Before we launch into a serious and sustained consideration of the relatively new practice of mega-listing, which is of grave concern to many online professional booksellers, we need to define our terms a bit. Strictly speaking, mega-listers offer many books for sale through the major search services (ABE, Alibris, Amazon, etc.), through other portals, or through their own websites. To use a somewhat arbitrary but real number, 100,000 books constitutes “many” to most of us. That type of volume would represent a lot of effort and a lot of storage space. It goes without saying that most of us would rather own a catalog of 500 stellar titles or 5,000 fairly scarce sellable books than a huge warehouse full of bargain basement dreck that’s actually worth less, but the free market allows for many niches so that is well and fine. This touches on another loaded term—“penny sellers.” Speaking for myself, I don’t have a huge problem with penny sellers. I don’t think they have ruined the profession, though they do erode confidence in online book buying if they do not describe their wares accurately, or if they are not upfront about the shipping costs, which is where they probably make a good portion of their money. On the other hand, the stakes are not high for most of the cheap and common titles they offer. Penny sellers came when they heard about the used book gold rush. They don’t find many nuggets, and often don’t know fool’s gold from the real thing, but somebody has to pan for siftings in book streams and cart away loads of Grishamite from the mine floor. If this keeps them out of McJobs and gives them more dignity, time to see their family, or whatever, more power to them. Many will learn the basics and proceed to elevate themselves. They have a right to undersell as long as they have the merch (and there is nothing funnier than a $5 bookseller complaining about a $1 bookseller). Penny sellers are a natural market force. The Glut, where everyone and their grandmother realized they could sell books online, begot the penny sellers, and the Glut itself was spawned by the confluence of huge amounts of unwanted books and the selling platform provided by Interloc, Bibliofind, and the 3As, where profits eventually trumped standards. Capitalism, baby. I often think back on a copy of The Soong Sisters by Emily Hahn I picked up seven or eight years ago. They grew up to become Madame Chiang Kai-shek, Madame Kung, and Madame Sun Yat-sen. It was published in 1941 or so, with red cloth covers and nice photos. Anyway, there were already a small handful of copies on ABE so I ran it through eBay as a lark and realized around $35 on the transaction. Fast forward to today, where there are 117 listings on ABE alone, from $55 down to $2.75 (and no doubt it could be found cheaper somewhere else). Back on eBay, the only copy recently offered was started at a penny, with $4.00 for shipping (though it was for UPS second day air, so not much profit margin there). From the description, “Book is in great condition. Cover is in worn condition. Lots of great photo ilistrations. Book is in great condition overall. Pretty rare. I could’nt find one for sale anywhere on the web.” He could have looked just below the first search page at multiple cheap copies offered through eBay Stores. (It ended up selling for $8.63 on 9/3/2006, by the way, so eBay can still a good place to move books quicker and higher than the search services do.) I liked the nice profit from this moderately common title not that long ago, but that was then and this is now. Things change fast in the internet age. Many of us have altered our business models, shedding common titles or stocking them in bookstores or on antique center shelves at reasonable prices rather than carrying them online where they will languish in multiplicity. We can undercut everyone else online, but time is money, and we would rather be looking for or describing good books than wrapping $3 books. This is all by way of explaining that “penny seller” is not necessarily a pejorative term—at least to some professional booksellers and to a great many buyers who appreciate low prices—and perhaps the term “mega-lister” should be accorded the same semantic leeway. Many accomplished booksellers offer tens of thousands of titles. Some, like Rhett Moran of Gutenberg Holdings, list close to 100,000 titles online, with lots more sitting in storage. He acquired these himself over the years, he knows how to describe and ship them properly, and he can answer any questions about them. Giant physical stores like Powell’s offer millions of titles online, though there is not a lot of description (they have a 1941 Soong Sisters for $9.95 described as “worn condition or underlined”—my underlining), and they can’t always locate the desired out-of-print title. One would have to assume that most BOBs (big online bookstores) would not want to be called mega-listers. There is a newer breed of online bookstore that seems firmly in the mega-lister camp but still maintains some tenuous semblance of traditional standards. They are a combination of penny seller and mega-lister that one colleague calls “book mills.” Thriftbooks.com out of Seattle is a good example of a potentially above average mega-lister. They carry many cheap listings, they only flood the market with a quarter of a million books rather than millions, and they often even include such bibliographic information as the date. Thousands of titles are wildly overpriced, but tens of thousands more are very affordable. They claim some kind of mutually beneficial relationship with one or more local library systems, and their boilerplate claims “the HIGHEST star rating of ALL high-volume sellers!” This is obviously a place to go for reading copies rather than exquisitely bound volumes and creampuff first editions of highly important and sought-after works. They make a point of comparing many of their prices to the same title at Amazon (e.g., one cent vs. $7.99), though I don’t know how they keep that accurate or current. From the helpful FAQ page, “How do you sell your books for a penny? We are able to offer low prices because we leverage both our proprietary technology and our partnerships with many large sources of used books including book stores, wholesalers, and publishing houses.” Fair enough. (I had some FAQs of my own about their operation, but Thriftbooks did not get back to me, so this estimation might be a little off one way or the other.) They use some skimpy and boilerplate description, but for reading copies of dirt cheap books with reasonable shipping rates, that is not such a major concern. On the pricier side, I wanted to know more about the condition of The Postal History and Stamps of Bermuda by M. H. Ludington, priced at $150, which is described as “Good. Good.” Does the second Good mean it has a dust jacket? Their response reads, “Each book is individually rated by a Thrift Books staff member. Below are the different ratings and definitions;” and “Good” is defined as, “A copy that has been read, but remains in clean condition. All pages are intact, and the cover is intact. The spine may show signs of wear. Pages can include limited notes and highlighting.” So they really couldn’t be bothered to provide more than that generic description. A bookseller who seems to like books offers this fairly scarce title for the same price, and it is rated “Very Good” with details, so that would have been the logical choice in those cases where you are lucky enough to have a choice. From