Howard Prouty, Editor IOBA Standard

Less than three weeks after assuming the position of Editor, I am pleased to present the first issue of The Standard for 2013, and to rededicate it as the voice of IOBA. This is meant in a dual sense: as our “house organ,” The Standard serves to represent our organization’s values, goals and concerns; but more than that, it should also provide an outlet for individual IOBA members to share their experience and knowledge with both colleagues and interested readers.

Part of what made it possible to bring this issue together in such a short time was a significant change to our editorial structure and management. At the instigation of IOBA’s new President, Chris Volk, the Board of Directors has decided to transfer some of the technical/production responsibilities to the newly-created domain of a Managing Editor. Joyce Godsey, an experienced bookseller and the proprietor of Sicpress.com (well known to many as a premier source for book repair supplies), has been engaged as our Managing Editor, and we’re very glad to have her on board.

Although I didn’t approach the assembling of this issue with any particular theme in mind, in looking over the contributions it seems that we have one anyway. There is a common thread that unites all the articles, one to which I think almost any IOBA member can relate: the sense of discovery, which is one of the constants of the bookselling experience. The longer pieces, by Greg Gibson and Chris Volk, relate their personal journeys: Greg’s somewhat quixotic passage from unpublished poet (with intermittent employment history) to experienced specialist bookseller, and Chris’s diversionary adventure as she unleashed her “inner collector” in pursuit of the books of a favorite author. Standing in contrast to Chris’s tale of her Internet-scouring quest, Tim Doyle’s tightly-focused account of how he solved a small biblio-mystery provides a perfect example of the kind of thing that can so easily fascinate or even obsess us….and that any one of us might find at any time, inside the cover of the very next book we handle. Finally, William Knox’s tale of establishing his thriving book business in Penang, Malaysia, provides a particularly interesting example of the diverse (and sometimes peculiar) ways that we have all come to bookselling.

For the time being I find myself planted in the Editor’s chair, but I don’t regard it as either a throne or a bully pulpit. I see myself rather as sitting at a very large table, with enough room for as many others as care to join me. It is, as I said above, both the organization’s voice and your voice as individuals — although truly, the two are inseparable. The IOBA is its members. Together, let’s make The Standard everything it can be and should be.

Howard Prouty
ReadInk
2261 West 21st Street
Los Angeles, California

Chris Volk, IOBA President

Traditionally, newly elected IOBA Presidents started out the year with a message to the members. I was going to do that in this issue, but instead, I wound up writing an article on collecting which I think will be a lot more entertaining to read (I certainly enjoyed writing it!).

I will keep this brief, and try to avoid platitudes:

As a long time promoter of IOBA, I have been asked many times “why does IOBA even exist?” More to the point, why do I think it is so important that I am willing to volunteer a lot of my time to the Association?

Here are just two reasons:

Recently I received a “want match” from AbeBooks. We have all become inured to the far-too- common “may have underlining” in what passes for a book description, but this one had a phrase that caught my attention: “Damaged. . . . may contain excessive writing, cover wear, staining, mold or torn pages.” This is not what online bookselling should be! No responsible bookseller should be sending out books which “may have mold” — books which could endanger the health of anyone who handles them.

IOBA, thankfully, exists to stand up against this blatant disregard for best bookselling practices, and for the rights of customers. IOBA’s members cover the entire spectrum of online bookselling, but they are unified in their belief that buyers are entitled to an honest description of what they are purchasing sight unseen, and in their concern for the future of bookselling itself. And I’m proud to be part of an organization that supports such sellers — not just by helping them say “here is the Code of Ethics I go by,” but also through providing education, scholarships, a discussion forum, and a supportive community to which they they can turn for help when needed.

The second reason: not long ago, a bookstore owner in Ohio lost virtually his entire inventory when a pipe broke in the floor above his store. An IOBA member posted the story of this catastrophe on the IOBA Discuss list, and members from all over the world came together to contribute books and money, to help this bookseller — not an IOBA member himself, by the way — recover from his disaster. Quite simply, it made me proud to be an IOBAn, and reminded me what a great group this can be.

As IOBA continues to grow, the more effective we will be in upholding “traditional standards” even as we adapt to the constant changes of the Internet and adopt new technologies,  and the better able we will be to help one another when the need arises. I am fortunate this year in having a great team on the Board, but what really matters to IOBA are its members. Without them, IOBA is nothing. With all of us working together, we can become an organization that will be a real force in online bookselling.

Christine Volk & Shep Iiams, Booksellers
Bookfever.com
P.O. Box 696,
Ione CA 95640

]]> http://www.ioba.org/standard/2013/02/from-the-president/feed/ 0 http://www.ioba.org/standard/2013/02/don%e2%80%99t-do-it/ http://www.ioba.org/standard/2013/02/don%e2%80%99t-do-it/#comments Fri, 01 Mar 2013 02:55:57 +0000 Gregory Gibson http://www.ioba.org/standard/?p=1345 Editor’s note:

My first encounter with this article was actually at its debut, as a talk delivered by Greg to the Class of 2009 (of which I was a member) at the Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar. I thought it was brilliant then, and my opinion hasn’t changed. In fact, it’s only improved with age — like a fine wine, or a good book, or, heck, like Greg himself — and I’m pleased to be able to bring it to The Standard’s readers. Enjoy! — H.P.

Greg Gibson, Ten Pound Island Book Company

I.
In the spring of 1975 I went to work for a genius who made his living rebuilding the old fishing wharves that lined the harbor in Gloucester, Massachusetts. This man understood everything about the internal combustion engine, radio waves and electricity. He was a Leonardo of the lever, a master of everything inorganic. Like many geniuses, however, his preternatural intelligence was limited in scope. Organic life forms baffled him. He couldn’t relate to his helpers. He couldn’t even order lunch. So my job, when I wasn’t placing fulcrums under levers or boring bolt holes, was ordering lunch for him, and running around making sure he didn’t forget things. I’d like to say I learned something from that brilliant eccentric, but I didn’t. The early mornings on the harbor, in secret places under the docks, were unforgettably radiant and beautiful. The rest of the day was long and hard.

After a year of this routine it began to dawn on me that rebuilding wharves was not going to be my life’s work. That was when my friend Jean opened an art gallery and found me a profession.

“You’ve always liked books.” she said, “Why don’t you start a little shop and sell old books in my gallery?”

That was all I needed. I’d gotten out of the Navy as the Vietnam War was winding down, and had spent the years before my marriage producing an unpublishable novel and bales of incomprehensible poetry. The demands of married life had forced me into gainful employment, but chainsaws and crowbars were driving me crazy. Here was a chance to work with words, at least.

227 E Main

I quit my job with the wharf man, and built some shelves in Jean’s gallery. Jean fronted me $100, and we set up as business partners. One hundred dollars bought a lot of used books in 1976. A kindly old lady who eked out small change quoting the “books wanted” ads gave me some copies of AB Magazine and through them I learned the rudiments of the trade. When it was time to price my wares the range was 50¢ to $2 (which appeared to be the upper limit of what the market would bear). Jean opened her gallery and a few people came through. I had an epiphany. Even now I can see the flash of light that accompanied it. I was reading AB and I realized that, between gallery sales and quoting books, I could make as much as $50 a week at this. $50 seemed like plenty.
Soon I was making that $50 a week, but I discovered I’d been wrong. $50 was not plenty.

Jean folded up her art gallery and we moved the books into a building that had been an old fish market. The place was right on the tourist route and our retail business saw a healthy increase. Even better, we began to get more house calls. About that time I had another epiphany – it was all about location.

108 Main

If we could bump up our sales and buying opportunities by moving to the fish market, I reasoned, we should be able to do even better by moving onto Main Street. This, in fact, was an imbecilic error in judgment that held me in thrall for far too many years. The old real estate mantra about “location, location, location” might have been true in downtown Boston or one of the crowded, bustling suburbs that surrounded it, but Gloucester was surrounded by nothing but water. Only 35,000 people lived there, and that simply was not a large enough population base to sustain a retail used book business throughout the year. It felt grand in the summer when tourists poured through like spawning shad, but each year there was a day in October when everything stopped. You could almost hear it – a grinding, crunching sound that meant seven months of anxiety and poverty. There was no location that would propel us past the limits imposed by Gloucester’s demographics. Jean wisely moved out of town and left me on my own.

I was so busy chasing down my fantasy of the perfect location – I went through six different shops in my career – that I failed to take full advantage of my earliest opportunities for true enlightenment. As in a Greek myth, these Godly offerings were delivered in human form.

Chief among them was Matthew Needle, a legend in the bookselling trade. I hadn’t been open for more than a month in my first shop with Jean when he appeared in his shiny Mercedes, genial and encouraging. He removed some of the $2 books from my shelves, put some cash in my hand, and made me feel like a real bookseller. He was back nearly every month after that, and eventually I tumbled to the fact that he wasn’t a collector. In fact, I was rather shocked to discover that he was buying books from me and selling them to other dealers. I suppose I understood the process in a literal sense, but I failed to grasp its deeper implications.

Then, some time after we’d moved to the fish market, a fellow named John Thomson and his girlfriend Karen Griffin appeared at my shop in a Datsun pickup. The bed of the truck was covered with a cap and was full of books. John and Karen were traveling across the country in this vehicle, often sleeping in the back among the books. We all hit it off, and they wound up staying with my family and me for a few days, in the course of which he shared a secret. He was buying books he found in his travels and selling them to other dealers along the way. This was mind-boggling to me. Then I connected the dots and realized that was essentially what Matty Needle had been doing all along. These guys were book scouts. Thus I discovered one of the major engines of our trade.

Often, on the heels of this enlightenment, I’d watch Matty’s Mercedes pull away and wonder, “Where’s he going?” Over the years, as my own experience increased, I learned that the answer was “Everywhere.” Matty worked tirelessly, combing the countryside for dealers with a good eye and a reasonable understanding of the fact that books were meant to be sold, not hoarded.

I was sitting in the fish market one lovely spring day, pondering all this, when in walked a slender well-spoken gent in blue shirt, khaki pants, and Docksiders – sans socks. I made him for Yankee gentry right away, and figured he was probably a yachtsman, since the fish market backed up on Alexander’s Yacht Basin. But as soon as we started talking I realized something else. He was a book scout, too. Not only that, he was looking for books that pertained to a single subject area. I had just met my first specialist dealer.

Matty Needle, John Thomson and Louie Howland soon became my friends and mentors, but it took a long while for me to absorb what they had to teach me. This was probably because their approaches seemed so disparate at first. John and Karen forged their encyclopedic knowledge into Bartleby’s Books, which would become one of the finest general used and antiquarian open shops in the east. Matty Needle, by contrast, sold only to the trade. “Less hassle,”” he told me. “You always know who you’re dealing with and their checks don’t bounce.” Louie Howland schooled me in maritime books and got me interested in maritime history. Part of this, I fully understood, was for selfish reasons. The more I knew about maritime history the better I’’d be at finding good books for him.

Each of these dealers introduced me to an important aspect of the specialist book trade, but it wasn’t until I closed shop number Five that I fully realized the error of my ways and gave up my quest for the perfect location. Seventeen years had elapsed. To call me a slow learner would be an understatement.

93 Main

II.
Still, a lot had happened between shops One and Five.

Much of what I learned about old books was delivered by my colleagues, and by books and magazines about the trade. However, a surprising amount came from my customers – not the hordes of tourists, but those serious and learned collectors who always knew more about their areas of interest than I did. I listened carefully to these people, and asked questions. They pointed me to the bibliographies, histories, and reference books that became the foundation of my knowledge, such as it was, of my trade. Their motivation was the same as Louie Howland’s. They were educating me so that I’d be better at finding books for them, and that was fine by me.

For whatever reason, it seemed that my most serious customers were seeking books about local history, about art and antiques and, because we were a waterfront town, about ships and the sea. I began reading the “books for sale” section in AB, in search of desirable titles for my customers. At the same time I started scouting others dealers’ shops ala Needle. Then came my first book fair.

I forget exactly how we found out about it – this was the late 70s and Jean and I were still partners. The venue was an armory in Cambridge, Mass. And I made the happy discovery that, just as Willie Sutton had said about banks and money, book fairs were where the books were. We sold a few of the books we’d brought, but mainly we purchased books from other exhibitors – books about the fisheries and our local granite industry, and a stack of big, hefty Abrams art books, all of which we sold to our customers over the next few weeks. Not only that, but we met some new customers who were interested in art and antiques and local history. We took their names and telephone numbers and tried to call them whenever we found something we thought they’d like. The idea that we could have customers outside of Gloucester was an intoxicating one.

About this time, with John Thomson very much in mind, I took my first road trip. Things were really opening up for me now. I remember patiently working all the junky antique shops along route 1, where Scott Nason would later find that rare first edition of “Tamerlane” – I wouldn’t have recognized it if they’d put it in my hands – and as far into the wilds of New Hampshire as the White Mountains. I forget where I slept that first night, but it was all terribly exciting. Here I was, out on the road!

A couple of days later I was exhausted, beaten down and nearly broke, having spent my pathetic allotment on I knew not what, when I stumbled into Jack Hanrahan’s place in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, poked disconsolately through a huge pile of books that had somehow landed on his floor, and announced that I was sorry I could not find a single thing to buy from him. To my considerable surprise he upbraided me. He told me it was nonsense to say I couldn’t find any books to buy, and more or less intimated that I was a namby-pamby quitter. ““You can find books anywhere,” he said. “And I know you haven’t been through that whole pile. Now get back to work. This is a business, not a hobby.” Sure enough, I went back and found two books on local history that were quite desirable at the time. Jack probably knew they were there all along, but just to reinforce his lecture he practically gave them to me.

I use the phrase “quite desirable at the time” because of a change that took place in my world during my first seventeen years in the trade. In the seventies and early eighties, while I was learning my way about, Gloucester had a core of cultivated, intelligent and (mostly) interesting men and women who actively collected books. But then, somewhere between stores number Three and number Five, many of them disappeared. Some of them got old and died off, but more of them simply stopped collecting. They bought all the books they wanted or could afford, and then their interests turned to gardening or fly fishing or fountain pens or scotch whiskey. It came as a shock, but it was a fact I’d see repeated again and again. And eventually it led to another epiphany. Most collectors have a limited shelf life, and it is our job to service their wants as diligently as we can during their active phase.

This demise of my clientele necessitated a change in strategy. I started trying to gather the names and addresses of strangers who visited the shop and I redoubled my efforts at book fairs. Rather than quoting these people books by telephone I sent them short mimeographed lists of books in my three areas of specialty. The lists were never rousing successes, but I could feel my business escaping the confines of Gloucester. Then the crash of the eighties came along and the bottom fell out of the arts and antiques markets. Those lovely Abrams books turned into doorstops for the most part, and my local history collectors disappeared as well, no doubt shocked to their senses by the shortage of cash. I was sent scrambling again.

Of my three main areas of endeavor, only maritime books survived. As I contemplated this troubling fact I realized that the fisheries, which I had formerly categorized as local history, were an important component of maritime studies. Furthermore, many of the artists mentioned in those Abrams books were quite fond of painting ships and the sea. Then there was yachting, which had always had a strong presence in Gloucester, and Pirates, irresistible to all – Yarr! – not to mention the naval heroes who were continually bringing them to justice or the bold explorers who for centuries sailed into unknown waters. With a little serious thought, the world of maritime history opened up and came to seem as boundless as the oceans themselves.

At Louie Howland’s urging I began doing the Wooden Boat Show in Newport, Rhode Island. Then I tried exhibiting at conferences of specialty groups such as ship modelers. I searched out periodicals like “Sea History, “Wooden Boat Magazine,” “American Neptune,” and “Nautical Research Journal,” and ran ads in them. I made the acquaintance of the local print shop and started cranking out five page Xeroxed lists of maritime books – just light enough to send with a single first class stamp – to my hundred or so maritime customers. All this proceeded by trial and error. If I got multiple orders for a title, I’d know it was a good one. Suddenly Gloucester was only the place where I kept my books. My ““shop” was open to customers everywhere.

Sometime in the late eighties computers came into the picture and my catalog business improved incrementally. The mailing list and want lists became a snap to manage, and my cataloged descriptions of books moved from file cards that had to be re-typed each time I listed a particular title, to a database in which that title resided for ever, ready to be summoned up at the push of a button. I used the computer to compile a proprietary database of maritime book values gleaned from booksellers’ catalogs, and used this database in conjunction with my wants lists to guide my purchases. In a way, it was a golden age for me. I met my specialist colleagues and found my place among them – certainly not at the top, but very comfortably in the middle. Occasionally a rare voyage or whaling log would come my way, but in general I was happy to specialize in standard out of print reference books. If a ship modeler or an amateur historian needed a good copy of, say, Howard Chapelle’s Search for Speed Under Sail, I was the go-to guy. My mailing list grew to over five hundred names and I had several thousand modestly priced maritime books, easy enough to find with a little work, and easier still to sell. Then the computer took away everything it had brought.

I’m speaking, of course, of the introduction of internet databases. By this time I’d closed shop number Five and moved to my house, where I intended to pursue my mail order business supplemented by frequent book and trade show appearances. Of course I needed a place to keep my books, so I bought the shack across the street from my house. Originally it had been a florist’’s shop but it was too far out in the sticks to thrive as a retail location. Just by luck the owner needed cash, and I was able to purchase the shop for a fair price. I used it as a warehouse at first, but when Interloc came along the guy who worked for me was in there all the time putting books online. And as long as he was there, it seemed we might as well open the doors to people who might want to buy our books in person. Hence shop number Six.

The retail trade was welcome enough, but it was Interloc, then ABE, that boosted our revenues. We’d buy whole collections of general books and throw them online. We’d issue a catalog to our specialist customers, then take the books that hadn’t sold, cut the prices, and put them on line too. For a few years it was easy money. Then more people entered the fray and pricing became competitive, engendering the classic “race to the bottom.”

3 Center

In the old days if someone needed a copy of Search for Speed Under Sail they’d come to me and I’d provide the book for $25. There were hundreds of titles like that. I kept multiple copies, and I would buy, for $3 or $5 or $10, every copy I came across, knowing that I had a certain and steady market. But as internet databases blossomed that $25 book began appearing for $20, $15, $10, $5 or even just a few bucks, offered for sale by some high school kid who’d gotten it free from his grandfather, or from that grandfather himself, who got it for twenty-five cents at a yard sale and wasn’t particularly in it for the money, or from the dreaded “penny seller,” giving the book away and making profit on the postage.

Search for Speed Under Sail, which had seemed a scarce and desirable title, was revealed by the internet to be common. At any given time twenty or even fifty copies might be on line, at prices as low as a dollar. Because of the economics of my scale I needed to make $10 or $15 on each transaction. My $25 copy didn’t stand a chance.

The corollary of this distressing situation was that I could no longer buy those standard books in great numbers. The grieving widow of an old customer would call me in to look at her husband’s collection and be shocked and angered to learn that I was not interested in purchasing books that had cost her husband $25 or $50 apiece. I had already accumulated six thousand volumes of essentially dead inventory and was not eager to add to that total.
The party was over.

III.
All this while, of course, I’d been dabbling in higher priced maritime books. If the “race to the bottom” tended to drive the price of common books down, my intellectual curiosity was propelling me in the opposite direction. I grew weary of handling the same books over and over; I began to seek the exotic. In time, the simple fact that I’d never seen a certain title before became a good reason for buying it.

This turned out to be an excellent response to the dreary physics of the internet marketplace. The only book not subject to the general downward pricing trend was a book that was not listed online. I began trying to fill my maritime catalogs with such items.

While it was difficult finding this kind of book, it was comparatively easy to discover manuscript items about ships and the sea that were not listed on the internet. Indeed, by definition, most manuscript items are unique – written by a particular person at a particular time for a particular reason. I began buying and listing logbooks, journals, diaries, letters and archives pertaining to maritime history. Because each item had to be understood and described in its uniqueness, these items required more work to catalog, but at least I could be certain nobody was going to undersell me on the internet. From there, the hunt expanded to photographs, documents, charts and printed ephemera, none of them unique by nature, but scarce enough to have little internet competition.

By this time – in the mid-90s — my catalogs had evolved into their present 6 x 9 inch 32-page format. This allowed me to list 100 to 300 maritime items in a package that I could mail for the cheapest first class rate. As computer technology evolved typesetting and illustration became possible on my desktop. Ultimately, I’d send a PDF file to my local job printer and get my catalogs back a week later.

Email was another technological evolution of the 90s that had a radical effect on my business. Email catalogs and quotes were instantaneous and free. My hard copy mailing list shrank back under five hundred. My email mailing list expanded to nearly two thousand addresses.

Nowadays I assemble sufficient material for six to eight maritime catalogs a year. These are composed in part of items that are sufficiently rare not to be listed on internet databases, but I always include a number of more common books to encourage beginners and people of limited means. Some of my most loyal customers have been buying $25 books for decades, and I’m happy to try to keep them happy. The four or five hundred hard copy catalogs are sent out in staggered mailings – sorted geographically – and the catalog is posted on our website, usually in a more lavishly illustrated form. After the hard copies have had a chance to land, I email my customers and let them know that they can view the new catalog online. When the hard copy and electronic versions have run their course I list the remaining books on ABE, ABAA/ILAB, and similar internet databases. If a collection of cheap books happens to come in between catalogs, I’ll send out a quick “email only” list, which costs me nothing and keeps my bottom feeders fed.

Two years ago I sold my six thousand low-end books at enormously discounted prices. I took the money and used it to fix the shop up, and my wife and a friend of hers opened an art gallery in it, thirty-one years after my old pal Jean opened hers and drew me in to the world of antiquarian books. Jean died a while ago, but I imagine she’s amused, looking down on us now, to see that we’ve come full circle.

77 Langs

IV.
I have written this narrative in hopes of providing you with a sort of road map of how a late 20th century individual evolved from a guy who’d ““always liked books” to a specialist dealer. The path was long and fraught with missteps. I’m sure it would have been shorter if I’d been able to apprentice with an established dealer, as was the practice in earlier times, or if I’d had the advantage of attending an in-depth seminar such as this one. Still, it is tempting to see my career as a felicitous journey from chaos into order, from trial and error into smooth efficiency, from darkness into light.

I want to caution you in the strongest possible terms that nothing could be farther from the truth.

In fact, I have been driven from pillar to post by a chaotic marketplace, itself driven by technological and economic forces that I am powerless to alter or withstand. I have “evolved” from being a gentlemanly practitioner of a civilized trade – a man who served his community from a place on its main street – to a marginalized, obsolescent outcast, a desperate survivor of a bygone world. While I sometimes see myself as a wily small mammal dodging my way among dinosaur legs, I feel more often like an Indian on his pony on the ridge, looking down at the Iron Horse steaming through his hunting grounds, wondering where all the buffalo have gone.

Think I’m being too dramatic? Let’s look at the numbers.

V.
Say I issue six catalogs a year, each containing $100,000 retail worth of maritime books and manuscripts. In the old days one might have hoped to have spent $35,000 or less on such material. But now, because of the prevalence of pricing information on the internet, those goods might cost me closer to $60,000. (This almost ruined Matthew Needle. Any boob who can fire up a computer has immediate access to the knowledge Matty spent decades of hard labor accumulating. It’s no surprise that he’s moved more into manuscript material, and now makes a good part of his living performing appraisals.)

My catalogs have a healthy sellthrough; I’ll do 50% or better in the first weeks of any catalog’s appearance. Then the remainder will go online and sell another 10%. So, shortly after my catalog appears I’ll have $60,000 in receivables, representing a profit of $24,000 on sold items, with another $40,000 in unsold books on my shelves as equity. That sounds tidy enough. Multiply $24,000 by six catalogs and you’re making $144,000 a year. In the harsh reality of cash flow, however, I’m just breaking even.

Worse still, before that money starts trickling in (I bill net 30 days, terms for which many institutions and more than a few big-shot customers have little regard) I’’ve got to go out and spend another $60,000 on the next catalog. So I run around to book fairs and specialist venues, trying to fob off my back stock, often at reduced prices – at least 20% to the trade – and then wait 30 more days for that to come in, and hope, in the interim, that dealers and customers stop by shop number Six – now an art gallery as well as a book shop – and drop some bucks on items that need to be seen to be appreciated, waiting all the while for the occasional, random internet sale of a big book that’s been in stock for far too long. Meanwhile, of course, I’m hemorrhaging overhead. (An entire book could be written on this topic, and I am always happy to discuss the manifold ways in which, despite the absurdity of my “location” fantasy, I am still in the real estate business.) So I borrow some money to cover my purchases until my receivables come in.
If I’m lucky enough to find a collection with high-profit, quick-turnover items, I can keep my business debt manageable by flipping the most saleable goods to recover my costs. Otherwise, I’m facing a financially stressful situation.

Now, it is a fact that people are drawn in some mysterious but undeniable way to fresh material. If you want to keep selling, you have to keep buying. From a cold-eyed business standpoint this may be as fallacious as my delusion about the perfect location, but you’d be surprised how many dealers behave that way; certainly I do. Most of us, I suspect, are simply addicted to the buzz of the buy. The only hope for us is a perpetual state of financial readiness which, for the reasons under discussion here, is nearly impossible to attain – at least for financial maladroits like me.

Aside from buying addiction, overhead, and constantly lagging receivables, cash flow problems are likely to result from expensive items that do not sell quickly. At any given time a good portion of my cash and credit are likely to be tied up in inventory. This is equity of a sort, but it’s damned difficult to liquidate. If it were easy, I’d have done so.

Sounds desperate, doesn’t it? And yet, here I am, more than three decades into my career, still having fun. I’ve paid mortgages, put kids through college, bought cars and so far avoided bankruptcy. In that time I’ve had many wonderful adventures and enjoyed the company of some unique and remarkable people. I used to think they were simply colleagues. I now realize they are the best friends a man could want.

How have I managed to survive all these years? I don’t know, really. I’ve improvised a lot, and faced more than a few dark nights and desperate passages. But I think I’ve learned a few things, and I’d like to share them with you now. If you are contemplating a first or second career as a specialist dealer, here is some advice. A good deal of it, obviously, has been lost on me:

1. Don’t do it. Don’t even think about it. It’s too hard.

2. If you’re sufficiently pigheaded or romantic enough not to heed #1, the least you can do is LEARN YOUR SUBJECT AREA. It is not enough to “love” travel books, or to be “interested in” birds. You have to study, and study hard.

3. FIND THE NICHE. This does not refer to a choice of specialty, but to the kinds of materials you buy and sell. You can get a very good start in your specialty by assembling a collection of relatively inexpensive but well chosen books in one subject area. The value of the sum of such a collection is always more than its parts. This, I believe, was how Dan DeSimone got started in his specialty. Or you might skip the bound, printed tome all together and (my favorite…)

4. THINK OUTSIDE THE BOOK. Look for photographs, ephemera and especially manuscripts. You probably won’t be able to cough up twenty grand for Borget’s beautiful and rare book “Sketches of China,” 1842, but you may, as I have done, discover an illustrated journal that turned out to be the logbook of the captain of an opium ship from about the same time period. And guess what? While dozens of libraries may own the Borget, not a single one has that illustrated logbook, because as a manuscript item, it is unique. There are other advantages to manuscripts. You have to read them, and bring your knowledge to bear in order to understand them. Hence, lazy people do not like to work with them. Hence you can often buy manuscripts at great advantage.

5. If Steve tells us, rightly, to ““listen to the book,” we specialists must, equally LISTEN TO THE CUSTOMER. In our limited, highly concentrated fields, advanced collectors and dedicated librarians almost always have knowledge that we do not. Usually, they’re happy to share such knowledge for the same reason Louie Howland first tutored me in maritime books. The more I know, the better I’ll be at getting books for him. I can’t stress enough the importance Kevin’s remarks on repeat customers. They are the life blood of a specialty business. Along with my books, that customer list is my true equity…. Did you ever do a book fair and not sell anything? Happens to me with some regularity. But if, as a result of doing that fair, I meet one or two new people who are truly interested in my subject area, that fair has been a success.

6. So, the Customer is important, and the Book is important. But the description of the book, especially the narrative part, is also of critical importance. Whether you’re doing catalogs, quoting on the phone by email or letter, THE BOOK DESCRIPTION VALIDATES THE IMPORTANCE OF THAT BOOK. IT IS THE LINK BETWEEN THE CUSTOMER AND THE BOOK.

7. EXPAND YOUR VIEW OF WHAT THE JOB ENTAILS. Consider Matty Needle. He works every connection, every angle, every chance encounter or journey, from breakfast at one joint to after-dinner drinks at another. He always seems to be out and about and he’s never not ready to buy a book. I’’m told the great Larry McMurtry was that way too in his heyday. Hogs after truffles.

8. THINK ALONG THE SAME EXPANSIVE LINES ABOUT THE BOUNDARIES OF YOUR SPECIALTY. Just recently I sent out an “email only” list of 19th century stereo views of waterfront scenes. The list sold out. Shortly thereafter I got a standing order from a successful marine architect who wants marine stereos in his office for the amusement of his clients. Now stereo views have become a part of my maritime specialty. You might even think of supplementing your stock with in-print books in your subject, or by sponsoring lectures, or by publishing books yourself. I’ve published about two dozen titles, many of them reference books that were assured of a ready market among my customers.

9. THINK CREATIVELY ABOUT USING EVERY ASPECT OF THE TECHNOLOGY AVAILABLE TO YOU. Those stereo cards sold because when you clicked on the thumbnail illustration in the description, it filled the computer screen with glorious 19th century detail. Pure eye candy. And if something like Google Books sounds threatening, think of it from the other direction. Every item in every one of my catalogs is searchable by Google’s spiders. This yields many inquiries a week. The book may have sold years ago, but now I have the name and address of a person who was demonstrably ready to pay me money. This has been vastly more effective than magazine advertising, and it’s free.

10. And last (there’s much more, but ten is a good number to stop at) LEARN FROM THE PEOPLE WHO ARE ESTABLISHED IN YOUR SPECIALTY. Figure out the things they’re doing right and emulate them in your own fashion. Even more importantly, reach out to them, and to the trade at large. They are not your competition, they are your allies. Furthermore, they have survived. You have a lot to learn from them and they, more likely than not, need all the help they can get.

In the final analysis, it is only the windfalls that separate success from failure in the specialist trade, and the troughs between windfalls can last for months or even years. It sounds desperate, and often it is. Do you really want to go there?

If so, give me a call. Maybe we can do some business.

Greg  Gibson
Ten Pound Island Book Company
76 Langsford St.
Gloucester Ma 01930

William Knox, The Penang Bookshelf, Penang, Malaysia

The Penang Bookshelf specialises in buying and selling fiction and non-fiction, both new and old, principally about Malaysia, but also about the rest of Asia.

“Hello bro, do the book ‘kongsi’ n ‘darurat’ still available?” So ran the text I received on my phone one day last week. Four years ago, I wouldn’t have known what the sender was trying to say. Now, however, I understood right away that my potential new customer was enquiring about two of The Penang Bookshelf’s more popular titles (not stocked by any other Malaysian bookseller), written in Malay, a language I don’t understand. The whole deal was concluded by an exchange of texts, and the books were soon on their way to the customer.

The next day, I was conducting negotiations with a bookseller in the U.K. to buy what is probably the most expensive book written in English about Malaysia. The day after that, I was in the middle of negotiations between another new potential customer in Shanghai and my client in another part of Malaysia for the sale of a rare book on Chinese ceramics.

Those three transactions give a fairly accurate picture of what life at The Penang Bookshelf is like – serving both the general public and the more rarefied collector. Although I started the business as a retirement pastime, selling in a once a month local street market, I soon realised that the response to what The Penang Bookshelf had to offer was sufficiently strong that I decided to either make a serious go of it, or give it up.

When I made that decision, I didn’t have any bookselling or business experience, but books had always been an important part of my life. The first present I can ever remember receiving from my parents was a reward for being able to read a few sentences, heaps of members of my father’s family were published authors, my father himself was a journalist, my grandfather was a renowned magazine editor, and my aunt was a Booker Prize winner. So a passion for books, and a lifetime as a consumer of books (and dealing with booksellers of all sorts), had given me some ideas about the type of bookselling business I’d like to set up.

In my last two careers, as a lawyer and then as a community peace worker, my most enjoyable, and usually more successful, moments were when I allowed my anarchic tendencies to show themselves. I took a similar approach when setting up The Penang Bookshelf. I looked at what I didn’t like about bookselling in Malaysia and bookselling online and tried to do something different.

Within Malaysia, most in-print books are sold through national chains, which concentrate on what sells quickly, i.e. popular fiction and self-help books that transform your life before you’re halfway through the book. Any substantial selection of books about Malaysia in these stores is rare, and if a book is difficult to get hold of there is seldom anyone to help you find it. In contrast, at The Penang Bookshelf I try to stock as wide a range of stock about Malaysia as I can afford; a significant portion of my inventory is unavailable in the chain bookstores. If a book appears to be out of print, there’s a more than reasonable chance I can find it with the help of my network of supportive customers, publishers and distributors.

To date I have sourced most of the used books sold by The Penang Bookshelf from online booksellers in the U.K. and the U.S. Sadly, it wasn’t too long before I realised that I was often dissatisfied with online bookselling practices. Few book listings included pictures, very often there was only a meagre description of the book’s condition, and a description of a book’s contents was a rarity. There was an assumption that the buyer knew what s/he was looking for. But when I visit a bookstore I seldom go in knowing what I’m going to buy — so my reasoning was: shouldn’t an Internet bookseller be trying to cater to similar customers?

So at The Penang Bookshelf, I have tried to do this. All book listings have pictures, descriptions of condition, and some description of contents. Of course, this limits the amount of stock that The Penang Bookshelf can have online, but that hasn’t proved an obstacle to the success of the business. A year ago sales averaged one a day, but in the last eight or nine months that has increased to five a day. Although it’s probably a temporary spike, this February the average has been more like ten a day.

I’m not sure that decent descriptions, etc. have been the main reason for The Penang Bookshelf’s success. It may well be because my business splashes about in a small pool and is a bit of a rarity. However, I would like to think that The Penang Bookshelf gets noticed because it’s an antidote to more common curmudgeonly bookseller. (I have a theory that there are so many grumpy booksellers because they have to wrestle with a split personality: they love books, but also have to continually let go of books they love.) Facebook, Google+, a blog and a newsletter have all been a great help, but direct communication with every customer has been even more helpful. I’ve noticed that most times when I buy from a website, whether it be the bookseller’s own or via a third party site, I never receive any direct communication from the bookseller. And yet I have found that establishing such communication with my customers, more often than not, results in increased sales.

A Chinese New Year parade passing by the original street market location of The Penang Bookshelf.

The only real drawback to being an online bookseller is loneliness, particularly in The Penang Bookshelf’s unusual environment. Joining IOBA was a must and has made me much more comfortable with the business. Although most members are in the U.S. and U.K., and have issues to deal with that are alien to me, there is enough common ground to cure my isolation and, more importantly, to improve my education.

Despite being principally an online seller, I would immediately give up the business if I didn’t have a chance to meet my customers in person. I am fortunate enough to have an average of a visitor a week to the apartment from where I work, and I still religiously return once a month to the street market where The Penang Bookshelf began. The profits from sales there are negligible, but the camaraderie with customers and friends gives me a boost to launch into the next month of my online existence.

William Knox
The Penang Bookshelf,
Penang, Malaysia

St Nicholas Illustrated 1923 Part One (bound magazine) Part 1 Vol 1 Nov 1932 to Apr 1923 MALLORY INHERITANCE-

1. How I Got Going.

Let me begin with a confession that will surprise no one: like many booksellers, I have a strong collecting streak. I am first and foremost a voracious (even compulsive) reader, and I have always liked owning the books I read, so for as long as I can remember I’ve been a book accumulator. It was the Internet that set me on the path to full-time bookselling, but it also changed me from an accumulator to a collector (although I still do plenty of accumulating).

As a bookseller, I can’t collect everything — if I did I would never sell anything — so even though I’m susceptible to a lot of collecting temptations, for the most part I manage to resist them. Although they fascinate me, and their scarcity presents an appealing challenge, I am not going to build up a collection of first-person accounts of the westward voyage to California in the mid-19th century. And although many of them are very lovely, I am not going to go on a quest to obtain all the different editions of Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market.

STARS OF SABRA - the book that started it all

Because I don’t resist every such temptation, however, I am now the proud owner of “The World’s Best Collection” of books by one of my favorite juvenile authors — developed over a mere dozen years, primarily through the use of the Internet, and (most significantly for a perennially cash-strapped bookseller) at a comparatively low cost. (“Comparatively” is the important word here: another bookseller, who has what is probably The World’s Second Best collection of this author’s books, had a good laugh when he found out how recently I started, and commented that I must have paid real money for the books. And I did, sometimes.)

(Just a quick note here: this essay is not meant to be about collecting any particular author, so to generalize my own experience I’ll refer to “my” author as Mrs. Freeman — which happens to have been her real name, but not the one she wrote under.)

My collection had an innocuous beginning, and an insidious growth. In the spring of 2001, we stopped at a library in a small remote Northern California town; there, on a shelf of books for sale, I spotted a book by Mrs. Freeman, and quickly bought it, with little more in mind than the fun of re-reading an old favorite. When I discovered the book was missing a couple of leaves, I went online looking for a better copy, and was surprised to discover that there was only one listed — for $150. So I shrugged and moved on; after all, a few missing pages can be easily skipped.

A month later, we were in Texas. In an antique shop, I ran across a copy of what had always been, since I was young, my favorite book by Mrs. Freeman. Everything was wrong with this book — it was battered and worn, and the price was outrageous — but sentiment carried the day, and of course I bought it anyway. The third book in my not-yet collection also came into my hands during that same trip. In a small East Texas town, there is (or was) a bookseller who had a “store” in a trailer parked in his front yard. The books were all double-shelved, bags and boxes were crammed in everywhere, and every book was just $3. It was the kind of place you just know is filled with treasures — but the books were dusty and disordered, the day was miserably hot, the trailer wasn’t air-conditioned, and we were running late. All I could reasonably do was pick a bag at random to go through — and the second book in that bag was by Freeman! So there was a treasure, and for $3 I made it mine.

2. A Collection (and a Collector) is Born.

All I had at this point was my three serendipitous finds, but what happened next turned them into the beginnings of a collection: I got curious to know more about Mrs. Freeman herself, and did an Internet search, and came up with little more than information on a few copyright renewals. (Remember, this was 2001: Google was in its infancy, WorldCat was available only to libraries, AbeBooks was only 5 years old (and still called the Advanced Book Exchange), Amazon was even newer.) So I decided it would be a good idea to improve the state of available information on Mrs. Freeman by compiling a simple checklist of her books and posting it on our website.

But even that simple project wasn’t that easy: not even the Library of Congress had all of her books listed. I really needed to know more, and the only logical way I could think of to learn more about her book was to buy more of them. So I began both acquiring whatever copies I could afford and capturing information on other copies. I put up permanent want matches online, bought selected copies through the regular multi-dealer listing sites, and even found a few titles in open bookstores in various places across the country. But the best hunting ground proved to be eBay, then still in what we now think of as its “golden age,” through which the contents of America’s attics, closets and basements were flowing onto the Internet. At any given moment, there were at least three and often as many as ten auctions running for Freeman’s books. I soon overcame my aversion to “sniping,” and although I probably lost more auctions than I won (being usually cash-strapped and thus cost-conscious), I won enough, and my collection — because it was clearly that, by now — continued to grow.

March 1934 Child Life Magazine THE RIDDLE AT LIVE OAKS part IV

My “checklist” idea began to take form as an annotated checklist, and it was about this time that I made what seemed, at first, like a mistake. Although my collection was far from complete, I pitched an article on Mrs. Freeman to Firsts magazine. Somewhat to my surprise, they accepted it, and suddenly the pressure to deliver the goods was on — made more intense when a last minute cancellation of another piece moved mine to an earlier issue than originally planned, and left me scrambling to meet the deadline. I managed somehow to get it together, and you can guess what happened after the article (with checklist) was published in December 2002: the prices of Mrs. Freeman’s books went up — in some cases, by a lot. And I wondered at that moment: have I just done the dumbest thing imaginable, by letting the whole world in on my hitherto under-the-radar collection and thereby sharply reducing my chances for future “bargain” acquisitions?

But this happened, too: we also posted a slightly revised version of the article on our website, and that is when the power of the Internet really made itself felt. Booksellers now began to get in touch, to offer an occasional “special” copy of one of Freeman’s books; a volunteer for a Friends group in New England offered me a very nice copy of one of the scarcest titles; a woman who had inherited her uncle’s collection contacted me, and when I made an offer her response was “Really? That much? These are just old kids’ books!”

Then I received this email:

“I found your website … in a Google search. I have an old collection of Mrs. Freeman’s books, about twenty-five or thirty of them, that I would like to have find a good home. … They were given to my family by my aunt. I believe her mother was Mr. Freeman’s sister, so many of the volumes are inscribed to members of that family. There are too many volumes to enumerate, but if there are any you are particularly interested in, I can let you know….” Was I interested?!? I wanted them all!

DEN STORE HEMMELIGHETEN (author cropped)

By then, it was obvious that far from being a mistake to let the whole world in on my collecting “secret,” the Firsts article and its Internet incarnation had made me a “go-to” person for all things related to Mrs. Freeman, and had connected me with fans and collectors all over the country. The ultimate result was the considerable enlargement and enhancement of my collection — not just with gems like these inscribed association copies, but also French and Norwegian editions, magazine appearances of Freeman’s work, etc. And my checklist was now taking on the proportions of a true bibliography.

One of the joys associated with building any such collection is finding that rare or extra-special item, something that’s considered even by specialists to be “impossible” to find. In Freeman’s case, there was one book, from 1919, that was never included in any of the lists of her published titles that appeared at the front of her other books. Her biographer even wondered if it really existed, but through WorldCat, I learned that there were at least two copies: one held by the Library of Congress, the other by the New York Public Library.

Naturally, the next time I had a chance to visit New York City, I rushed to the main library, had my photo taken to get a library card, put in my request, and the book was brought to me from the stacks. It was only 80 pages long, had been issued in plain brown paper wrappers, and the library had bound it with two other unrelated titles from the same era. Not the best way to treat a rare book, but then they didn’t know how rare it was.

I photocopied the title page and table of contents for my bibliography and left. But a thought soon began gnawing at me: it was only 80 pages, why hadn’t I copied the whole thing? I had a couple of free hours a few days later, just before my flight home, so I went back to the library, requested the book again, and waited. And waited. Eventually the librarian called me over and said that they couldn’t find the book! I explained the situation and they dispatched more searchers, to no avail: it appeared that one of the only two known library copies had been lost (and who knew if the other copy had been lost also). I was in despair, but fortunately it wasn’t permanent: several months later the book had once again been properly shelved at the library and I was able to obtain a photocopy of the entire thing. Not an original, of course, but better than nothing.

A few years later, I received an email from someone who had “acquired a copy” of this very same rarity, and was interested in selling it. Emails were exchanged; I made an offer; it wasn’t accepted. A few more emails passed over the next year or so, but the owner still wasn’t sure what she wanted to do with it. More time passed, during which I broke my ankle very badly. The day I returned home from the hospital, I was lying on the couch feeling very sorry for myself when a package came in the mail. Mildly puzzled, since I wasn’t expecting anything, I opened it to find a book, nicely wrapped in colored tissue paper. Inside the tissue was THE book, and with it a card which said simply “this belongs to you.” So it was that a gift from a complete stranger, a gift that couldn’t have possibly appeared at a better time, made my collection indisputably “The World’s Best.”

Does that mean it’s finished, though? Not at all — although there’s no question that it’s gotten more difficult to find quality material in recent times. There are twice as many copies of Freeman’s books listed on sites like AbeBooks than there used to be, but few bargains — and still no copies anywhere online of the scarcer titles. Good buys do still turn up, however, and I continue to tweak and monitor my want matches on AbeBooks and Biblio. The collection is still not finished, and probably never will be.

Augusta Seaman' scarcest title 3 copies known with original gift card inscription

3. The Internet and the Collector.

Putting together a collection like I’ve just described in pre-internet days would have been almost impossible. The owner of The World’s Second Best Collection of Mrs. Freeman’s work is a children’s book specialist who has been collecting these books for over 40 years.

Although the Internet is a powerful tool, however, it doesn’t eliminate the need for one of those good old-fashioned virtues: patience. (About the only way you can be a successful collector without a good measure of patience is to have an even bigger measure of cash — and if you happen to be blessed with that, you can probably ignore a lot of the rest of this article, which is pitched to the more realistic financial situation of people like me.)

The Internet has changed a lot over the dozen years I’ve been building my Freeman collection. The attics seem to have been mostly emptied and dealers listing books at fixed prices now dominate eBay. There used to be four or five interesting auctions of these books every week; now months can go without any.

The Americana Exchange website recently ran a very interesting article called “A Hard Sell” by Bruce McKinney, in which he wrote about the difficulties of disposing of a collection of books by Joyce Carol Oates. There was one sentence in the article that really struck me. After commenting that a search on AbeBooks turned up over 22,000 items by Oates, McKinney said: “Her next great collection is already loaded on AbeBooks and waiting to be assembled.”

Well, sort of. A good collection can be assembled with relative ease, especially if money is no object; a great collection, however, will take more time and effort. The Internet gives, by making it easier than ever to develop a collection, but it also takes away, by devaluing many items in that collection. Not only is online pricing sometimes irrational (or truly insane), but the ‘net can also create a false sense of either scarcity or abundance. For instance, ten copies of a given book online can seem, from one perspective, like quite a few — but when you consider that there are perhaps 10,000 “real” booksellers online, that translates to visiting a thousand bookstores in the real world to find a single copy. And when there are no copies of a book online, it can be a trap to assume that it’s truly “rare,” especially when that assumption leads a seller to put an absurdly high pricetag on something, based on nothing more than the idea that it’s “the only copy in the world!” (The topic of Internet pricing of used and rare books, and the forces that drive it, is best left for another occasion.)

St Nicholas Magazine THE MALLORY INHERITANCE story Dec 1922

4. Doing It Yourself.

Let’s say you’d like to have a “World’s Best Collection” of your own. Like with most endeavors, there’s no single “right” way to go about it.

Although I’ve only set out to create a complete collection (including later printings, book club and reprint editions, magazine appearances and more) a couple of times, based on those experiences I’ve compiled the following list of guidelines and general principles, which includes some specific suggestions for using the Internet to pursue such a project:

1. Pick something you really love: an author, a subject area or genre, an era, a series, a publisher, an illustrator — the possibilities are endless. Chances are very good, if you’re anything like me, that you’ll already have at least a few related books on your shelves, and that you’ll have read them. These books, and the existing knowledge you’ve gotten from them, are more than enough of a foundation on which to begin building a collection. (And as you gather more, try to read them, too. The more you know about your chosen topic, the better collector you’ll be.) Remember, the most important driving force for the assembly of any collection isn’t money — it’s passion. And if you lose interest in the topic, it’s okay to move on to another one; in fact, if that happens, you probably should.

2. Define what you want to collect related to your chosen subject. First editions only, or also variants (later printings, paperbacks, book club editions, etc.)? Books only, or also magazines and/or related ephemera? Here, too, there are many options. My suggestion is to be realistic at the beginning, but try to stay open to other possibilities, and see where your collection takes you.

3. Do some research. The Internet has made this amazingly easy, but you might still find that you need some books: reference books about your subject, related biographies or histories, or critical works. Bibliographies are especially crucial resources — not just formal bibliographies, but also those included in the back of most nonfiction works.

4. Use your research to build a list of desired acquisitions; then run a quick online search for the titles referenced. For the common and cheap books, buy a copy (or two) of anything that meets your criteria; there is a certain satisfaction that comes with filling up a shelf or two, and you can work on quality later. For the more uncommon items — which you might not find listed online at all — create “wants” (see below). And be patient.

5. Take advantage of all the various “wants” you can create online: AbeBooks, Alibris, Biblio and viaLibri all have this option, and eBay allows you to save searches, which helps to take the tedium out of looking for the same things again and again. You will inevitably get a lot of false hits from both want matches and eBay searches, and you’ll get used to seeing the “same old same old” items time after time, but there’s value in that, too: you will quickly learn to recognize the more common items in your field, and this will enhance your ability to spot the truly uncommon things when they show up, and to act quickly to acquire them. You’ll also develop your own “tricks” to reduce your useless want matches and improve your search results. (Examples: on AbeBooks, check the “not print on demand” box; if you’re focused on an author, be sure to perform occasional searches (or even enter separate wants) for common misspellings of his or her name.) Scanning through dozens of want-match emails can be tedious (be prepared to use your “delete” key at lot), but it’s also important to try and keep up with them, because when a truly scarce and desirable item is listed, especially at a bargain price, it will often be snapped up right away. Remember that you probably aren’t the only person receiving a want-match email on it!

6. Don’t overlook the power of keyword searches, which can lead you to things you didn’t know existed, or hadn’t thought to look for. The more such “offbeat” things your collection contains, the more interesting it will be. If you’re basing your collection on a specific, recognized bibliography, one of the most exciting things is to discover a book that the “authorities” overlooked: the most exciting words for any mystery fiction collector, for instance, are “not in Hubin.”

7. Get the word out about your collection. Let dealers know of your interest; post on blogs, Facebook and elsewhere; find Internet sites for those with similar interests; join your local book-collecting group, if there is one. If you don’t already have a website, set up a simple one talking about your interests. The Internet is truly fantastic for this kind of thing, and you shouldn’t underestimate the value of the contacts you will make there. A couple more examples from my Mrs. Freeman collecting: a historical society in New Jersey sent me copies of a fanzine that included the only significant biographical information on the author; and I once received a phone call from a woman who shared with me her fond memories of a long-ago 6th-grade class trip to visit Mrs. Freeman herself. You’ll have to be patient, but getting the word out on the ‘net will almost invariably yield fruit.

8. Don’t even think about the “investment value” of your collection. Regardless of what the resale value might ultimately turn out to be, if you are collecting something that you find interesting, you will be rewarded many times over the value of the money you actually spent.

9. Don’t forget the “real world” of bookstores, book fairs, library sales, or anywhere else books might be found. With tens of thousands of online sellers of all sizes listing millions of books, it’s easy to forget that there are still untold millions of books that are not listed online. These can only be found the old-fashioned way: by going out and looking for them.

* * *

Augusta Huiell Seaman with Girl Scouts about 1923 from SOMETHING ABOUT THE AUTHOR Vol 31

“Mrs. Freeman,” by the way, published her many books — the books that now populate The World’s Best Collection of her work — under the name of Augusta Hueill Seaman. While she might not be well known today, in her time (1913 to 1949) she was both popular and influential. She was the first American to write mysteries for young girls, and no less a figure in that field than Mildred Wirt Benson, the original author of the Nancy Drew series, once mentioned in an interview how as a young girl she had eagerly awaited Seaman’s serialized mysteries in the St. Nicholas magazine. Librarians also loved her books, and included her on their list of the most popular authors of the 1930s.

And having more or less completed my Seaman collection, I have moved on, and am currently working on two other author collections. Although I’m not quite ready to divulge their names, I can give you a few hints: they are both women, they both wrote mostly around the early to middle 20th century, and while neither has been quite as forgotten as Seaman, you might still say “who?” if you heard their names.

So why, after extolling the virtues of sharing one’s collecting quests with the world via the Internet, am I suddenly turning a bit cagey? It’s because I also recognize, as you should, that there’s a delicate balance at play here — between the advantages that come from being quiet about a collection in the early stages of building it, and the benefits to be had from going public at the appropriate time. Without meaning to sound too calculating about it, let’s just say that by the time I’m ready to reveal the identities of my two most recent collecting interests, most of the “bargain” copies of their books will already be safely at rest, on my shelves.

Christine Volk & Shep Iiams, Booksellers
Bookfever.com
P.O. Box 696,
Ione CA 95640

ABC For Book Collectors by John Carter and Nicolas Barker (Eighth Edition; Oak Knoll Press and The British Library, 2004) defines an association copy as a book that “once belonged to, or was annotated by, the author; which once belonged to someone connected with the author or someone of interest in his own right; and perhaps most interestingly, belonged to someone peculiarly associated with its contents.” In an essay in Other People’s Books: Association Copies and the Stories They Tell (The Caxton Club, 2011), Millard M. Riggs writes: “[Association copies] have long struck me as a special way to bring life and uniqueness to subjects distanced to us by time and place.” While the uniqueness of an association copy certainly appeals to the collector in us, it is also the evocation of that distant time and place that I find fascinating.

Inscription from Horace L. Gold to Groff and Lucy Conklin, plus detail of embossed seal.

The physical artifact pricks the interest and focuses the attention, and provides the motivation to conduct research. Research yields knowledge, and knowledge is the book collector and bookseller’s stock in trade.

My story begins in 2003, when I bought a copy of Galaxy Reader of Science Fiction (New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1952), edited by Horace L. Gold. This is a fairly common book, but this copy contains a lengthy personal inscription by Gold, to Groff and Lucy Conklin, dated March 1, 1952. Horace L. Gold founded Galaxy Science Fiction magazine in 1950 and served as its editor for the next decade; Groff Conklin wrote a book review column for Galaxy from 1950 through 1955 and was the foremost SF anthologist of his time, with 41 collections to his credit. Groff’s wife Lucy edited his writing, and was credited as his co-editor on The Supernatural Reader (Lippincott, 1953). If there is a really cool science fiction story you remember reading from the 1940s through the 1960s, there’s a very good chance you read it in a Groff Conklin-edited anthology.

detail of embossed seal

Then in 2006, I bought a copy of Science Fiction Terror Tales (Gnome Press, 1955), also edited by Groff Conklin, considered to be one of the rarest of the Gnome titles. This copy also bears a long personal inscription, but this time in the opposite direction: it’s inscribed on the front endpaper by Conklin (signed as “Groff”) to H.L. Gold, dated April 9, 1955, and additionally signed in full by Conklin on the title page. The book has a terrific provenance, as I purchased it directly from Marta Randall, Gold’s daughter-in-law by his second marriage and an SF author herself.

Inscription from Groff Conklin to Horace L. Gold, plus detail of embossed seal.

So, one book was owned by Horace L. Gold, and the other was owned by the Conklins. But what caught my attention was that both books have the identical embossed seal on the front free endpaper: two circles surrounding the stylized image of a bird. Conklin’s copy of the Galaxy Reader had passed through the hands of an unknown number of interim owners, so the seal could have been added at any point — but Gold’s copy of Science Fiction Terror Tales had been in the family’s possession until the moment I bought it. It seemed pretty obvious that the seal must have been added by either Conklin or Gold — but which one, and what was its origin? Marta Randall was not aware of the seal being used in any of Gold’s other books, and Bud Webster, author of the definitive Conklin bibliography 41 Above the Rest (and my main competition for collecting Conklin-related material) had never seen the seal before. Neither Gold nor Conklin were frequent signers, and I was never able to track down any other examples of the seal. Despite various attempts at researching the problem over the years, it remained unsolved until just a few days ago.

detail of embossed seal

Fittingly, the solution to the mystery began with the purchase of yet another signed Conklin title. Many years ago I set up a want on AbeBooks for signed Groff Conklin, and last week I got a hit for a signed copy of The Supernatural Reader, the anthology edited by both Conklins. The bookseller’s description stated that this copy bore an inscription, dated 1953, on the front endpaper: “To Ben and Bernarda this, our first overtly joint work! with love – Lucy and Groff.” The dealer describes it as “from the library of Ben and Bernarda Bryson Shahn, with estate label tipped in inside front cover”. I immediately bought the book.

Inscription from Lucy and Groff Conklin to Ben and Bernarda Shahn.

Naturally, my next step was to do a little research on Ben and Bernarda Shahn. Ben Shahn was a Lithuanian-American artist and photographer, most famous for his works of social realism under the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the Farm Security Administration during the Depression. Bernarda was a photojournalist and artist, and with her husband produced a set of 13 murals inspired by Walt Whitman’s poem “I See America Working,” which were installed at the Bronx Central Annex of the United States Post Office. Most relevant to the solution of my mystery, however, was a cache of material in the Shahn papers in the Smithsonian Archives of American Art. Folder 3 in Box 6, labeled “Conklin, Groff and Lucy,” contains several letters the Shahns received from the Conklins, documenting their close friendship over many years. These letters have been scanned, and are available to view online here.

To my great delight, in the upper left-hand corner of one of these letters — a typed letter from Conklin to Shahn and dated April 12, 1947 — is the very same seal that had been puzzling me all this time. Better still, Conklin actually writes about it in the letter: “The seal impressed on the top of the front page of this letter is something I’ve had around the house for some time. It’s a kind of Conklin colophon; the bird design is the same as my Japanese ring. How do you like it?”

Group of three books with association inscriptions related to Groff Conklin.

So after only ten years, a minor bibliographic mystery is solved, almost by accident. This story illustrates the sometimes perverse nature of bibliographic research: a problem can stump you for years before Chance intervenes and throws a clue your way, and then within minutes, the full solution is neatly served up tied in a bow. I don’t know if anyone other than Bud Webster and I will care about this revelation, but I find it extremely gratifying. Beyond the satisfaction of nailing down a bibliographic point, I am pleased with having found the cache of scanned letters from Groff and Lucy Conklin. Perhaps there’s a bit of a voyeuristic thrill involved, since these were originally written as personal communications between friends. But the intimacy of the writing, including a very long letter written by Groff a while after Lucy’s death, reveal aspects of his character never even hinted at in his published writings. Bud Webster once described Conklin to me as “an unassuming man”, and it is quite likely that Conklin never thought that anyone would be interested in anything beyond reading the stories he gathered for his anthologies. But the letters I found hint at an interesting character, someone I would like to know better. And so the research continues.

Timothy Doyle
Bayside Books of Maryland, IOBA
6285 Oakland Mills Rd
Sykesville, Maryland

David Friedman

In the quiet darkness of a late fall night, circa 1923, my grandfather Charlie and his family packed their belongings and quietly left Birmingham, England. Times were not good in Birmingham for union organizers and efforts to bring a reasonable standard of living to the bakers there came at a very high price.

Charlie and family moved to Glasgow, Scotland. The small used bookshop that he started there was stacked to ceiling with dusty shelves which held a mixture of magazines, books, old toasters, and soft-core British pornography. The bookshop was eventually taken over by my aunt and I visited there a few years before she died.

Perhaps my own relationship with books and selling them was genetic. Coincidentally, I also spent several years as the chief negotiator for a teachers’ union. Times had changed and, happily, I didn’t feel the need to flee Fort Dodge, Iowa – at least not because of my union organizing activities.

The IOBA booksellers are gently tied to one another, even though much of what we do is rather solitary. Our days may be spent hunting for books, keying in data, and dealing with sales orders. The ‘Independent’ aspect of our work is significant. Paradoxically, we are united in our sense of personal freedom and charting our own course. When we buy a book (or a thousand) we rely on our personal intuition and knowledge to determine if we’ll be able to convert that book into a profit. Much of our day-to-day survival rests on our own shoulders.

But not entirely.

Being part of an association of like-minded people provides a sense that we’re not in it alone. While there may be 15,000 independent online sellers, it’s comforting to know some of them e-personally. It’s also significant that those who choose to join together share a commitment to quality, service, and a code of ethics. As a group we independent people make a statement of our commitment to a standard of excellence.

It’s a good business decision to let others know that you stand for something. Our customers are people who are interested in knowledge and education. It pays us to be knowledgeable and educated about what we are doing. There is no better way to accomplish this than by joining together.

There’s a fair amount to know about the art and science of our business, especially since little more than a decade ago our business model didn’t even exist! Through association with others in the field we each have the benefit of shared experience, such as learning about the cutting-edge information that can have a positive impact on our business. Frankly, why keep reinventing the computer chip, or the wheel, when others can provide you with some of the basics?

My involvement with IOBA has enhanced my work. It’s been an association that has given me a great deal–and offers the potential for much more. IOBA is a unique organization that is dedicated to serving our shared interests. It helps each of us be a little bigger and have the potential to be a little more independent than we were without it.

My membership in IOBA has been of substantial value to me. We face increasing challenges in our business on a day-to-day basis. The explosion of the digitized world continues to provide tremendous opportunities as well as significant challenges. One of the challenges affected many of us when a few months ago a major on-line service had a significant glitch and interruption of service. Potential changes in postal regulations could impact the shipping of our books we sell. Together, we can learn how to deal with any adverse effects on our business, and have some potential to impact issues as they emerge.

As we know, right now anyone with a book can be a bookseller. For better or worse, it’s what allowed most of us the opportunity to become a part of this field. Is there more to what we do than the very simple act of offering our goods in the market? I believe that without our willingness to ‘associate’ with one another in our common best interests, we will merely be reactive to the market place. Our potential strength and effectiveness lies in creating opportunities to make a difference in the market place and, ultimately, to influence that same marketplace. There’s a lot for us to think about!

IOBA offers an expanding array of education and services to the on-line community. It provides substantial value for all of us. I’m dedicated to trying to help our association increase that value, because membership in IOBA is among the best investments an independent on-line seller can make.

David Friedman
Barner Books
3 Church Street
New Paltz, NY 12561

Originally published in the Summer 2005 issue of The Standard.

NOTE: These are pitched to the “first-time askers” — those of you who would like to request a dealer discount from a fellow bookseller who you’ve never bought from before, and who is a complete stranger to you.

Lesson 1. Ask directly. Take the time to seek out the seller’s email address, and send a direct message. (It’s acceptable, for the sake of convenience, to make such inquiries through certain websites — e.g. AbeBooks, with its very handy “Ask Bookseller a Question” link — but it’s slightly classier, at least in my opinion, to take such incipient transactions completely “outside the room” of the third-party aggregate-listing sites.)

Lesson 2. Ask politely. One thing to always keep in mind is that a trade discount is a courtesy and a privilege, not a “right.” You should be upfront about being a bookseller, but strive to avoid any sense of entitlement: you are asking for a discount, not expecting or demanding one. It can also help to state what your own policy is, as some dealers put a lot of weight on the “reciprocal” aspects of discounting.

Lesson 3. Be clear. Know what you want going in, and make your needs and desires crystal-clear to the seller. If your purchase is contingent upon a discount, say so; otherwise, state that you will buy the book (i.e. at the listed price) even if there is no discount forthcoming. (The term “firm order” is useful, but alas not always understood.)

Lesson 4. Offer payment in as many forms as you’re able. PayPal is quickest and easiest these days, but if you’re willing to send a check or use a credit card, mention those as other options — you can state your own preference if you have one, but always make it clear that it’s the seller’s prerogative to choose whatever payment method he finds most amenable. The sticky point comes with credit card use. It’s considered “bad form” by some dealers to offer to pay for a discounted purchase with a credit card — which then costs the seller a little bit more, in terms of fees — but on the other hand, many sellers don’t mind. (Interestingly, the same objection is rarely voiced with regard to PayPal, although their transaction fees are roughly comparable.) My suggestion is to only offer credit card payment as a secondary option, perhaps even with an apologetic caveat attached (i.e. “if it’s acceptable,” or something like that).

Lesson 5. Be grateful (if the answer is “yes”). See “privilege,” in Lesson 2, above. And remember what your mother told you: say “thank you.”

Lesson 6. Be graceful (no matter what the answer is). Here’s the tricky one, because sometimes the answer is either “no” or a “yes” that you might find wanting (i.e., only 10%). You should always proceed with the transaction (or not), based on your earlier statements to the seller, but resist the temptation to challenge or question his policy. Remember that when all is said and done, we each have the right to determine our own business practices — and with regard to “courtesy” (Lesson 2, above) …. well, haven’t you noticed by now that not everybody in the world is courteous? Ultimately, I believe that a bookseller does himself a lot more harm than good by adopting a restrictive or distinctly ungenerous trade discount policy: nobody ever gained a customer (or a friend within the trade) by refusing a discount. But the cost to you is minimal: a dollop of disappointment on a single deal, but a piece of knowledge for the future. It’ll save you the trouble of asking again, for one thing, and you’ll also have the potential satisfaction of “taking your business elsewhere.” So who’s the loser, in that scenario?

As a couple of real-world examples of how to put Lessons 1 through 4 into practice, here are sample “inquiry letters” as used by fellow IOBAn Brian Cassidy and myself:

Brian’s letter

Version 1; when he intends to make the purchase, discount or no:

Hello. My name is Brian Cassidy and I am a book dealer in the Washington DC area. I am interested in [book title/description]. Could you please confirm availability and forward a total price for a direct sale, including shipping and discount, if offered (I offer terms up to 20%, reciprocal)? I am happy to pay via your preferred method. Thank you in advance.

Version 2; when purchase is dependent upon availability of discount:

Hello. My name is Brian Cassidy and I am a book dealer in the Washington DC area. I am interested in [book title/description], but before deciding would like to know if you offer a dealer discount on direct sales. I offer terms up to 20%, reciprocal. And I am happy to pay via your preferred method. Thank you in advance.

My letter (purchase not dependent on discount):

Dear [bookseller’s name]:

I would like to buy your book [title/author + seller’s inventory number, if known], listed at $__ on [whatever site]. This is a firm order; any available trade discount will be greatly appreciated, but I’ll buy the book either way. Please confirm availability and advise the total amount due, inclusive of shipping (Media Mail is fine), and I’ll forward payment promptly. I am happy to pay with whatever method you prefer: PayPal, check or credit card. Many thanks for your attention to this order.

Howard Prouty
ReadInk
2261 W. 21st St.
Los Angeles, CA 90018
www.readinkbooks.com
ABAA | ILAB | IOBA

Please note the importance, in my opinion, of a fully-featured signature: personal name, business name, mailing address, website, and professional affiliations. One thing this inquiry should do beyond question — especially if you are approaching a seller to whom you are likely a complete stranger — is to establish your bona fides right at the outset. If I were inquiring of another dealer here in California, I would also add my resale permit number.

With IOBA well into its second decade, it seemed a good time to take a look at our logo and make sure it truly represented who we were and how we wanted to be perceived.

The first question, of course, was did we even need a new logo? Because they are such powerful representations of their organizations, logos should not be changed lightly. The IOBA Public Relations committee began with a survey of the membership to determine the general usage practices and perceptions about our logo.

We discovered that 57% of respondents displayed our logo on their website, and of those who did not, the overwhelming majority simply hadn’t gotten around to it or didn’t know where to get an image. But there were a small percentage that simply didn’t like it.

We also asked where else booksellers would consider using our logo, and found that there were many “paper” applications such as bookmarks, flyers, invoices and business cards that members would consider placing the logo on. This anticipated usage impacted design considerations as we got farther into the process.

Finally, we asked survey respondents to rank their preference of the following four options:

1) Keep the cat and IOBA letter logo as it is

2) Remove the cat and use just the IOBA letters as logo

3) Have two logo formats available for use (cat and letters combo, and letters only)

4) Design a new logo.

The first choice selections of respondents broke 51% for some sort of change against 49% for no change. With such a close margin, we might have decided to abandon the search for a new logo except for one thing.

Simple web searches revealed that the cat image that played such a big part in our first logo was not unique to IOBA. For example:

A library: http://www.zazzle.com/cat_on_books_regular_business_card-240033988873469392

A bookplate: http://www.kaboodle.com/reviews/set-of-12-cat-on-books-bookplates

A refrigerator magnet: http://www.zazzle.com/cat_on_books_magnet-147718845098314787

Given that our logo used three books while some of the other images had five, it appears that we used a modification of an existing image for our first logo. There was some indication that the cat image may have been designed in the 50’s or 60’s and may have belonged to the Antioch Book Company, however neither the Board nor the members of the IOBA Discuss list could completely confirm that.

With the copyright status in doubt, the Board decided that a possibly fruitless effort to acquire the rights to the image did not justify the difficulty and expense, and even if the rights to the image were acquired, its cat image would still not be unique to IOBA. Wanting IOBA to have unquestionable ownership of its own logo, the Board instructed the Public Relations committee to pursue a redesign.

We therefore moved ahead with designing a new logo image to present to the board.

We had both physical and philosophical considerations.

As to physical characteristics, we were looking for a clean design that would be attractive on both screen and paper. It had to look as good in black and white as it did in color, and it needed to “reverse” (be able to be displayed as white on a dark background) so that members could use it on a variety of website background colors.

It also needed to be clean and uncomplicated so it would look good even when reproduced on smaller laser or inkjet printers. We stayed away from embellishments like drop shadows and hairline design elements due to the difficulty of accurately reproducing them in the variety of circumstances we projected the members would use.

Finally, it had to “scale.” Many members in our survey indicated that they would consider using it on business cards and bookmarks, so the logo needed to be clear and legible even in a small size.

Philosophically, we wanted the logo to represent all parts of our organization and mission.

We decided early on to include a globe to represent the “international” nature of IOBA, but the globe itself went through several iterations. We considered and rejected longitude and latitude lines because they just became blurry at smaller sizes. Our first attempt tried to capture both Europe and the American continents, but we found that the Atlantic Ocean took up so much of the image that it was no longer easily recognizable as a globe, so we compromised on the current view, which includes North and South America, a bit of Africa, and a hint of Europe.

We also decided relatively early in the process that we should attempt to retain the Castellar font for the IOBA portion of the logo. We liked the idea of a tie-in to our first logo design. In the end, the board opted for the color green for the same reason.

Several suggestions on the survey indicated that members felt it was important to spell out “Independent Online Booksellers Association.” That choice represented challenges in legibility at smaller sizes, but using a serif font and keeping the name in lower case helped readability when the image was shrunk.

In all, we reviewed, discussed, and tweaked over 40 versions and variants of the new logo before making our final recommendations to the board. And in September, 2011, just nine months from when we sent out the first survey, the board approved the new logo.

IOBA members who wish to download the logo can get a copy in the members section of the IOBA website. Follow the link for IOBA logos. HTML text is provided for embedding the logo on member websites.

We’d  also like to thank the PR committee members who worked on this project: Karin Bergsagel (ex-officio), Cathy Graham (chair), Sharon Heimann, Joe Orlando, Alice Voith, Chris Volk, and Justin Woolley.