violence around them from an isolated “farther shore.” Do you feel these are accurate descriptions?

I think your descriptions are perfect. The Farther Shore is my hymn against war. I imagine it is what most war writers hope for, deep down inside, that they can change the world for the better with their writing. They do observe the war from The Farther Shore—they’re victims and participants, but more importantly, they bear witness to that around them. They physically bear the weight of the war and all the memories they're making.

While reading The Farther Shore I felt that the characters in your story had, above all else, an overwhelming feeling of detachment. It wasn’t so much as if they were fighting for their survival—it was, to me, as if they were fighting to disassociate themselves from any possible memory of Somalia and the violence, if they were to survive. As a veteran of the Somalia action, is this what you also felt? Is that what you were trying to convey to the reader? The characters seemed more and more detached from the violence as the story went on. At the beginning there seemed to be some apathy for those killed or wounded, but as the novel and the suspense grew it seemed that they took everything that happened in stride.

I think memory is the key word there. Stantz says in the end that he won't remember it all, an obvious lie, built as much for those asking the question as for himself. I think the reason for the "keep moving" attitude served two purposes. First, they are more and more exhausted as the novel goes on. They're physically, emotionally—and in the sense of belief—spiritually exhausted as they are forced to make decisions and accept the consequences of their actions. The other reason for the "keep going" attitude was to keep the plot moving so that the reader can share in the burden of the experience with the characters.

Our readers are interested in all aspects of the creative style. Jack London had a saying, “A thousand words a morning.” Do you have a set schedule you are firm with for your daily work? How do you juggle your writing needs in with being a busy professor of Creative Writing? Do you write at home or at the “office?” Is writing a difficult process for you or does it come easily?

I try to write at least a thousand words a day or put in four hours writing and editing. So much depends on my teaching schedule and my wife and son's schedule as well. My teaching load is insane at the moment. I teach four courses a semester. I look forward to my summers.

The Katie and Cormac schedule is wonderful though. We have another one on the way, so I can't wait to make time for them as well. All writers have to figure out how to make their time work. We all have 24 hours in a day. Some days you are selfish with your time and some days you are kind with your time. I write in my office at home. We're in the midst of buying me a door for my office. When Cormac was born my office didn't have a door. I was going over the manuscript for The Farther Shore and I would hear Cormac cooing in the next room while I worked on a scene about killing children. It was tough. If he's home when I'm writing he'll stop by to chat about baboons and such. I like to hug him. I enjoy my space when I write. I like to pace and drink coffee. I open books by dead authors at random and read what they have to say. Sometimes the writing is easy and sometimes it is hard. Most days it's hard. I can whip myself with self-doubt like no one. It'd be nice if it were all the roses of happiness. But, alas, the well of despair is deep, the forest is dark and deep, and the trail is full of peril.

What can we expect to see in the future from Mr. Matthew Eck? Do you think Joshua Ferris deserved to win the Discover Award?

I'm working on a new novel. It's about killers. It's about a character that I've had in the back of my mind for years now. It's not a war story though. It's about the lies someone will believe in order to live their life between the long stretches of darkness that fall in front of it and behind it. I think I'll probably visit the war story again soon though. I care deeply about veterans, for all the obvious reasons. My heart goes out to all the soldiers out there in the world and I'm always thinking of stories I can share with them. And yes, Joshua Ferris is an amazing writer; he deserves all the praise that he's received. He's intelligent and gifted. I thought Vida's book [Vendela Vita—another Discover Award runner-up] was remarkable as well. Either one of them could have won it.

How did you hook up with Milkweed over the other big publishing houses? Will that relationship continue?

My agent sent it to Daniel Slager and the rest is history as they say. She had a feeling that we would work well together. As I say in the acknowledgments page, he found the heart of the novel and edited it true. I'm honored to be at Milkweed and I would love to work with Daniel again. I learned a great deal from his edits and requests and we can get along very well. Like all writers I just want to get my work out there into the world and get it to as many readers as possible. Publishing is a wonderful business and writers switch houses all the time for all the obvious reasons.

Are you one of those writers that feels they should write only about things they are familiar with in their lives—say like fighting in Somalia? If so, what else has happened to Matthew Eck that you would like to write about? And will it always be fiction?

I think writers should write about whatever they want. Men can write about women, dogs can write about cats, and on and on. Oh, what hasn't happened to me that would be interesting to write about? I like going to the grocery store. Something fun always happens. The craziest person in the place usually finds me and starts a conversation. I used to think that you had to "own" the experience in order to write about it. But these days I like to watch people and I like to try and figure out what it is they're doing, what they're about, and what their lives might look like on the page. What would happen if I sent character A to a petting zoo? That kind of stuff. Empathy. Some days I write to teach myself empathy. To teach myself to be a better person.

Was the title The Farther Shore your idea?

My wife helped me with that one. It's a line from Dante.

As, in the autumn, leaves detach themselves,
First one and then the other, till the bough
Sees all its fallen garments on the ground,
Similarly, the evil seed of Adam
Descended from the shoreline one by one,
When signaled, as a falcon—called—will come.
So they move across the darkened waters [all those souls];
Even before they reach the farther shore,
New ranks already gather on this bank.

Stephen Parker operates Classic First Editions LLC out of Orange, CA and can be contacted at http://www.classicfirsteditions.com.

Adventures with a Binder

I recently journeyed to the Charles Matthews Bindery in Los Angeles to participate in a basic book repair class followed by some tips on restoration. It turned out to be a book autopsy, however, followed by major reconstructive surgery. Incredibly informative, very helpful and a lot of fun.

With piles and boxes of books in need of varying levels of attention, I thought it a good, practical idea. But lurking in the back of my mind I had dreams of creating beautiful volumes with intricate, gilded designs and painted fore edges.

The pre-requisites were simple: a book in need of repair and a desire to learn. It wasn’t difficult to find a good candidate, a small turn-of-the century volume bound in cloth, with worn cracked boards and cracked hinges, but with only one loose page worn.

Traffic was awful, even on a Saturday morning, and the 60 mile trip took two hours. There were three of us in class, I was the extreme novice, and everyone was helpful. Charlene Matthews was the binder who taught us. She is talented, friendly and makes great coffee.

The object of the game was to remove the text block completely from the cover, clean the cover and spine of the majority of old material, reinforce the spine, repair the major splits, put the boards back on, tip in the new matched endpapers, and put it all together and go home. It seemed simple enough, but I always jumped into the deep end of the pool as a kid, and I could feel my toes growing cold.

The whole process took about five hours with a lot of help. Someone who actually knew what they were doing could probably do it in about half that time or even less. In between steps we learned about the tools and techniques, viewed some exciting book art projects, and laughed.

To start, the text block was separated from the case. This is done by cutting carefully down the hinges.

No special tools are required for this as you can see. These two “lifting knives” have been with the binder for over 15 years (she bought them at a swap meet). The small green one was at one time almost as long as the brown one. Since the class I have found a small cadre of knives and other pointy things that work very well from yard sales.

In this project, I separated the endpaper and board from the cloth cover. It was interesting to see the condition and color difference underneath. Over time the front board had completely cracked down the middle.

Once the majority of the board was removed, it was sanded down with fine sandpaper. It is important to clean off the folded-over cloth. If you don’t, once the new endpapers are pasted down it will detract from the finished work.

The splits in the folds were repaired from the inside, with Japanese document repair tape found at Tallas. Once this tape has been burnished (rubbed carefully and well with a bone folder) it is almost invisible.

This is old animal glue here. It’s very hard to the touch but surprisingly easy to remove once wheat paste is applied. Wheat paste seems like the miracle bookbinding stuff. It’s used to put things together and, as in the case of this spine, to remove things. Wheat paste is also designated as a reversible glue meaning exactly that—once dry it can be removed.

Remove as much of the old glue as possible. Be careful with the knife. Wheat paste makes the paper soggy and it along with the sewing threads are easily damaged.

Once the spine is cleaned up, it is interesting to see how the signatures were sewn. The next step, while the spine dried a bit, was to prepare the new endpapers. Paper was chosen to match the texture as closely as possible, then dyed to match the color.

Coffee is often the dye of choice, however we used acrylic paint of various tints mixed and thinned with water. Trial and error ruled here, but I think a good match was found. The new endpaper, cut longer than needed, was dyed and hung up to dry. It was tipped in using PVA. Rounding the corners of both the papers and boards was done on an old vintage corner rounder.

The new boards were cut to size, rounded and glued in using PVA, a thick fast-drying glue thinned slightly and applied with a brush. The glue must go on the cloth, and not the boards. Success comes with practice! Warping can be prevented by using a handy-dandy weight—the orange block is actually a brick covered in cloth. A binder’s stapler is used to hold a section of signatures that are being drilled for sewing.

The end pages were tipped in, PVA glue was applied, and the text block was given a new cloth spine.

Not an exact color match, but the purpose is support. Under the old cloth case it will blend in and not distract from the finished work.

One process that is used repeatedly is burnishing. Done with a bone folder, it seemed that every step was finished by smoothing and shaping with this inexpensive but indispensable tool.

After cleaning both the case and spine, reinforcing the spine, and creating a new endpaper, the next step was to attach the case to the block.

The finished book is below. You can still see where the cloth and old board were cracked. This is still part of the book’s history but now the board is strong and the tears are repaired. The frayed corners were not addressed as the class was only so long, and after all, it is an old common book with a history and a story all its own.

Among the interesting tips given, the binder often “irons” her books. Set on low, no steam please, she irons the boards, ends and spines. This helps set the glue and smooth the book. Another tip was the use of colored shoe polish to even the book’s tone. Small amounts were used, and I noticed it left a “healthier” look and seemed to clean the book without removing the original dye. I do not know if this is an accepted practice outside of this bindery but it was very interesting and had surprising results.

So ends the anatomy class. The next class was a little more intensive! I submit just the before and after pictures here. The larger book had a hollow back with leather spine that was chipping badly, though the stitching was sound. The spine was cleaned and reinforced, and a new backstrip was attached. The smaller book was much more intense. The front cover was detached along with the first few pages including marbled endpapers. The cover was reattached with a leather splice. The new splice was slipped in and glued with PVA.

This class was very instructive and lots of fun. The experience is highly recommended if anyone in your area is offering something similar.

There were three main sentiments and instructions.

“Do no harm.”

“Work slowly, and carefully.”

“You are using way too much glue!”

Sharon Heimann operates E Ridge Fine Books out of Lake Elsinore, CA and can be contacted at http://www.eridgebooks.com.

Fighting Fraud

A MAJOR STEP IN FIGHTING FRAUD

Bloomfield, CT. – History has been made! The Federal Trade Commission and the Professional Show Managers’ Association (PSMA) have jointly taken a giant step in educating the public about fraud in the world of antiques and collectibles. A year long crusade, led by Nancy Johnson and Dordy Fontinel, board members of the Professional Show Managers’ Association, has resulted in the printing and mass distribution of hundreds of thousands of colorful informative bookmarks. Titled “Antiques, How to Shop Wisely,” the educational pieces give bullet points of information to be considered when shopping for antiques: “When shopping for antiques and collectibles, ask the dealer. How long have you been in business? How do you know any item is genuine, not a fake or reproduction? What are your criteria for identifying the item? Will you give me a written guarantee that the item is authentic? What is your return policy?” In addition, Johnson and Fontinel were successful in their request that Consumer Information on Safely Shopping for Antiques and Collectibles be added to the FTC website. The two women spent nearly six months working with the FTC on the specific information that is now available. The recently posted article may be accessed by visiting the FTC.gov website or simply googling FTC antiques. When PSMA President Nancy Johnson wrote an article in the Association’s Winter 2007 newsletter entitled “When Did It Become OK To Cheat Someone?,” a commentary on our world’s complacency about being defrauded, show promoter Dordy Fontinel responded and began a dialogue with Johnson about the problem of fakes and fraud in the world of antiques and collectibles. This dialogue resulted in Fontinel speaking with Sen. John Warner, and subsequent meetings with his staff and the Federal Trade Commission. Last June, Fontinel and Johnson met with Jeanne Bumpus, Director of Congressional Affairs at the FTC, and members of the planning and information division of the FTC. Their goal was to have Antiques & Collectibles recognized as “consumer items” and to encourage the FTC to take note of the rampant fraud, which is taking place under the guise of “Antiques.” The FTC agreed and the process began. Knowingly selling a fake is criminal fraud in most states. PSMA also feels that the bookmarks will provide a convenient opportunity for anyone interested in educating the buying public and fighting the cause. PSMA encourages show promoters, dealers, shop and mall managers, club members, and auctioneers to get involved, therefore PSMA is offering the bookmarks at their cost. The battle has just begun! Now that the FTC has issued an Alert that selling an antique or collectible item that is not authentic is Fraud, Fontinel and Johnson feel more consumer protection will occur on the state and local level. To order bookmarks, send a check made payable to PSMA to the PSMA Offices, Attn: FTC Project, P.O. Box 30, Bloomfield CT 06002. The cost of the bookmarks, including Priority Mail, is $25 per 1000 or a single package of 200 for $10. (PSMA is a non-profit trade association of consumer show managers, with the majority of its members in the Antiques & Collectible fields.) Nancy Johnson operates Nancy Johnson, Bookseller out of Denver, CO and can be contacted at http://www.nancyjohnsonbookseller.com. IOBA Standard, Summer Edition 2008, Volume 9, No. 3.

Alan Deffenderfer of ABD Booksellers

My interests in reading have changed over the years. When I was in middle school, my parents bought a set of encyclopedias. I used to stay up after bedtime in my upstairs room and read articles on places, events and things around the world that fascinated my young mind. In high school, I was on the debate team and I became absorbed in reading newspapers and new magazines to keep abreast of the latest political and cultural issues. I graduated with six As and one D; I barely passed college preparatory English! My interests developed and changed in college where I majored in both Religious Studies and English and minored in Political Science. At the time, I took every class in poetry and biblical studies that the University of Missouri, Columbia offered. I was fascinated with the way poems and stories functioned. I became interested in hermeneutics, the study of the interpretation of stories and narratives. These interests, both academic and personal, continued through graduate school and still inspire me to this day.

While in graduate school I managed the college bookstore. At first we sold only new books, but eventually we started to carry both new and used books at our location. These experiences during my graduate school years deeply influenced my decision to go into business for myself. I come from a long line of self-employed family members. Parents, siblings and cousins all have their own businesses and while I was training to be a university professor, I was always intrigued by the possibility of owning my own business. When my wife had the opportunity to move across the country for a new job, I decided to go into business for myself. While I do teach at the local college, my online bookstore is the primary hat I wear. I have recently added FileMaker development, primarily supporting other booksellers, to my business model. In addition to selling books (and teaching), I am also a certified FileMaker Pro 9 developer. I expect to release a book cataloging solution in the Fall of 2008.

My book business, ABD Booksellers, specializes in new and used theological and philosophical books. While I carry some software for theological studies and books of a general nature, the majority of my stock is geared toward professionals and interested laypeople in the fields of religious, biblical and theological studies. I carry over 100,000 titles from hundreds of university, academic, church and religious publishers that range in content from biblical studies, theology and world religions to the mind-body problem, atheism, and the problem of evil. There is an ecumenical and academic spirit behind my bookstore that sets it apart from almost all other religious bookstores that I’ve encountered. Drop in and I think you’ll agree.