Thriftbooks’ About Us page, they say they hold over 250,000 titles “in stock.” They also claim to be adding 10,000 new titles a day, though it isn’t clear whether they mean to the website or into the building, or maybe they both buy and sell 10,000 a day so the base number stays at around 250,000. At any rate, and here is the biggest distinction of all—they seem to actually own at least some of the titles in question, and they seem to be stored on premises they own, lease, or rent. Yes, Virginia, some mega-listers don’t physically own the stock they list for sale. We are getting used to this bizarre idea, but it’s still shocking when you think about it. The BOBs and an okay book mill or three are the last outposts of civilization. After that we run into a whole stratum of mega-listers that are high on volume and short on standards. New book dealers who list the entire catalogs of various publishers and distributors at an often indecent markup; page hogging remainders dealers who offer multiple copies of palletized titles they hold; volume processors of ex-library acquisitions, charity works, and bulk donations; and scavengers who scrape all the titles from one site and list them on another. Super mega-listers, like black holes, suck it all in. This would all be okay of course if they all fought it out on some giant website where everyone knows what the deal is, but they have invaded once-pure book search services such as ABE and Alibris like some noxious species of plant or insect. (Many Amazon sellers are upset too, but this kind of comes with the jungle that is Amazon.) The 2As know that customers respond to branding and prefer one-stop shopping, but they should have worked out a better way for well-behaved new booksellers and used/out-of-print/antiquarian booksellers to co-exist without all the duplication and duplicity, even if it meant less income for them. Rare book tabs on the home page or other anemic sops are not the answer. We were there first, and we gave them life. We need the 2As at the moment, but surely they realize that given the current situation many of us would leave in a heartbeat if one of the independents would just reach critical mass (as in lots of sellers and lots of eyeballs). But back to the semantic task at hand. “Mega-lister” is probably the best term to use, because the prefix mega means large, and it’s the large ones that hurt us the most. This puts penny seller mega-listers (PSMs) with their own stock in the same tent as data miner mega-listers (DMMs). There are at least three types of data miners. Those that sell new books they don’t own (and often can’t provide) from distributor’s catalogs; those that put up huge lists of books they don’t own (and often can’t provide) from other types of sources; and those phantom listers that specifically target the catalogs of other booksellers with actual books. Most DMMs (also known as aggregators and data consolidators) never handle any books themselves. You order through the 3As, he gets paid, he orders the book through the distributor, the distributor ships it to you, and the distributor bills him for a much lower amount than you paid him to begin with. Some mega-listers ply their trade internationally, where unsuspecting buyers may not be aware of ABE and Alibris. To complicate matters, mega-listers and data miners often do some of both. They share several characteristics in addition to massive size, like poor descriptions and inane boilerplate, so one name fits them all pretty well. Eskimos have many names for pure snow but only one for yellow snow. If mega-listers are also good booksellers who are not sacrificing standards for profits, they will achieve customer satisfaction, some peer acceptance, and business success. That said, however, mega-lister nomenclature does demand a handy title for the worst offenders. Let us further define the “malicious mega-lister,” then, as distinct from somewhat more benign forms of this practice. Their sins against our noble profession are listed in order of magnitude. -MMs who scrape listings from actual booksellers and offer them up as their own at higher prices. They can’t stand by the book’s description because they did not create it, and most would probably be incapable of doing so with important titles anyway. They can’t easily answer questions about their phantom listings without contacting the actual bookseller and pretending they are the customer. They rely on drop-shipping by the actual owner, and cannot guarantee proper service in this area either. (As an aside, isn’t it annoying how we even do the wrapping and shipping for these leeches?) They can’t always insure availability, particularly when the order is finalized directly through one of the search services, and that means dashed hopes and the pursuit of refunds. This is all quite distinct from traditional book search services that charge a modest fee for locating wants. The markups many malicious mega-listers charge for a brief stint as middle man are totally outrageous. Selling items you don’t actually own is blatant misrepresentation at the very least. It’s the kind of thing a good federal agency or state attorney general should look into. The situation is different with newer books that they pretend to own but actually order from the distributor, though this can also be problematic for the would-be customer in terms of accurate bibliographic description, stockouts, and high markups. -MMs steal the hard work of actual professional booksellers who have found, researched, described, priced, and housed these books. They do this in a major way by lifting descriptions in their entirety, which is nothing short of plagiarism, and they are quick to pilfer images as well. This practice is falling by the wayside quite a bit, due to threats of legal action embedded right in the original descriptions, by altercations they have had with angry booksellers, and by the possibility of getting kicked off the search services. It is probably more common now among rogue operators selling single books they actually don’t own on eBay than it is among large established businesses on the 3As, although in some cases this might be one of their off-the-shelf operations. Have malicious mega-listers stopped stealing our hard work and merchandise on the 3As, or have they figured out less obvious ways to present phantom listings they don’t actually own by simply stripping them of unique descriptions and identifiers? -MMs clog the search service results. This can be confusing and maddening to customers looking for a desired title. It is also a real pain in the butt for true booksellers and researchers, and the ripple effects include virtually useless wants matching and meta-search engine results (as in BookFinder and AddAll). Piling on so many wild price variations and multiple listings of the exact same book with questionable ISBNs and misleading stock images is sure to bury legitimate offerings and sure to add to an erosion of confidence in online book buying. -MMs have an unfair pricing advantage over small booksellers. Most publishers and distributors don’t sell directly on the 3As because they know the booksellers who support them would complain. Instead, they enter into agreements with mega-listers who have few if any inbound or outbound shipping, inventory, customer service, or other overhead costs. They load entire databases to the web without checking against actual distributor inventories and delivery schedules. Once in this lawless zone, they can underprice and overprice at the same time, casting gill-nets at will and pulling in many of the available fish. Small publishers suffer when most sales are driven through Amazon, Baker & Taylor, or Ingram with their large discounts, because sales from their own websites fall off. And many mega-listers designate new books as used/rare/out-of-print on such sites as Amazon at two or three times retail when they are still in print and available directly from the publisher. In a more recent development, dubious charity mega-listers cut to the front of the line on the supply side, and undercut those of us who have to pay for our stock on the demand side. -MMs data mine. They use software programs to do the listing work for them. Data mining repeats erroneous bibliographic information, publisher catalog data mining lists many books that are no longer available, it causes too many listings to read the same way, and it often employs stock photos that are really only acceptable for new publications. It is virtually impossible to data mine in a responsible manner, as you would have to personally check thousands of listings for availability, etc. -MMs throw all price guidelines out of whack with a blizzard of confusing and conflicting information. This lines their pockets, but it often reduces the value of our property, wastes everyone’s time, and drives away paying customers. -MMs provide poor customer service. They unite a good number of books with a good number of customers for a hidden surcharge, and often nobody is the wiser, but the very nature of their operation precludes a high degree of honesty and satisfaction. These bottom two attributes were around before mega-listing on the internet, by the way, but they are readily identifiable aspects of it. I have some questions about this cyberpiracy that are perhaps rhetorical. First of all, am I missing something? Do MMs do anything that is good for anyone other than themselves and their hosts? And what about the major search services? ABE, for example, used to outlaw this activity before May, 2004. Does the increased income justify sacrificing standards, dealing with complaints, and denigrating the site? (It must, of course, so that one isn’t so rhetorical.) Should we just leave them in disgust and set up our stores on sites most book buyers are oblivious to? Do ABE and Alibris feel they would fall behind if either did the right thing here and reined in malicious mega-listers? Is “malicious” even a good word to use, or is there a better appellation for this new creature in our midst that would serve to differentiate between big online bookstores, relatively well-meaning cheap book mills, and the bad kind of mega-listers? Malice means “desire to harm others or to tease.” They don’t exactly desire to harm us, but they don’t seem to lose sleep over it either. And tease may be a stretch, but they are sure in our face as well as in our pockets, and it’s time somebody did something about it. I must confess that I do not totally understand how malicious mega-listers ply their trade. It would be interesting if a reformed employee of one of these outfits would come forward and write a book about it or something, or perhaps trial transcripts would reveal the same secrets. The technical details of data mining; the ins and outs of fooling honest booksellers; clashes with same; profiles of customers who pay ten times more because they didn’t know any better; certain understandings they have reached with the search services, including better deals on fees and commissions; the hellishness of their daily email and phone work trying to reconcile canceled orders and explain themselves to disappointed customers. Great stuff, though it doesn’t make up for the loss of our verdant fields with maybe three or four listings of a rare book (remember that dreamtime?) that are now clogged with countless rip-off mutations, phantom titles and PODs (another serious issue) like bodies amid broken down war machines on a bizarre and confusing battlefield, with camp follower penny sellers bringing up the rear, dark clouds and vultures above, and the 3As generals observing it all from a safe hilltop, though General Amazon can be partly excused because he never claimed to be an antiquarian and out-of-print bookseller to begin with. It seems too late for major reform. The 2As Amazon wannabes are liking huge amounts of newer books and wildly overpriced older books better, regardless of how they spin it. We do not necessarily believe that quality listings and services will always win the day, for example, as ABE and Alibris are now saying, because mega-listers are not stupid and they aren’t hanging around and multiplying for nothing. ABE and Alibris can’t really afford to provide significant relief for their original “partners” by drastically curtailing mega-listing without hurting the bottom line. They say they have plans to deal with the scourge by limiting listings to two copies only of books which are substantially the same (i.e., new books), by introducing seller ratings , etc., but we remain skeptical. What I learned in preparing this article is that they understand why we don’t like page hogging, but the new owners have either forgotten or never fully understood the whole traditional bookselling standards thing. Data miner mega-listers will still be free to list millions of books that are not available anywhere; data thieves can still scrape our listings for inflated prices as long as they are not extremely obvious about it; many older books will continue to be described in highly misleading and substandard ways; many customers will be left bewildered, disappointed, or cheated; most good booksellers will remain frustrated; and the venture capitalists will continue to extract profits while grooming these properties for virtually inevitable takeover by even bigger corporations. The average ABAA bookseller, somewhat above the fray to begin with by virtue of superior stock, is probably happier now that blatantly pirated descriptions of truly rare books are on the wane. The high fees and commissions they generate give them some clout, which is why Alibris has been courting them. The average IOBA or unrepresented bookseller, squeezed by penny sellers from one end and ruthless mega-listers from the other, are pretty close to the bottom of the totem pole at the present time. ABE or Alibris could make a bold move by firmly re-establishing itself as the premier site for used/out-of-print/antiquarian books. This could be accomplished by consistently expelling bad booksellers and by limiting inventory to, say, 100,000 titles per bookseller, where anything over that would require review. They could also start charging significantly more for listing over 150,000 or 200,000 titles rather than capping the high end of the sliding fee. They could roll back a few other hurtful loss of control policies, downsize a bit, still make good enough livings, and do right by the profession. Come home, ABE or Alibris. Become the site of choice for real booksellers and their happy customers. All is forgiven. Since that is a pipe dream, you know the drill. Work hard; improve your stock; improve your knowledge; set up your own website; list on clean independent sites like Biblio.com, TomFolio.com, and IOBAbooks.com; try lucrative venues like eBay; ease into book shows and antique centers; join trade associations like the ABAA, ILAB, and IOBA; and work toward a better future. Shawn Purcell operates Balopticon Books & Ephemera and can be contacted at http://www.balopticon.com.

This is a look at some indisputably large (as in over half a million titles) online book stores that sell on Abebooks.com. It reports on the number of listings; the Book Condition field and other noteworthy findings for the thirty most expensive and thirty least expensive listings; whether or not they provide dates and publishers in that group of listings; and the most highly priced Ernest Hemingway title. This is obviously not an exhaustive or scientific survey, but the findings are accurate as of late August, 2006. It would be more informative if it employed a larger checklist that included antiquarian and non-fiction titles; and one would want to look at other venues as well. You would have to go to even greater lengths to see if they actually own these books, or if they simply order from a distributor or arrange for drop-shipping from other booksellers. Omitting such information as the date and publisher and failing to cite the correct title make it difficult to compare the listing with other offerings. A highest price Hemingway search is one way of determining markup, and of ascertaining if these book stores handle older books or if they just deal in new stock. I have cited some freakishly high prices in the top thirty that can perhaps be blamed on automated pricing systems, but if they have the book and it is ordered, wouldn’t they bill you for that amount just the same? Another way to look at this is how professional booksellers and the book buying public would react to somebody setting up at a book fair with such ludicrous prices, which extend deep into the catalogs in most cases. Visit these sites yourself in order to form your own impressions and come to your own conclusions. –A1Books of Netcong, NJ. 1,195,112 listings. There is no Book Condition field at all. There are two variant boilerplate descriptions in the Book Description field that read, “Brand new item. Over 3.5 million customers served. Order now. Selling online since 1995. Few left in stock – order soon,” and “May contain remainder marks. Over 2 million customers served. Order now. Selling books online since 1995. Few left in stock – order soon.” Lists AIDS in America by Charles H. Russell at $6,732.89. Does not provide dates and publishers. 49 listings for Ernest Hemingway, the most expensive of which is Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (Modern Critical Interpretations) at $53.40. No date or publisher given, and does not specify binding. The title they give is absurd, and the ISBN and stock image provided do not clearly indicate if this was published by Chelsea House in 1987, Roundhouse in 1998, or what. –Aaron Brown of Corpus Christi, TX. 1,973,171 listings. Book Condition description for all sixty is “Acceptable,” but there are many “possibly” and “could have” type boilerplate variations in the Details field, along with such reassurances as “All pages together and are readable,” “May be similiar or identical to the edition published under the ISBN number of…,” and “Shape: 2 to 3 of 5 stars.” Most of the book stores on this list start pricing at $1, but Aaron Brown’s lowest price is $25.12 for Dream Baby by Ann Evans. All dates have the “on or around” preamble, and he (?) does not provide publishers. 219 listings for Ernest Hemingway, the most expensive of which is A Farewell to Arms at $11,354.57. “May have been published on or around: 1929.” “My copy of this item is in used, acceptable condition or better.” On 8/29/2006 I asked, “Can you tell me more about this book? Is that the correct price?” No response. –Better World Books of Mishawaka, IN. 686,798 listings. Book Condition descriptions include various boilerplates such as “Great condition for a used book!,” “Book in almost Brand New condition,” and “Shows definite wear, and perhaps considerable marking on inside.” No real grading specifics in the top thirty listings. (They do have a related enterprise called Better World Books – Collectibles that lists high end items professionally described.) Lots of other boilerplate about their policies, including “Fast shipping, best return policy, and social responsibility put Better World Books above the rest.” Above the rest of other booksellers, other charities, or what? Within this group, 32 sales benefit “Books for Africa!,” and the other 28 benefit 17 different efforts all over the US. Their website explains how they say this for-profit charity works. A Wikipedia entry on BWB casts some doubt. Unusual listings on the high end, some of which only Livrenoir shows, like Texas Police Officer (7th Edition) at $2,850.20. Teach Yourself Windows 95 is listed at $2,156.16 and $1,962.10, with the same inventory number. Provides the publisher, but not the date. 44 listings for Ernest Hemingway, the most expensive of which is The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories at $87.73. Specifies Charles Scribner’s Sons as the publisher but no date. –Books2Anywhere.com of Fairford, UK. 1,494,290 listings. There is no Book Condition field at all. Boilerplate for all reads, “Check out our low worldwide delivery costs! Please note: we only take orders through ABE – NOT DIRECT!” Provides dates and publishers. 135 listings for Ernest Hemingway, the most expensive of which is Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917-1961 at $60.11. –Caiman of Miami, FL. 1,179,329 listings. The Book Condition description for all sixty is “New.” Does not provide date, publisher, or a single word about the book other than the ISBN. 97 listings for Ernest Hemingway, the most expensive of which is MCI—Sun Also Rises at $51.34. Gives ISBN and stock photo only. –Limelight Bookshop of New York, NY. 729,412 listings. The Book Condition description for all sixty is “New. New.” Most of the top thirty lists of the really large sellers are populated with multi-volume scientific works, but quite a few at the top here are single volumes like the Oxbridge Directory of Newsletters 2005 and Volume 4 of the Encyclopedia of Human Nutrition, both listed at $2,375.15. Provides dates and publishers. 73 listings for Ernest Hemingway, the most expensive of which is Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917-1961 at $135.74. A little hard to tell if this is hardcover or not. –Livrenoir of Brooklyn, NY. 3,840,327 listings. [This number jumped to 4, 498,534 since this article was prepared just a couple of weeks ago!] Only two of sixty Book Condition descriptions use more than three words. A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare in Near Fine condition listed at $8,186.56 gives Reprint Services Corp as the publisher and 1871 as the publication date, with no other information whatsoever other than “quarto” and the ISBN. Provides dates and publishers. “Livrenoir” translates to “black book,” as in The Black Book of Boobytraps by Lyle Whitney (1996). Coincidentally, Livrenoir holds the only copy of this title for sale, according to BookFinder and AddAll, and it is priced at $72.49. That’s a good deal for an otherwise unlisted title. You could make a nice profit on it (though if it’s about deadly traps rather than putting a bucket of water over the door or something, keep the War Against Terrorism in mind). I enquired about availability through the ABE form on the evening of 8/27/2006. This quick response came the following day. “I am afraid we do not keep our inventory at hand. It is located in separate warehouses, therefore it is impossible for me to check specifics on any particular title. I am sorry I cannot be of assistance with your inquiry. Let me know if I can help you with anything else.” Presumably you would get the same response if you called. So you really have to order it to find out, which I did this same day, again through ABE and with special instructions to please pack carefully. Searching WorldCat for this extremely rare title while waiting for my package to arrive, only three repositories hold it. The Ellsworth Air Force Base Library in South Dakota, the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency in Virginia, and the Library of Congress. Is it possible to scrape listings from the good old Library of Congress, or did he just buy this at a book fair or something? I got some bad news from Livrenoir the evening of 9/2/2006. “We’re sorry, but this title sold earlier on another site and is therefore no longer available. Please accept our apologies for the inconvenience this cancellation must have caused.” And shortly after that ABE officially reiterated the reason for cancellation, ending with, “We hope you will visit abebooks.com again in the future.” 330 listings for Ernest Hemingway, the most expensive of which is Winner Take Nothing (Scribner, 1933) at $487.27. There is no further description other than the ISBN, “Very Good,” and a stock photo. –Papamedia.com of Ithaca, NY. 1,373,417 listings. The Book Condition description for all sixty is “Brand new, Perfect condition.” There are two $75,000.95 paperbacks at the top, but that’s probably a boo-boo, because it quickly settles down into the familiar $16,500 range for multi-volume sets. They listed over 3,300,000 titles on ABE not that long ago, but a couple weeks after this article was prepared it has plummeted to 363,498 titles from the figure above, perhaps due to the new “two substantially the same titles only” policy, so changes are afoot. Does not provide dates and publishers. 64 listings for Ernest Hemingway, the most expensive of which is Ernest Hemingway’s: A Farewell to Arms (Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations) at $67.95. No date or publisher given. If the real Papa could see that mangled title he would kick some colon. –Paperbackshop-US of Elk Grove Village, IL. 616,803 listings. There is no Book Condition field at all. Boilerplate for all sixty reads, “Check out our great rate for multiple orders – you won’t be disappointed!” Provides dates and publishers. 43 listings for Ernest Hemingway, the most expensive of which is the popular Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917-1961 at $43.78. No word on the binding. –Quartermelon of Stratford-Upon-Avon, UK. 1,126,087 listings. Book Condition descriptions all read, “BRAND NEW” or “BRAND NEW \N. \N. \N. (\N) \N (\N),” with “PAPERBACK” or “MASS MARKET” added to some of the bottom thirty. They appear to be based in the U.K. but they say books ship from the U.S. Provides dates and publishers. 80 listings for Ernest Hemingway. Assuming a 1997 edition of A Farewell to Arms priced at $4,859.63 is a typo or something, the most expensive is Green Hills of Africa (1998) at $233.19. I am pretty sure that when ABE first started, they (or perhaps it was BookFinder or Bibliofind) used Green Hills of Africa as a sample search form title, to be used together with the author’s name. The results back then were Hemingwayesque in their directness and simplicity.

Short identical questionnaires were sent to Abebooks, Alibris, and Amazon, and they were kind enough to reply. A modified version was sent to the independent meta-search service AddALL, which did not respond. Abebooks Mega-Lister Questionnaire 1. How does Abebooks define mega-listers, and do you differentiate between categories of mega-listers? The terms we use to describe booksellers usually relate to the inventory they carry such as rare and antiquarian dealers, used booksellers and textbook specialists. Booksellers use the term, mega-lister, but we don’t use it internally. We believe they are usually referring to booksellers with a high number of listings or booksellers that are ‘page-hogging.’ ‘Mega-lister’ is a very broad term and we prefer to be more specific. 2. What are the main customer and bookseller complaints about mega-listers? Both buyers and sellers have concerns about the issue of so-called ‘page-hogging’ where sellers list multiple copies of the same book. It makes buying and selling books much harder. We share those concerns. On 7 July 2006, Abebooks introduced a new policy limiting multiple copies of books that are materially the same to two. In conjunction with the new policy: We are introducing a quantity field to our inventory management systems. It is already available to booksellers with custom conversions or who use our online listings manager, and the upcoming 3.0 version of HomeBase will have it as well; Quantity will also be added to the search results and the shopping basket; We have started to enforce the new multiple listings policy but will stringently enforce it when all the tools, such as the quantity field in inventory management systems and quantity in search results, are in place for booksellers to offer multiple copies without resorting to ‘page-hogging’ tactics. 3. Some mega-listers and data thieves steal detailed descriptions of unique and expensive books they obviously don’t own themselves, dramatically marking up prices and then arranging for drop-shipping from the real bookseller after the sale. Has Abebooks been able to cut back on this practice, and if so, how? When we hear of one bookseller ‘stealing’ book descriptions from another bookseller in order to drop-ship, we investigate and remove the listings if proven. Booksellers can only list books that they are legally entitled to sell but those books do not have to be in their physical possession. Booksellers can list books supplied directly to a customer from a distributor but they cannot list books owned by another bookseller. 4. Have some of these mega-listers continued that practice and avoided detection by simply removing all unique descriptions and identifiers from their phantom listings? It can be very difficult to prove or disprove this practice. However, books without unique descriptions are unlikely to sell so the bookseller is unlikely to profit from such actions. 5. What about mega-listers who clog search results with page after page of poorly described, unavailable, and bizarrely priced multiple listings; and who otherwise erode traditional bookselling standards in too many ways to list here? Do you have any future plans to curb or remove Abebooks mega-listers, or to improve the general quality of your bookseller listings? We are very keen to encourage booksellers to list detailed and informative book descriptions. Therefore we plan to introduce new search refinements to the search results to make it easier for buyers to find exactly the book they want. Booksellers who don’t take advantage of these refinements are less likely to appear in refined results. In the future, we intend to introduce bookseller ratings and we believe this will improve availability of books and fulfillment of orders. The introduction of quantity and better inventory management tools are all designed to improve our listings. We are always keen to improve the quality of the listings but it’s important to note that booksellers who offer detailed and informative descriptions, along with an image, win sales – booksellers with poor listings do not. Alibris Mega-Lister Questionnaire How does Alibris define mega-listers, and do you differentiate between categories of mega-listers? What are the main customer and bookseller complaints about mega-listers? Some mega-listers and data thieves steal detailed descriptions of unique and expensive books they obviously don’t own themselves, dramatically marking up prices and then arranging for drop-shipping from the real bookseller after the sale. Has Alibris been able to cut back on this practice, and if so, how? Have some of these mega-listers continued that practice and avoided detection by simply removing all unique descriptions and identifiers from their phantom listings? What about mega-sellers who clog search results with page after page of poorly described, unavailable, and bizarrely priced multiple listings; and who otherwise erode traditional bookselling standards in too many ways to list here? Do you have any future plans to curb or remove Alibris mega-listers, or to improve the general quality of your bookseller listings? [Alibris did not answer by the numbers, so their blanket response follows.] We don’t generally use the term, but an easy definition of a ‘mega-lister’ would be a seller who maintains over 100,000 items in their online inventory. Regardless of inventory level, we’ve demonstrated over time that we hold all sellers to the same performance standards. If they are unable to provide the level of professional service required, they will be removed from our network. Alibris has removed sellers with inventory in excess of 250,000 items, but has also removed those with vastly smaller inventory for the same reasons. Many sellers who fall into the above definition of ‘mega-lister’ are well regarded sellers within the industry. Others are not. We believe there is room for any seller on Alibris if they uphold the levels of quality and professionalism we seek to maintain. Those who don’t are dealt with swiftly. Due to our shipping reimbursement and minimum price of $2.95, we have very few issues with ‘penny sellers’ who seek to make the bulk of their profits on shipping. In addition, our search presentation makes it difficult to clog search results. However, when identified, we’ll counsel sellers – regardless of size – on using our quantity field. We’re also looking at ways of ‘rolling-up’ duplicate listings in order to make our search work even better. Alibris is concerned about sellers who copy other bookseller’s inventory and list it as their own. We have internal mechanisms which help us identify these sellers, whom we refer to as Spiders. Once identified they either delete the offending inventory or are removed from the Alibris network. There are also a handful of known Spiders who are not welcome at Alibris. Alibris is committed to being the premiere online destination for the best independent sellers from around the world. We understand that we’ll thrive not on the quantity but on the quality of our seller network. Amazon Mega-Lister Questionnaire How does Amazon define mega-listers, and do you differentiate between categories of mega-listers? What are the main customer and bookseller complaints about mega-listers? Some mega-listers and data thieves steal detailed descriptions of unique and expensive books they obviously don’t own themselves, dramatically marking up prices and then arranging for drop-shipping from the real bookseller after the sale. Has Amazon been able to cut back on this practice, and if so, how? Have some of these mega-listers continued that practice and avoided detection by simply removing all unique descriptions and identifiers from their phantom listings? What about mega-sellers who clog search results with page after page of poorly described, unavailable, and bizarrely priced multiple listings; and who otherwise erode traditional bookselling standards in too many ways to list here? Do you have any future plans to curb or remove Amazon mega-listers, or to improve the general quality of your bookseller listings? Not sure what we have to do with this at all so we’ll pass on this. Thanks.

Weeding through countless fields of obsolete digital pics and scans on my hard drive, up popped a set of images from Herbarium and Plant Descriptions that reminded me what a pleasure it was to handle this item for awhile. I remember writing a fairly lengthy description for an eBay auction and starting it at $100. If the herbarium didn’t sell there I would have transplanted the work over to my regular book list, thus preserving more gleanings about the little girl who put it together, the gist of her efforts, and a written description of the volume that contained them. If it remained unsold to this day, I could have consulted her notes about each plant for this piece. But as things turned out it did sell on eBay in May of 2005 for $113.61, with two bids. The only other information I still have is the auction title, “PROVIDENCE RHODE ISLAND RI HERBARIUM 1888 MAGNALL,” and the name and address of the buyer. “Magnall” refers to Florence A. Magnall of Room 11, Providence High School, as a notation on the inside front cover informs us. She was the earnest student who wandered through field and forest on the margins of Providence searching out these specimens for pressing and preservation. I do recall that her notes were charming, and this was obviously for class work rather than personal interest. My own little girl is a big plant science major now, and she collated this for me, as one or two leaves (an appropriate term) were missing. And speaking of the scythe of time, what can be more ephemeral than one plant in trillions that is still with us over a century later? Rather than wax on about this subject, I thought it would be more interesting to look at the descriptions of every used copy of Herbarium and Plant Descriptions currently listed for sale on Abebooks. Edward T. Nelson is the author or designer, and there seem to be two editions. They are listed here in descending order of price, which averages out to around $100 when you throw out the highest and the lowest. (Maybe this article will result in some sales!) Preserved images from my aforementioned copy are interspersed. -Allyn & Bacon: Boston 1895. 10 x 7.5″, portfolio, boards, 8pp to text + 48 double pages, covers well worn, rubbed & soiled, waterstained, corners bumped & worn & fraying, only side tie remains, waterstained, interior paper spine covering detached, torn, creased & missing pieces, smudging, light soiling/creasing, edge tears, 38 of the pages filled in with specimens & notes: the first 24 well detailed, rest minimal, some sm pieces coming loose. Margaret Hefferhan (or Hefferon?) of East Stroudsburg, PA has numbered the blank sides up to 39 (with 37 absent). Wild geranium, jack in the pulpit, buttercup, daisy, veronica, violet. May 4 to June 30, 1901. -Allyn and Bacon, Boston, 1895. Book Condition: Good. Octavo 7″ x 9″. A loose leaf field workbook with a cover in half cloth over printed boards. This one has been filled with pressed specimens contained throughout and described with the notes dated individually during the year 1903. The cover contains several prior owners’ names and stamps inside and out. Hey, I took one last zoomed look at Florence A. Magnall’s work, and I’d forgotten that she recorded verses on the opposite page that relate to each sample. Entries about when and where she found the plants were probably up front with the index or something. Was this part of the assignment, or creative padding? Here is a lovely snippet borrowed from Erasmus Darwin, opposite the pressed anemone. All wan and shivering in the leafless glade The sad anemone reclined her head; Grief on her cheeks had paled the roseate hue, And her sweet eye-lids dropp’d with pearly dew. We’re glad you left us these frond memories, dear Florence Because the same pale recline happened to you. Shawn Purcell operates Balopticon Books & Ephemera and can be contacted at http://www.balopticon.com. #ephemera

This fear of running out of books can be traced back to the vacation we spent in the Outer Banks of North Carolina in the mid 1970s. I ran out of reading so I went into the small local bookstore and asked for a copy ofMiddlemarch. The clerk, a young girl about 18 years old looked puzzled, so I said “You know, Middlemarch, by George Eliot.” She replied “Is it new?” “No.” I answered. “It was written over a hundred years ago. It’s a classic.” “What else did he write?” she asked. I left the store with a lurid roman-a-clef about psychotic twin gynecologists in Manhattan, and vowed never to leave home without sufficient literary materials to last at least twice as long as any planned vacation. This worked well for me, until the year I went to Hawaii over Christmas. Some of the airlines have become very strict about baggage weight, and between the books and the cameras, and snorkeling gear, I was 30 pounds over the allotment before I even left New York. Even after I crammed as much as I could into my already overcrowded carry-on bag, I still had to pay a hefty supplementary fee. So, when packing for a trip to Spain last spring, I decided to limit myself to only three books. For the guide book, I selected the trusty Michelin, since it has the most in-depth information about the sights in each city (though I did include some photocopied pages of walking tours and restaurants from Fodor and Frommer). I also selected two books to read, both of which I sampled before I left, so that I was sure that I would want to read them on the trip. The flight over to Spain went smoothly. The airport lines at JFK were short, so we breezed through check-in. Between the long wait for departure, the hold over in Madrid, and the terrible airline movie choices, by the time we arrived in Barcelona, I had already finished the first book (Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point — a terrific guide for learning how to start marketing trends). The first few days we stayed with friends in a very small suburban coastal town — Arenys de Mar, just north of Costa Brava. They speak no English, and so all of the books on the two 36 inch bookshelves in their apartment were in Spanish. Naturally, I did spend a bit of time looking them over. The top shelf contained a large collection of coffee table type books. These included travel photos of regions of Spain, world geography and collections from the great European Art museums. To my surprise they told us that these books were Christmas gifts from their local bank. I told them that back home we were lucky if our banks gave us a calendar. The bottom shelf contained a large set of books all in matching leatherette bindings. I knelt down for a closer look, and to my dismay, they turned out to be the complete works of Danielle Steele in Spanish translation. So, for my bedtime reading, I started my second book — Boyle’s The Arc of Justice, the 2005 winner of the National Book Award for non-fiction, and a riveting account of a famous racial segregation battle in Detroit in the early 20th century. By the fourth day of a fourteen day trip, I realized that I was in grave danger of running out of reading material. On the fifth day we bade our friends goodbye and headed for Barcelona where I could begin my search for something else to read in earnest. The week before I left home I read Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, so my immediate reaction when I stepped off the train was how calm the city seemed. Mr. Orwell’s Barcelona was a teeming city with blood-stained bodies littering the Ramblas. Modern Barcelona is nothing like that. We saw all the sites, the wonderful Gothic quarter where the sounds of the street musicians echo in the dark, narrow, high-walled passage ways, the Gaudi buildings and the Parc Guell. I stopped in a few new bookshops, but left empty handed. The English language books were few, and I had either read them, or was not really interested. I was not yet desperate for any old book to read, since I had not finished the Boyle, and I still had a least a week before the long flight. We took an overnight train to Madrid, to meet some New York friends for a one week tour of Southern Spain. To my surprise, in the late spring, Madrid becomes a giant book fair. All along the wide boulevards near the Prado, at least one hundred temporary book stalls are set up. Dealers sell everything from new bestsellers to antiquarian books to scientific tomes. I saw a table with a stack of the Kama Sutra in Spanish right next to a stack of books about Pope John Paul. I am always a bit taken aback by what gets translated. Dan Brown, I can understand, but Richard Powers? Nobody reads him in English, so who would read him in the Spanish translations? Our friends had just arrived from New York, and while they napped, I spent a delightful afternoon, looking for James Joyce in Spanish as well as something in English to read on the plane home. I was more successful in the former quest than the latter. Several of the kiosks offered small boxes of used English language books for sale. These were old dog-eared paperback bestsellers, mostly romance novels and self-help. I saw a very nice one volume reproduction of Description d’Egypte in French which I considered buying but did not want to add another 12-15 pounds to my luggage — it was smaller than the original, but still a substantial book. I did manage to find a two volume paperback Spanish translation of Joyce’s Ulysses. I have a Penguin type edition I bought in Puerto Rico, but this set has more character. There is no glossy cover, and it is the type of book a poor Spanish intellectual would sit and read all day over one cup of espresso in a local café. (Note: For my first time readers, one of my goals in life is to obtain a copy of Ulysses in every language that it has been translated into.) Spain has only one department store chain, oddly named El Corte Ingles. Madrid has a very large branch with several annexes, one of which is a two story bookstore. I went over looking for a hardcover copy of Ulysses as well as something to read in English, but left empty handed. I did learn something interesting, though. All of the bookstores carry the Spanish version of the Penguin Paperback classics. There are hundreds of books in the set, but instead of arranging them in alphabetical order, the books are arranged on the shelves in the order that they are added to the series. If you are looking for a classic, you need to use a long laminated plastic card which hangs from the shelves by a small chain. You look up the author and the title, find the publication number, and then search the shelves for that number. Since I did not find anything new to read in Madrid, each night I slowed my reading pace, and read fewer pages trying to savor my book. I saw lots of old churches, synagogues and mosques in Toledo, Cordoba, and Grenada, but no bookstores selling English books, except for guides and souvenir pictorials. I managed to pick up a few books about the old synagogues, but nothing that I would classify as airplane reading. In Tangiers, I found a bookstall in the Casbah, left the tour group and braved the beggars, only to discover that all of the books were different editions of the Qur’an. The very last day, we were staying in Marbella and spent the morning at the beach in Puerto Banus. I had purchased a T shirt at El Corte Ingles in Madrid, and discovered that I had misread the size, so I left the beach early to try to exchange it at the Puerto Banus branch. Lo and behold, right across the street from the department store was a large, brightly lit bookstore. Its name was Bookworld Espana and it contained only English language books. Puerto Banus is the British Florida, where many well to do retired British people escape the winter. I left with an interesting book, Don Quixote’s Delusions: Travels in Castilian Spain — at last something to enjoy on the long plane ride home. We boarded a small plane in Marbella to take us to Madrid, and spent the short ride discussing the trip with our friends. We had never traveled together before, but all agreed it had been a great success. One friend became an expert in removing the heads and tails from cooked shrimp, so that his wife would be able to eat her dinner at night (that is how they served shrimp all throughout Spain). Another friend repeated his travel advice so often it became a mantra. “Don’t stand when you can sit. Don’t sit when you can sleep.” I learned never to travel without at least one extra book. We landed in Madrid to change to our plane for New York. The airport is huge, with many concourses, and since we were given no direction from the airline, we came very close to missing the connecting flight. By the time we boarded the second plane I was exhausted, and promptly fell asleep. When I woke up, we had landed in New York. Groggily, I looked down and saw that the long sought-after book had remained unopened in my lap. Joe Perlman operates Mostly Useful Fictions out of East Northport, NY and can be contacted at http://www.mostlyusefulfictions.com.

The Art of the Book: A Review of Some Recent European and American Work in Typography, Page Decoration and Binding, by Charles Holme. London: The Studio, 1914. Beauty and the Book: Fine Editions and Cultural Distinction in America, by Megan L. Benton. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000. It is always interesting to view books as works of art, and The Art of the Book edited by Charles Holme and Beauty and the Book by Megan L. Benton explore just that territory. Written 85 years apart and emphasizing different facets of the publishing industry, these two books provide an interesting picture of the world of fine editions from the middle of the 19th century to the early part of the 20th century. There is a surprising amount of overlap, and the information in each dovetails nicely. The chief value of this book is not so much in the essays, which are sometimes remarkably brief, but in the numerous illustrations of title pages, initial letters, headers, ornaments, colophons, fonts, and composition. Fine binding is also well represented with clear photos of wonderful examples of tooling, inlays, and various leathers. The elegance and variety of this work is shown in books from Great Britain, Germany, France, Austria, Hungary, Sweden, and America. These illustrations and photographs delight the eye and the mind with their symmetry and balance. They are exquisite. This book itself is a work of art. The text is set in a block upon the page, ornaments denote new paragraphs, and there are handsome, wide margins. The content is readable and remarkably clear despite having been written in 1914, keeping in mind that language changes over time. It cites many presses and printers of note. This volume is well worth acquiring, and a 1990 reprint from Dorset Press is widely available. Beauty and the Book, by contrast, covers the period after World War I through the early 1930s. It is a history and a social commentary on the fine book world as it existed at that time. The author recounts the explosive rise of the fine book and its subsequent fall. The following is from her introduction. “Attention here centers on the broader social and cultural phenomenon of fine publishing. The study therefore encompasses the great majority of postwar fine books, the several hundred titles produced by the era’s leading commercial . . . establishments. Among the best known and most active were the Grabhorn Press of San Francisco; the Pyson Printers in New York; Boston’s Merrymount Press; and the firms of William Edwin Rudge and John Henry Nash, located in Mt. Vernon, New York, and San Francisco, respectively. As the author explains, common books had flooded the market by 1920. They were highly affordable due to the massive industrial production of paper. It helped, too, that affluence abounded in the United States. To a certain extent, books were a measure of luxury and leisure, but more than that, they were a measure of culture—class, distinction, and taste. Small wonder, then, that fine books began to make inroads. The use of handmade paper, hand typesetting, and the slower production of small print runs were designed to restore “luster to the cultural entity of the book.” Indeed, producing a fine book was viewed as separate from the industrial and commercial venture. Yet, paradoxically, the production of a fine book was a commercial venture, and even if viewed from a lofty height, it remained a business which demanded profits in order to survive. The publishers and printers of fine books seemed to hold in their minds simultaneously both the noble calling and the need for sound business practices in their day-to-day dealings. The author presents this period as heady and intoxicating for the producers and purchasers of fine books. She focuses principally on the production of the page—the typography, illustrations, and margins—rather than the binding. Surprisingly, publishers and printers were less interested in fine bindings, and as long as the books were adequately bound they were satisfied. Eventually, though, the bubble burst. Fine books flooded the market and the public became jaded as the downturn of the economy further depressed demand and value. Never again would such fine books be offered in such profusion. It was an amazing period while it lasted, and the author recounts this unprecedented cultural expansion from its first stirrings to the final flourish. Each chapter is an essay covering an aspect of that era regarding fine books. The relationship between printers, publishers, fine books, and the process of creating them is explored. From these tales book builders may be deemed an eccentric lot who are both creative and opinionated. Highly readable and well-documented, this book presents an era of American history from a perspective not usually viewed. Explanations are clear, and the author merges history and social commentary smoothly to provide a clear glimpse of the book world at that time. