IOBA
Sep 23, 2006
Updated: Aug 15, 2021
My passion for paper started in the school playground, swapping comics, cigarette cards and later, ‘naughty’ postcards. In the mid 1960s, swathes of houses in my neighbourhood were being bulldozed to accommodate the motorcar, and these abandoned homes gave up all kinds of printed treasures. Along with the discarded books there were magazines, old documents, photographs, cigarette cards—in fact ephemera of every kind. As a teenager I found books both fascinating and frustrating (I’m mildly Dyslexic) but ephemera opened a window on the past for me, and made it real.
On leaving school I quickly discovered that I was unfit for conventional employment, and have contrived to avoid a proper job ever since. I’ve been a boatman, footman, building restorer, gardener, antique dealer, window cleaner… Alongside bookdealing—which I’ve done for more than a quarter of a century—I’ve been equally active as a campaigner for historic building preservation, an environmental troublemaker, and latterly, a founder and director of a charitable community development trust.
I’ve never been interested in antiquarian bookselling—I’m a bookdealer. I buy and sell books for a living. Old books, used books, new books—but always I hope—interesting books. I started selling them because I had lots and needed money. And it was very easy to turn books into money in the 1980’s.
By doing it. Very few of the dealers I know have had any kind of training, let alone a formal apprenticeship. But I don’t really think you can learn to be a bookdealer, you just are one. We’re book junkies and we deal to support our habits. Of course, you need to learn a great deal about all sorts of things in order to stand any chance of being a successful bookdealer.
It is a lovely and fascinating.
Opening the shop was an act of commitment to the town and it provided a base from which to run various campaigns against the wanton destruction of its architectural heritage and social fabric. Times have changed but I hope the shop still excites people’s interest and serves some of their needs.
When we opened we stocked what turned up, but the shop stock has over time become strongly arts based, and reflects the subjects we enjoy, and hopefully, know something about. We still try to offer books at every price from 50p to many hundreds, and sometimes, thousands of pounds. I hope you can get some impression of the shop from visiting its web page [see link at the bottom].
What hasn’t changed? In the early years we reckoned to pay all our overheads from the paperback sales — it wasn’t unusual for some customers to buy up to ten novels a week! Charity shops cut deeply into paperback sales, although we are now undercutting their prices by selling fiction in the covered boxes outside.
We’ve seen huge growth in book collecting over the past twenty-five years, much of it in subject areas that interested me. Initially we stocked a lot of material largely overlooked by an older generation of dealers and collectors—pulp fiction, SF, popular entertainment, old magazines and ephemera were main stays.
I suppose the majority of our stock still reflects popular culture, particularly the visual and performing arts—although we have always said that we try to stock the books our customers tell us they want to buy. For many years we ran a book finding service which gave us valuable insights into our customer’s interests and the often-surprising rarities they were looking for.
Along with most other secondhand bookshops, we have been struggling to cope with the seismic effects the internet has had on bookshop trade. Joy (my wife and more recently business partner) is bringing a fresh eye to the shop after years of running our book search, and we are both spending more time in the shop dealing with customers. On a good day we now sell two or three times the number of books from our window displays than from the internet sites we list on. And weather permitting, there are always people searching for bargains in boxes on the pavement.
The internet has hugely increased the average person’s awareness of out-of-print books, and many of these newly-aware, potential customers, are walking past our door. All we have to do is lure them in…
Simply achieving a turnover that’s sufficient to pay the ever-increasing bills. Secondhand bookshops by their very nature have a fairly low ceiling on the turnover that they can realistically generate. Increasingly this means that they are being priced off the High Street.
A gas company van crashing into the front
My favourite customers? The ones who save a quiet day, or week, with their purchases and all those who say “what a wonderful shop”—and then buy something!
Bob Geldolf might have become a customer if my wife hadn’t asked him to leave for talking very loudly into a mobile phone. We live in something of a royal ghetto, so some of the more minor ones use the shop. And, as we also live in “Cider with Rosie country”, Laurie Lee is a much-missed customer. Unlike some celebrities he understood that the principle reason for visiting a bookshop was to buy books.
It was personal interest. Twenty-five years ago it was close to impossible to find books on these subjects out here in the sticks, so I set about trying to make it easier.
Bomber and Paganini. Made in Germany in the mid-70s, it’s a very black comedy about a couple of inept petty criminals who hate each other, but are forced by circumstance into mutual dependence. If anyone can supply the English subtitled version, on any format, I will pay handsomely.
Walk ins, other bookshops, flea markets, book fairs, auctions, ebay, car boot sales, internet databases, skips—anywhere and everywhere. You can still find lots of interesting books if you’re prepared to look. And of course it helps that I’m a compulsive book buyer.
By selling as many books as we buy, and only buying those we know will sell. If books are hanging around it’s usually because they’re too expensive, and ours is a tiny shop so we have to be ruthless.
A lot of our shop stock is listed on the internet. I’ve never understood dealers who kept their internet or book fair stock separate—don’t they want prospective customers to see their better books? Of course it raises stock control issues, but our fulfillment rate rarely falls below 90%, and as we cover most dust wrappers, and are assiduous about shelving, we rarely have problems.
A recent memorable purchase was an enormous folio volume entitled:
The original artwork for the frontispiece of Mervyn Peake’s Titus Alone, a pristine first of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe … I could go on … and on.
What can I say? It is a labour of love, but then I always seem to have worked for love rather than money. 🙂
So, some Drif questions. Do you remember him coming to your shop any of these times? Did he collect anything himself, or was it all buy low and sell high? Any favorite Drif anecdotes, and what ever happened to him?
I didn’t know Drif, but met him a couple of times in our shop and occasionally bumped into him in others. I think he warmed to us when his request for anything on necrophilia, or children’s books featuring frogs, resulted in me selling him both. I don’t imagine he collected anything, but I suspect that he often bought high and sold very high. He disappeared after his novel—said to be a work of some brilliance, but ruined by obsessive rewriting—failed to find a publisher. A rare Drif sighting comes from an old friend of his, John Martin, who bumped into him at a Chiswick (London) car boot sale last year. Apparently Drif had spent the previous three or four years in Calcutta, and confirmed that he was no longer involved with the book trade. They exchanged phone numbers … and then John lost his mobile!
I certainly don’t blame anyone for buying or selling books on the internet—we do it. But it seems to me that as a buyer it’s becoming less convenient, and as a seller, more expensive. Buying relatively common titles is a nightmare of wading through dross, and some of the sins of omission in the descriptions of more expensive books are jaw slackening. As a seller, the only online venues that move any books exact an ever-increasing price, not only in cash, but in the loss of independence and the ability to build relationships with customers.
As to the big question: how will bookshops survive? I think that the answers will rely as much on developing retailing and marketing skills, as they will on the books we buy. Hopefully some of my answers indicate how we hope to survive, and indeed prosper—but it’s a complex subject, which I would like to return to on another occasion!
Mike Goodenough operates Inprint in Stroud, England and can be contacted at http://www.inprint.co.uk.