Alan Deffenderfer operates ABD Booksellers out of Havre de Grace, MD and can be contacted at http://www.abdbooksellers.com.

Golden Books Group of Devon, U.K.

An Anglo-American Dyslexic selling books from England 1991 – 2008.

Being the great-grandson of Abner Wolf (American pioneer grocer) is a hard place to be with a big reputation to live up to but being of similar character and disposition it was always very much expected that I should go into business in some way as the great Abner had. So it was therefore that in February of '91 I began my first enterprise, on a market stall (just like Abner had done many years previously), though in my case it was in London's famous Greenwich. We set up shop (stand/stall) near the famous historic landmarks of the Greenwich Maritime Museum, Greenwich Observatory and indeed the Cutty Sark itself (since damaged by fire alas). Those were eventful days and also the chapter wherein I met and married my wife Ann, an Irish artist. Fuller story on our website.

By 1993 we had gained enough experience to open our first proper shop in a then sleepy seaside town called Whitstable—famed for its oysters. This was to be the first of many ventures and adventures. Whitstable is on the North Kent coastline, 20 miles north of the City of Canterbury, and its Cathedral was the perfect backdrop for a fledgling book business. After our son was born we relocated the heart of the business to the celebrated “Camden Passage Antiques Market” in North London. This was where artists and intellectuals then mingled with royals and politicos and ordinary mortals in the narrow streets. It may have changed since then—that was the ‘90s!

Two years later after this experiment it was clear that my passion was for antiquarian and rare leather bound books pre-1930s and this is where I now specialize. This has been a happy decision and collectors came from around the world to buy our selection of quality British and European leather bindings. In 1998 I also opened a small temporary bookstand at an antiques mall in Kansas City for about a year.

By 1999 the way of the world had changed and as our future was being reborn on the internet we moved lock stock and barrel to an 18 acre smallholding on the Devon Coast. We were now able to comfortably house our burgeoning quantity of great books for sale. Our online presence at goldenbooksgroup.co.uk was hugely welcomed in those early days when only new books were “out there” and big corporate rivals made us earn our stripes the hard way which we have!

All went very well in the initial stages though Abe somehow managed to somehow capture our original domain names and our traffic from our websites to feed customers to themselves! We were dented badly, first with .com and secondly with .co.uk as they started their UK end. Our gloves really came off as we started our fight back. Luckily for Abe our attention was largely diverted from their domination agenda by more pressing matters and they were spared our legal response at the time. A lot of people lost their domains in this way it would seem.

Latterly we had more devastation when a local birdbrain tried to put us out of business by planting concrete posts right across our business access way. This restricted growth/trading for over 5 years as British law protects the alleged guilty party until actually proved guilty which although frustrating at times does prevent miscarriages of justice most of the time. Usually here, in the UK, as the Plaintiff, you still lose time and money and the guilty party still gets off lightly, often by claiming bankruptcy (despite having assets). It is a strange world and strange times that we live in.

Even more recently (as if any further rites of passage were needed) I have been recovering from a serious prolapsed lumbar disc for the past two years.

Running your own business is certainly hard graft, in any weather. Good insurance is the very minimum requirement for survival. We are however still waiting for ours!

By 2003 in response to difficulties over access, we were promoting our new Library Building Service (delivered) which allowed us to exhibit at major antique fairs like Olympia Fine Art & Antiques Fair, the Miami International Antiques Fair and many others.

2007 saw me awarded the great honour of the Directorship of Marketing and Promotions for the Independent Booksellers Network (the UK's version of IOBA) which is currently going through changes.

The future? I am very interested in keeping Antiquarian and Rare Bookselling and Booksellers as unique and independent as possible and am very loyal to this concept. It is a professional job where older books are respected as testaments and long term investments, cherished and shared and passed on for generations.

Current memberships include LAPADA, CINOA, PBFA, Independent Booksellers Network, and IOBA.

Yes, I did do it and still try to do it my way.

Best wishes,

Ivan and Ann Golden

Ivan Golden operates Golden Books Group out of Devon, UK, and can be contacted at http://www.goldenbooksgroup.co.uk.

June Gaulding and Mark Gaulding of JMVintage

JMVintage is owned by mother and son, June and Mark Gaulding, and has been in existence since 2001. We are a specialized bookseller with unique niches and we sell solely online (although we do have occasional visits to our studio). Our main specialty is books, magazines and ephemera related to the Duke & Duchess of Windsor and other royalty.

We are located in Palm Desert, California, one of the many cities that make up the greater Palm Springs area.

While we’ve had our business for seven years, the story of how we became booksellers is one that started many years ago.

I have always loved books since early childhood. I was addicted to the Hardy Boys and Agatha Christie mysteries, early on. I am a voracious reader. So, a bookstore seemed to be a natural career path for me, even though I didn't actually realize this until the middle chapter of life. I discovered antiquarian and used bookstores in my early twenties, about the same time I “discovered” the Duke & Duchess of Windsor. In fact, it was this “royal” discovery which started me on a twenty-year mission to acquire every book ever written by or about the Windsors. In 1987, a book was published that presented the correspondence of the Windsors up to and through the abdication and their subsequent marriage. I literally was astounded at the story…one I had never heard about. This book is called, Wallis and Edward: Letters, 1931-1937; The Intimate Correspondence of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, edited by Michael Bloch.

In the 4/2008 issue of Allure Magazine, Madonna is quoted: “I’m reading every book ever written about the Duke & Duchess of Windsor.” Which is exactly the sentiment I had over twenty years ago when I read the couple’s letters in Bloch’s book. My next step was to visit Acres of Books, a huge used bookstore in Long Beach, where I lived at the time. This introduced me to another love affair—with used bookstores. The moment I stepped inside I felt I’d finally found a place that I belonged. I relished hunting through piles and piles of books to find some obscure treasure, covered in dust. Using bibliographies from the various out-of-print works I was able to find, I began to compile a list of books and other material on the couple. This was the beginning of my Windsor collection. I began to explore used bookstores throughout Southern California, looking for either titles on my list or an even better reward—a title I hadn’t even known about.

So, that one book literally launched several great passions in my life: book collecting, studying the lives of the Duke & Duchess of Windsor, and shopping at used bookstores. This was before the internet, and at the time I traveled a great deal in my job and I would always immediately grab the yellow pages as I arrived in a hotel to find used bookstores I could explore and squeeze into the few spare moments I wasn’t working. Every vacation usually incorporated a portion of time exploring the out-of-print bookstores in the area.

A decade later, my “hobby” and collection had grown to include 200 books. In 1997 another significant and serendipitous event occurred: the Sotheby’s auction of the Windsors’ personal property became the media event of the year, reacquainting the mainstream public with their epic story. The local paper, The Desert Sun, did a profile on my collection as a “local interest” story to accompany all of the Windsor auction news.

The article ended: “Later this month, on vacation, Gaulding will travel to Montreal to comb more old bookstores. For this Windsorphile, the continuing mission carries both a sense of love and loss. ‘It’s become kind of sad,’ he said. ‘Neither person (the Windsors) seemed to find a raison d’etre. But I keep searching. I never really want to find that last book.’”

As a result of that article I received a number of inquiries from people in the Palm Springs area. One such acquaintance introduced me to AbeBooks and the shopping opportunities on the internet. This transformed my collection and buying in a very significant way. My Windsor collection became more than just books. I was buying magazines, photos, and ephemera. This was probably the most significant evolutionary step on the road to bookseller as it literally introduced me to the internet book world and I discovered there were other Windsor aficionados all over the globe.

In the late '90s I began to purchase multiple copies of Windsor-related books and other items. I suppose I had some secret hope that someday I could have my own bookstore and could sell these copies.

JMVintage began in 2001 with my extra copies of Duke & Duchess of Windsor-related books. My mother, June, who was approaching retirement from the travel agency industry at 65, was considering options for making additional money once she was no longer employed. I suggested that she could sell my extra Windsor books and magazines. We formed a partnership and started selling on AbeBooks with just a few books.

In 2002 we both attended David Gregor’s seminars (www.gregorbooks.com) on book selling and book collecting. These classes were such an important education on the industry and we both took it very seriously. I remember distinctly Mr. Gregor saying, “If you’re not buying, you’re not selling,” which essentially became my mantra, much to my partner, June’s, chagrin.

At the seminar we learned about Amazon Marketplace and then listed our inventory there. Not long after we discovered Bibliopolis, which allowed us to create our own website, www.jmvintage.com.

Gregor also was instrumental in helping us understand about specialization of inventory, which we had already discovered, quite by accident, by the very nature of the unique subject matter we were selling. This early specialization advice has been crucial in growing the business since 2002. Our niche market illustrates I think, most effectively, the concept of The Long Tail, written by Chris Anderson and published in 2006. The long tail is well illustrated in my own book collecting and subsequent bookselling experience. The internet made available the most amazing breadth and depth of material, which before 1997, I had known nothing about.

The Windsors are about as specialized as you can get. But it seems that from this subject several other specialties have naturally evolved. We began to specialize in Cecil Beaton and Elsa Maxwell, and then it broadened to encompass books on art, architecture, interior design, biographies and autobiographies of twentieth-century figures, and royalty in general. Specialties tend to develop periodically based upon my own reading obsessions. One that has stuck over the years is courtesans.

On the flight back from Gregor’s seminar in 2002, June decided that she wanted to specialize using her own interest in cookbooks. It is interesting how much those seminars, those two brief days, have guided us throughout the years since.

Five years ago, when I turned 40, I decided that I was going to make the bookselling business my full-time profession. While I was in no position to leave my almost twenty year career in healthcare finance, I set a goal that within two years the business would have grown so that I could begin to transition out of my regular job. But as things usually happen the two years quickly passed and I was swept up in promotions and ended up in a position that was quite full time. June has diligently nurtured our book business throughout the last seven years and I participated every other waking hour not spent at my job at the hospital.

When I had my 45^th birthday, I was horrified to think that my hopes would yet again not be accomplished when I reached the 50-year milestone. I resolved to not repeat regrets five years from now and left my job with the hospital to pursue our bookstore full-time. That was in September, 2007.

Our inventory currently includes almost 5,000 books and magazines. Our main goal since September has been to grow the business to include Windsor items besides books and magazines. We’ve developed a product line of gifts, original art, and objet d’art/décor items with a Windsor theme. We also worked with Luke Lozier and the great folks at Bibliopolis to upgrade our website into a cleaner more polished look.

It has been an interesting learning experience for us both in the seven years since we started our bookselling business. About 35-40% of our sales are through our website, but with the cyclical ups and downs of the industry and other selling sites like AbeBooks, it seems that we are constantly challenged to redefine.

JMVintage takes up a large room, a garage, and several closets in my home. We’ve literally run out of space, unless I move out of my home and rent an apartment and commit my home strictly to commerce. My original dream was to have my own bookstore and I’ve often wondered if we could find a successful way to back our way into a bookstore…to reverse engineer it, so to speak, since many independent and brick and mortar used bookstores have closed their doors and gone online only. At some point in the near future we will have to find some sort of additional space, whether it is a shop or rooms in an industrial park.

Without the initial training at the Gregor seminars we probably would not have been able to grow the business over the years. I also have wanted for some time now to attend the Colorado Antiquarian bookselling workshop. I have a business background which lends itself to the business but ultimately I would love the opportunity to become more educated on this noble profession.

We also manage the Duke & Duchess of Windsor Society (www.ddows.org) and publish a quarterly journal for the Society, which is another aspect that feeds traffic to our website. Understanding the internet and its complexities is a constant challenge. Learning how to enhance your google rankings and how to increase traffic is one of life’s great mysteries and a cause of heartburn for us (along with the price of a gallon of gas)!

Perhaps the most rewarding aspect of JMVintage is the fact that it now includes three generations. My 93-year-old grandmother, Faye, has for several years been an integral part of the business. She loves working on the computer. The only problem since I’ve been here full-time is that we literally run into each other trying to work in our studio here in my home.

Some day we hope to have our own brick and mortar shop which is not an extension of my house. Until that time please, visit our store online at www.jmvintage.com. We would love to hear from fellow members of IOBA.

And, by the way, I still haven’t found that last book! I suspect that other IOBA members will understand.

June and Mark Gaulding operate JMVintage out of Palm Desert, CA and can be contacted at http://www.jmvintage.com.

Feedback

Dear IOBA,

I am writing to thank you and the board members of IOBA once more for granting me a scholarship award to this year’s Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar. What an incredible experience! We covered an enormous amount of material in such a short time. I feel like my brain has been expanded a hundred-fold. Equally energizing and beneficial was the opportunity for meeting other booksellers from across the country (including our group of IOBA members). The faculty and participants had such a variety of experience levels, interests and specialties, and stories of their own journeys along the many roads of dealing in books. Having this new network of colleagues is wonderful!

Serena and I have been pouring over my seminar notes and handouts and discussing ideas to shape and improve ourselves as booksellers. We are making plans to attend book fairs and create our first catalog. (Our first perhaps will be of a lesser-known female sci-fi/western author’s collection, including books, manuscripts, fanzines and ephemera, which we acquired over a year ago.) We are acquiring new reference materials, communicating with some of the seminarians I met, and working on ways to find better books and improve our catalog descriptions. The list goes on.

Thank you again for your generous support. The IOBA scholarship award was a tremendous help to us. And not only financially, but also in terms of collegial support—introducing us to and welcoming us into a fabulous network of colleagues that we hope to get to know more and work with over many years to come. Thank you!

Best Regards,

Cathy Graham
Co-Owner, Copperfish Books, LLC

Happy Hits submitted by Bronwyn Smith

Isn’t the internet wonderful?

Received a call from a customer who told me that he'd just visited a London bookshop. He was in search of a book, a biography of an English punter and racing identity. Imagine his surprise when the bookseller told him that the only available copy on the internet was our copy in Dromana, Australia! My client lives in Melbourne, a little over an hour away from Dromana. He was most anxious that we hold the book until his return from the other side of the world. We were happy to oblige.

The Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, usually just called the "Iditarod," is an annual sled dog race in Alaska, where mushers and teams of typically 16 dogs race through freezing wilderness for about 10 days. I sent a book on the Iditarod Race to a customer in far Northern Queensland, our tropical Gulf Country. It is a remote area with crocodile infested swamps and jungle. Any roads are four wheel drive-only tracks impassable during the wet season and isolated from any major towns or settlements. Apart from its tough terrain and living conditions, it has nothing much else in common with Alaska's arctic terrain. I can't help wondering why anyone living in that part of Australia would want to read about training dogs to race through the frozen wilderness. We all have our dreams I suppose.

Bronwyn Smith operates Dromanabooks out of Dromana, Australia and can be contacted at http://www.dromanabooks.com.au.

And shortly after this your editor sent the following cookbooklet to Anula in the Northern Territory of Australia. Small world.

Blurbettes

God Exists: New Light on Science and Creation by Joseph Davydov (Rockville, MD: Schreiber Publishing, 2000).

From the inside flaps:

We hear a great deal these days about various theories regarding the origins of the universe, and we keep reading about the ongoing debate between those who accept the Bible’s account of creation and those who reject it.

Here for the first time a prominent physicist takes us step by step through the world of today’s science, and shows us how recent advances in the physical and biological sciences shed new light on the first chapter of Genesis, which describes the creation of the universe, the formation of the planet Earth, and the birth and development of life on Earth.

Such scientific subjects as matter and energy, particles and antiparticles, relativity, quantum physics, the Big Bang, black and white holes, the expanding universe, and genetic codes are explained in layperson’s terms, and are applied to the Biblical narrative of the six days of creation, which the author explains as six evolutionary stages in which a relative material universe is created by an Absolute Creator, culminating in life on Earth.

Furthermore, the author brings us closer perhaps than any other scientist or philosopher in the past in providing compelling scientific arguments in favor of the existence of this Absolute God which completely transcends our relative world.

The prominent former-Soviet scientist Genrikh Golin writes about this book:

We, the scientists of the former Soviet Union were educated in the spirit of atheism…thank God a gradual recovery of this society is taking place at the present time…In this context the book God Exists by Joseph Davydov is of great scientific and practical importance to everyone. Any unprejudiced reader who wishes to be exposed to authentic research will acquire a great deal of new and uncommon information. It is quite possible that for many it will become the first step towards a new “scientific-religious” world view, based not on blind faith but on scientific facts.

Dr. Joseph Davydov received his PhD at the Moscow Institute of Energy in 1967, and his engineer’s license from the State of New York in 1990. He is a member of the New York Academy of Sciences, and president of the International Scientific Center in Brooklyn. He is the author of over forty scientific works, including the book Worlds, which for the first time offers a proof of the objective existence of an Absolute God and other nonphysical worlds. The present volume was first published in Russian under the title Creation and Evolution.

From the rear panel:

Can the existence of God be scientifically proven?

Does the Bible have anything to say about the origins of the Universe?

Does scientific knowledge take us further away from or bring us closer to God?

THIS BOOK PROVIDES THE ANSWERS.

So, a careful reading of these blurbs would lead one to believe that God Exists offers “compelling scientific arguments [italics added] in favor of the existence of this Absolute God,” which seems to be a retreat from “a proof [italics added] of the objective existence of an Absolute God” in a previous book he wrote titled Worlds.

The author says we don’t have to rely on blind faith any more, thanks to his explanations, but there are arguments on paper and proofs you see with your own eyes. Appendix A informs us that, “the messiah should come and establish a universal paradise on the earth…approximately in the year 2240.”

Book Blogs

Used Books Blog

http://usedbooksblog.com/blog

Posted by A. J. Kohn 3/28/2008

A passion for books but not proofreading

Yesterday I received an email from AbeBooks which stated that I could save 48% on Stephan King’s Duma Key.

Stephan King? It seems that Abe’s ‘Passion for Books’ doesn’t extend to proofreading. Maybe I’m being overly critical but this is a company in the business of words, books and literature! You’d think that they’d go to greater lengths to ensure these types of errors didn’t occur. What would happen if TechCrunch had a headline that read ‘Steve Jubs predicts iPod success’?

I’d give AbeBooks a mulligan but they used that up a few years ago when they sent a message to their booksellers and accidentally referred to them as boobsellers. A very different business for sure.

Perhaps the AbeBooks tagline should be ‘Passion for ARCs’ which notoriously have these types of errors. Or is my criticism too harsh?

Ye Olde Booksellers

Ventures in Book Collecting by William Harris Arnold (NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1923).

The first passage is from the foreword by Thomas J. Wise.

-Arnold commenced, as most book-lovers do, by gathering books at random. Anything rare, anything choice, was sought for and welcomed. But in common with the wisest of his kind Arnold soon felt the unwisdom of this manner of collecting, and perceived that the one sure way to reach anything like finality, and the one sure way to render any collection useful as well as attractive, was to limit his energy to the accumulation of books and manuscripts by two or three of the authors whose work he loved best. Accordingly in 1901 the bulk of his collection was sold by auction by Messrs. Bangs and Co., of New York, in two separate portions, the one consisting of American literature only, the other including books in general literature covering a wide field. Having thus cleared the way, Arnold turned his attention to Alfred Tennyson and Robert Louis Stevenson. Upon the former in particular he concentrated the power of both mind and purse, with the result that the Harris Arnold collection of Tennysoniana has become famous upon both sides of the Atlantic as the first Tennyson collection ever founded in America. In the following pages Arnold has himself described in his own delightful way many of his host of wonderful things. If every collector when nearing the end of the journey would but follow his example, the advantage to the little world of book-lovers would be great, and the labor of the bibliographer of the future would be lightened.

-In 1895 there were few accessible records of the prices that had been paid for the first editions of American authors; therefore in buying I naturally exercised caution. None of the prices asked by dealers seemed unreasonably high, and the general run of them appeared absurdly low. There was no occasion to hesitate when a copy of Thoreau’s “Week” in the best possible state was offered for $13.50, but I felt brave indeed when in 1896 I brought myself to the point of paying $200 for “Fanshawe”; but it, too, was in pristine condition, and I made the plunge on learning that the author, rather ashamed of his youthful production (he was only twenty-four when the book was printed), had destroyed all the unsold copies, these comprising nearly the whole of the small edition, and that, so far as known, only ten or twelve copies were in existence.

-It was in the auction-room that I had most of the thrills of those early days. What a delightful sensation it was when the auctioneer knocked down to me for $16 a copy of Lowell’s “On Democracy,” privately printed for the ambassador before the address had been delivered, together with another copy of the first published edition, a little pamphlet issued by Birmingham and Midland Institute.

-This bookworm was one of several of Italian origin that came to this country in a copy of the “Divine Comedy” of Dante which was imported for the library of Cornell University. From the appearance of the volume it is surmised that these bookworms were born and bred in the “Inferno”; that during the sea voyage most of them were in “Purgatory,” and that on arrival at New York they all found themselves in “Paradise.” However that may be, they were well cared for, and several descendants of the immigrants have entered one or more of our leading universities. Indeed, they are credited with having given to Cornell a certain distinction which as a mere seat of learning it would not possess.

I shall not say more of this aspiring publication, of which eighty-five copies comprised the first edition, and two hundred copies the second edition of a smaller size and only less luxurious form, except ostentatiously to quote in full a letter written by his own hand in his seventy-ninth year by the greatest of bibliopoles, Bernard Quaritch.

London 15 Piccadilly, March 21, 1898.

W. Harris Arnold, Esq.,

New York.

Dear Sir,

I thank you very much for presenting to me a copy of your

First Report of a Book Collector,

royal 8vo, 1897-98

I have read it with great interest and I thank you for the friendly references to myself and my business.

I admire your enthusiasm, though it is for a class of Literature I am rather weak in. 18^th and 19^th century rarities I do not specially go after. My range is nevertheless very wide. I take in

Manuscripts and Palæography
Early Printed Books
“ Bibles & Liturgical Works
Natural History, Voyages, Travels
Greek & Roman Classics
Oriental Literature, Egypt etc.
English Classics, English MSS. and
English Topography
The best foreign books
Music, Polit. Economy, Games, Sports
Gardening Literature
Curiosa & Superstitions of every sort etc. etc.

You must admit a tolerably wide range.

In fact I follow up the bibliographical wants of all my customers.

However what you say,—and say justly about the collecting of first editions is true and very much to the point in all departments of Literature and Science.

The postscript to your first Report on Bookworms is the first really scientific account on this dangerous insect family. We have to thank you and that accomplished Entomologist Mr. Comstock for it

Yours, dear sir,

ever truly

Bernard Quaritch

As I became acquainted with first editions of British authors, my interest in collecting was intensified. Of course they were not so easy to acquire as the first editions of the nineteenth-century Americans, but the difficulty of pursuit induced greater zest. I had good luck, better luck than I was aware of at the time. While my selections were almost altogether from catalogues of British dealers and by bids at the London auctions, the disadvantage of distance was much reduced by kind offers of certain London dealers to send books on request for inspection and sometimes without even the formality of request. I recall my surprise when one day I received not only the three or four books I had asked for, but ten or twelve more, and all of them uncommonly good examples of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century rarities. Some of these were too costly for my purse, so, rather than return them, I gave New York’s most astute dealer opportunity to take what he would of those I could not compass. None went back to London, for he took all that remained with the remark, “I wonder where they could have got all these good ones.”

In five years I gathered about two hundred English first and early editions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and a long shelf-full of seventeenth-century poetry. That shelf held a “Paradise Lost” in the original sheep binding, the first edition, with the title-page of early issue, for which I paid what now seems the astonishingly low price of $200. This distinguished volume had for neighbors Brome’s “Songs,” Cartwright’s “Comedies,” Doctor Corbet’s “Certain Elegant Poems,” Dryden’s “The Hind and the Panther,” Fletcher’s “The Purple Island,” and unusually fine copies, all first editions, of the poems of Carew, Donne, Drayton, Hall, Howard, Marvell, Katherine Philips, “The Matchless Orinda,” Shirley and Waller, and for none of these scarce books except the Waller did I pay more than $40.

Those were the days of Browning clubs. While devotees of the poet were puzzling over obscurities of text, I was searching assiduously for first editions. One by one I found them all, though “Pauline” eluded me until 1900. Even more important than the rarest of first editions were proof copies of “Dramatis Personæ” and “The Ring and the Book,” both with numerous manuscript revisions and corrections made prior to publication, and each accompanied by a letter referring to the proofs. These were to be sold at auction at Sotheby’s. I sent bids for them to my good friends Ellis & Elvey, who exercised uncommon discretion in executing them. “Dramatis Personæ” was sold first, and was secured for me much below my limit. “The Ring and the Book” immediately followed; the bids went quickly beyond my limit. Then, with an elasticity of action rarely exercised by an agent, a bid was made for me far in advance of my limit, but which, added to the price of “Dramatis Personæ,” was no more than the sum of my two limits. Both treasures became mine at a cost, including commission, of $116. This was in 1897. When I look back on this episode it seems to me that I had undeserved luck. Those bids were nothing short of stingy.

It was not difficult to get satisfactory copies of the first published editions of Tennyson; before my first year was past I had nearly all of them. There were, however, other Tennyson books to obtain which called on all of one’s collecting ability. It appears that the poet had had printed trial copies of several of his more important productions which from time to time he sent to friends whose criticism he particularly desired, and always with the request to destroy or return. No more that ten or twelve of each were usually made. Of course these trial books are extremely rare. Another sort of rarities are the copies of poems produced for copyright purposes, of which a very small number of each were printed. My first good luck with these Tennyson treasures was obtaining for thirty shillings a trial book called “The True and the False,” the title first chosen for the first four Idylls, but, at publication, changed to “Idylls of the King.” Only one other copy is known to exist. Through the kind offices of my new, but now dear old, friend, the distinguished collector and bibliographer, Thomas J. Wise, to whom, while we were strangers, I had written to tell of “The True and the False,” I obtained one Tennyson rarity after another, most of which at the time were unknown to American collectors.

-Letters of Oliver Goldsmith are among the scarcest desiderata of the autograph collector. Doctor James Grainger, one of Doctor Percy’s frequent correspondents, was the first to introduce him to Goldsmith. Grainger wrote Percy in 1764: “When I taxed little Goldsmith for not writing as he promised me, his answer was that he never wrote a letter in his life, and faith I believe him, except to a bookseller for money.”

After fifteen years of watchful waiting, I was one day called on the telephone by the old-time dealer in autographs Patrick Madigan, who told me he had just secured a most interesting Goldsmith letter that had been treasured as an heirloom by a Nova Scotia family for over a hundred years; he was offering it first to me. Mr. Madigan called it a great bargain, and so it was, but I shall ever maintain a close-mouthed reticence as to the price, for I have no wish to establish with my friends an undeserved reputation for lavish expenditure.

-Like most people, I occasionally allow myself to play with little superstitions. On my last visit to London, I stayed at a small hotel in Curzon Street, Mayfair. Leading from the bottom of the street is a narrow way between brick walls, higher than a man’s head. This provides a short cut to the old-book houses of Quaritch and Maggs, the auction rooms of Sotheby, and other haunts of the book-collector. As I went through the passage one fine morning, a very black cat sprang from coping to coping directly in front of me. A little latter, just as I entered a book-shop, another cat, as black as black can be, leapt from behind to the top of a counter as though to bid me welcome. I said to myself, I shall surely have “black-cat luck” to-day.

One of my errands that morning took me to the manuscript department of the British Museum. As I passed among the exhibited examples, I casually stopped to glance at the literary autographs. One that particularly interested me was an agreement to sell to Samuel Buckley, a printer, a half-share in the volumes of The Spectator, signed by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele. I suppose the document held my attention not only for its importance but because, after collecting for over a quarter of a century, I still lacked representative autographs of these great figures in English literary history. But one must not envy the British Museum. We should rather thank a generous nation for making its unrivalled treasures freely available to the world.

An hour later I called at Quaritch’s, where I saw and secured a trio of first editions of books illustrated by Kate Greenaway, all presentation copies, and a book from the library of Thomas Gray, with his delicately written autograph on the title-page. Then, with that tantalizing Spectator document still in mind, I said: “What do you happen to have of Addison and Steele?” And—can you believe it?—there was put before me the original agreement, duly signed by Addison and Steele, for the sale to Jacob Tonson, Jr., of the other half-share of the Spectator volumes.

Both the British Museum document and the document that is now mine were drawn and signed at the Fountain’s Tavern in the Strand, on the same day, November 10, 1712. It was “black-cat luck,” if it did make a hole in my pocket.

-Although Landor is the author of the maxim “neither to give nor take offense is surely the best thing in life,” innumerable episodes show him easily turned to wrath. Another characteristic was an extreme love of flowers. A traditional story, related by Colvin in his entertaining little biography, illustrates these diverse traits.

In a burst of anger he once threw the cook out of a window which overlooked the garden, and immediately afterward thrust out his head with the exclamation: “Good God, I forgot the violets!”

-A letter to Moxon, of considerable bibliographical importance in relation to this very book, is printed, apparently without abridgement, in “Alfred Lord Tennyson, a Memoir by his Son.” Actually only half the letter is given. Here it is in full, copied from the original in my collection:

Dear Sir,

After mature consideration I have come to a resolution of not publishing the last poem in my little volume entitled Lover’s Tale—it is too full of faults & tho’ I think it might conduce towards making me popular, yet to my eye it spoils the completeness (sic) of the book & is better away—of course whatever expenses may have been incurred in printing the above, must devolve on me solely.

The Vol. can end with the piece titled to “J.S.” Half of this last I have received in revise: there are 9 stanzas more which it will not be necessary to send me—if I remember right they only contained one material blunder viz “Bleeding” for “Bleedeth.” Should this last revise be already on its way it will be better for me to retain it, & if there be any other mistake, which is scarcely probable I will give you notice by letter. We who live in this corner of the world only get our letters twice or thrice a week: This has caused considerable delay: but on the receipt of this you may begin to dress the Volume for its introduction into the world as soon as you choose.

Believe me, dear Sir

Yours very truly

Alfred Tennyson.

P.S. The title-page may be simply

Poems

by Alfred Tennyson

(don’t let the printers squire me)

Be so good as to send me five copies.

In this volume first appeared many of the poems which have secured enduring popularity: “The Lady of Shalott,” “Mariana in the South,” “The Miller’s Daughter,” “The Palace of Art,” “The Lotos Eaters,” “The Dream of Fair Women,” and “The May Queen.”

Although Tennyson decided not to publish “The Lover’s Tale,” he had six copies of the poem separately printed. Five of these were given to friends of the young poet. The single copy retained was cut to pieces by Tennyson thirty-six years later, in preparing copy for another trial edition, much revised and enlarged. The poet was not content with this second effort, for the first published edition, again revised, was not issued until 1879.

When in 1907, Thomas J. Wise, after years of diligent research, printed his exhaustive “Bibliography of Tennyson,” he was able to record the existence of only two of the original six copies of “The Lover’s Tale”; one of these in his own possession, the other in the collection of John A. Spoor. So much effort had been made by collectors and dealers in the search for this important rarity, it seemed unlikely that any more would be discovered. But a few years later a copy turned up in Southampton and was secured by a firm of London booksellers, who offered it to Ernest Dressel North, the veteran dealer in rare books, then on one of his frequent book-hunting visits to England. Mr. North had a long-standing request from Charles Templeton Crocker, of San Francisco, to report at once should he ever come upon this particular rarity. Thus Mr. Crocker had the exceptional satisfaction of adding the much-sought-for little book to his notable Tennyson collection.

On a certain bleak night early in the year 1920, my wife and I were ensconced in our after-dinner chairs, one on each side of the open fire—a veritable Darby and Joan. Several book catalogues had come in the mail of the day. I began with an unpretentious one issued by Edward Howell, of Liverpool. The first page did not hold my attention; but the turn of the leaf made my eyes pop, for there, in big type, was described—unmistakably described—one of the missing copies of the original trial edition of “The Lover’s Tale.” The price was absurdly low—twenty pounds!

I immediately telephoned the Western Union and gave a cable order. As I afterward learned, sixteen American collectors cabled to Mr. Howell. We were all too late; the little volume had already been bought by the most alert booksellers in all of England, who quickly sold it to an eager collector.

Nevertheless, this identical copy of the book now fills the long-empty gap in my collection. How it came into my possession, more than a year later, is a secret—I can only say that I am a very lucky book-collector.

-Some years ago I spent a very merry Christmas in Boston. In one of the few intervals of relaxation from hilarity I found myself at the little stone steps that almost drop one into the alluring basement bookshop of Goodspeed in Park Street. I had had happy business relations with Mr. Goodspeed for many years. Often he had written to tell me of a recently acquired book or letter of the sort I was interested in. This time I said to him: “When you have something important, especially if it be a Tennyson item, do not write to me about it but send the book or autograph itself. If I don’t want it I’ll send it back without delay.”

About a fortnight after this visit I received a rather large thin parcel with the Goodspeed label. It contained the manuscript of “Early Spring” written on a folio sheet as sent to The Youth’s Companion in 1883. Following the poem, which is signed by the poet, is this message:

March 12/33

Gentlemen,

My fathers begs to send you this new poem of his for your Youth’s Companion. He has copied it out for you: & hopes that you will like it.

I am

Yours faithfully

Hallam Tennyson

Of course Hallam Tennyson was not aware of the fact that the poem was not wholly “new” but was a radical revision of the unpublished verses of half a century earlier.

While I am still on the lookout for the little pamphlet, I can most truly say that I am not the least bit envious of those fortunate collectors who have acquired the very rare separate print of this charming poem.

Made in IOBA

Past IOBA President and past IOBA Standard Editor Michael Watson is the author, co-author, contributing author, and development or technical editor of over 120 books, some of which can be seen at http://www.20ants.com/pub.

Michael Watson operates 20 Ants out of Indianapolis, IN and can be contacted at http://www.20ants.com.

GnatSigned

GNATSIGNED (nat-saend) adj. Term originally coined by either Natty Bumppo, Tom Thumb (with the help of P. T. Barnum), or The Incredible Shrinking Man to describe books author or owner-signed in lettering so tiny that you can barely read it. The diminutive signature is not signed onto a bookplate and stuck onto the book, nor is it inscribed to some particular person. This is the most desirable type of collectible book, far surpassing the value of cluttered association copies to and from famous authors, for example.

The following is a fine example spotted in Enemies of Promise by Cyril Connolly (NY: Macmillan Company, 1948 revised edition). What at first appears to be a stray mark on the inside front cover is actually the signature of H. (?) Humphrey. Could this be the low profile signature of the famous Democrat Hubert Humphrey? Such confusion is just one of the value-added joys of GnatSigning.

PS: Be careful to look for super small annotations, which closely resemble the actual text, and gnatty fore-edge paintings are particularly hard to detect as they often resemble smudges.

Literary Pilgrimages: Patchin Place

From the Wikipedia entry on Patchin Place:

“Patchin Place is a gated cul-de-sac located off 10th Street and Avenue of the Americas in New York City's Greenwich Village. Its ten brick row houses have been home to several famous writers, including Theodore Dreiser, E. E. Cummings, and Djuna Barnes, making it a stop on Greenwich Village walking tours. Today it is a popular location for psychotherapists' offices.”

Although I was born in New York City, there were several times when I didn’t get there for two or three years in a row—which I would blame on distance if I lived far far away, not that there’s anything wrong with that, and not that non-coastal peoples would or should want to come to debauched New York to begin with—so now we make a point to bus or train down from upstate much more often. We tend to go uptown when it’s cold (where you can warm up in museums) and downtown when it’s warm. The last two times we gave whirlwind tours in those two directions to my two sweet wide-eyed nieces who live nearby but had never been down! I prefer NYC on working weekdays, but the Friends of the Library trips usually run on weekends. One nice old Jewish gent on the last one was making the journey for the avowed purpose of ordering a hot pastrami sandwich in a particular deli on the Lower East Side.

These tour buses usually stop right in front of the main branch of the New York Public Library, and it’s very convenient to go right to the third floor bathrooms. I usually enjoy books about bookselling on the bus, and the Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle Room 319 and Berg Collection of English and American Literature Room 320 I’d just read about in Rota are right there, along with a great group of vintage New York Yankee photos currently in the hallway. Boy that Yogi Berra seems timeless, although when you buy a fresh jar of Newman’s Own Bandito Salsa when Paul was alive and dip chips in it two days later after he passed, you know it ain’t so. Time is almost always the great leveler.

This happened to be the second day of a new exhibit at the Library entitled “Art Deco Design: Rhythm and Verve.” I had seen signs that said “No flash photography” but apparently there was no photography at all for this exhibit, which led to my semi-forcible and near-confiscatory ejection and established a new personal record (approximately fifteen minutes after arrival) for getting into trouble in the City, not including my birth.

From there we usually walk down to the Village and nearby neighborhoods. We stopped at one of the Sixth Avenue flea markets, and there to my surprise was a good amount of books in boxes on tables against a church wall. I say surprise because these actually looked fresh to market. I gathered about a dozen circa early 1960s children’s books by the same author—all first editions with dust jackets, four of them signed, and, as I found out later, none of them listed online in that state. More on those some other time. It took awhile to find the purveyor. “How much for these?” He went to the copyright page of three or so, realized it was all the same deal, and then quoted $70 for the lot, expecting me to say $50 before his counter of $60. I said I would think about it while my wife watched the pile on the yellow chair in the accompanying photo. He said we could just leave them there and they would be fine, but that’s the kind of thing you learn not to do in this business. He also said he would hold them for us until the end of the day, another non-starter. I dug out one more by the same author and agreed to his price if he would throw it in, which he gladly did. Turns out they came from a Pennsylvania house and contents that was sold for non-payment of taxes, and this was their first time to market. “I knew they were good, but I didn’t think they were that good!” said this stall fellow, once he had his nickel on the dollar in hand. I had to lug them around the entire day, but they were fun to look at while waiting outside of this or that store.

After a great breakfast and more meandering, we found ourselves at the Patchin Place I’d read about. I’ve been very close by before, but it’s really tucked in and is sort of the last thing you would expect to see, even downtown where the scale is smaller. The brick row buildings went up around 1849, an iron gate was added in 1929, and the blind alleyway was threatened with extinction but saved as a landmark by feisty community activists including Ed Koch in 1969. There is a plaque where Cummings lived, and about which he wrote, “the topfloorback room at 4 Patchin Place. . .meant Safety & Peace & the truth of Dreaming & the bliss of Work.” When we wandered in we were the only ones in the courtyard, with its rich history, many moods, interesting tenants (including Marlon Brando, John Reed and Louise Bryant, and a host of authors and artists), and the last remaining gaslight (electrified but still working) in the City. You either like a spared Somewhere in Time place like this and the artsy-fartsy often openly flawed “elitists” who lived there or you don’t, or you should.

Early Patchin Place resident John Cowper Powys wrote to his brother that the removal of the Jefferson Market Prison gave residents a nice view of such landmarks as the Singer Tower, the Woolworth Building, and a fabulous nearby clock tower. Wandering down to this castle-like building, which has been converted into a branch of the New York Public Library, and deciding against entering further with my bag of old books, I asked the security guard if it used to be a church, as I had never glimpsed the fantastic building as a whole. “A whore house,” came her reply. “Say what?,” somewhat shocked that even a New Yorker would give such an unadorned description with quite a number of patrons within earshot. “A whore house.” “Well,” I said, after a temporary loss for words, “they can be the same thing sometimes.” Only when we reached the adjacent jewel-like pocket garden and sat down to read the literature did we realize that she was saying “courthouse,” as in Jefferson Market Courthouse. They can be the same thing sometimes too.

Google and Google Image Patchin Place (though somebody has co-opted the name big time for plastic-looking pocket books with big polka dots) some time, or better yet, read about them, or best, pilgrimage.

Vintage Book Photo: Medical Incunabula

Army Medical Museum Photo, undated.

Illustrated Boards: Caroline en Europe

Caroline en Europe by Pierre Probst. Paris: Librarie Hachette, 1960.

Dust Jacket Art: Waikiki Beachboy Waikiki Beachboy by Joe Brennan. Philadelphia, PA: Chilton, 1962. Looks like Barack Obama on his recent Hawaiian vacation.

Periodical Covers: American Nudist Leader American Nudist Leader (6/1959)

Book Fallouts

A small Christmas greeting original watercolor with a personal note on the inside, dated 1988. Stanley Maltzman is a local listed artist. His Artist Statement on Gallery Direct reads as follows.

“Through the years students have asked what inspired me to paint a certain picture, or what kind of pencil I use for drawing. My answer is, “it is a thousand hour pencil”. In other words, the secret is not the pencil…it is the work, the devotion and the love of drawing. Art starts with the business of seeing. Nature inspires you with her beauty, but you, as an artist, must take the elements nature presents to you and interpret them in the light of your own feelings to create your drawing or painting. I firmly believe that there is a certain sense of communion with nature that is captured by working in the fields or woods that cannot be achieved by working indoors. In natural surroundings one can touch, smell and observe the beauty that surrounds them.”

Yard Sale Tales submitted by Sharon Heimann

I had been selling books for just about a year, and was on a scouting trip. After a long unsuccessful, very hot morning of yard sales my last stop was one with a lot of cardboard boxes filled with books. Her price, 25 cents for the hardbacks, 10 cents for the paperbacks. So I settled in. I picked and chose quite a few and then browsed the paperbacks, composed largely of science fiction. Some were quite old and all were in fine condition, and I picked up a few. I didn’t know much about SF and thought the only good book was a hardback (oops) and went home.

Going through the paperbacks I opened a copy of Star Wars and checked the title page and almost feel over—yes, signed "May the Force be with you" by George Lucas, in fine unread condition. Not bad for a 10 cent investment, and the hardbacks were clean, most near fine to fine, and well, I wish I bought the whole lot.

Sharon Heimann operates E Ridge Fine Books out of Lake Elsinore, CA and can be contacted at http://www.eridgebooks.com.

Book Store Lore submitted by Lynn DeWeese-Parkinson and Jeffrey D. Sandrone

There are probably a lot of things that gather a non-book-buying crowd, but the Baja Classic surf and bikini contest drew thousands to Playas right in front of our place last weekend. I sold them precisely zero books. On the other hand I made 1200 pesos (US$120) renting out our 2 boogies and 1 long board for a couple of hours last Saturday & Sunday and another 400 pesos yesterday for 1 boogie and the board. Perhaps it is time for a change of trades.

Lynn DeWeese-Parkinson operates out of Tijuana, Mexico and can be contacted at http://bibliophilegroup.com/lynnsbookstore.

One day last week I had only one sale—for fifty cents—it was an empty Muskego beer can. Later that same day a group of young men walked in and asked if I sold arrows. I said: Arrows? They said: Arrows. I said I think you want the sporting goods store. They said: Yeah, but they're closed. You sell arrows or not?

I closed up and went home.

Jeffrey D. Sandrone operates Have Books - Will Sell in Wind Lake, WI and can be contacted at http://www.tomfolio.com/mall/havebooks-willsell.

Images of MacIntosh Books and Paper

MacIntosh Books and Paper
2365 Periwinkle Way, Sanibel, FL
http://www.beachhunter.net/advertising/Sanibel/macintosh_books_and_paper.htm

We made a wonderful jaunt to Sanibel Island in June and stumbled upon this cheery establishment where Susan and Jennifer sell swell books by the seashore. I doubt if I will ever see a wild manatee and old books in the same hour again. My front desk shot was blurry but the website has some good ones. From the back of a little bookmark they give out we have the following.

An Island Tradition

William “Mac” MacIntosh founded MacIntosh Bookshop in 1960. The original store was located on the east end of Sanibel and later moved, first to a building near the causeway intersection, then to its current location in the quaint yellow building beneath the “It’s time to read” clock. In 2005, Susan Holly and Jennifer Lessinger acquired MacIntosh and merged with The Write Stuff, the island’s only stationer, forming MacIntosh Books and Paper. Mac died in 1982, but the tradition of his island bookshop lives on.

Book Store Labels: Zavelle Book Stores, Philadelphia, PA From the inside front cover of A History of England by W. Freeman Galpin (NY: Prentice-Hall, 1938), and weighing in at 2.75” by 3.5”.

Bookplates: W. B. Brandt & Co. From the inside front cover of A Treatise on Fine Arts by W. B. Brandt et al (W. B. Brandt & Co., 1930). Not much publishing information, other than this is Copy 871 of an unknown limitation. This is an insurance company gift bookplate for a work that combines ruminations on the fine arts with a naked attempt to sell “All Risks Fine Arts Insurance.” From the Introductory Remarks: “Have you ever returned to your home at night, tired out mentally and physically, and looked through your library for a volume containing matter of interest to you that you could pick up, sit in your favorite chair by your favorite lamp, and read easily without much mental effort of these things, and after having perused the pages of the particular article in which you are interested, find yourself relaxed both mentally and physically? This is the object of this book.” One of them, anyway.

Solicitations

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

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

Booku

In a mildly dampstained volume of Theobald's 1752 Shakespeare, "Barque Bashaw" appears across from an ancient bookplate

under the Brewster, Mafs. owner's name in his own hand but with lighter ink recorded at a different time.

Did he donate this to the immigrant ship's library, did he ply the mid-1800s Atlantic himself, or what?

Comic Books

Dated 2/19/1952, probably International News Photo.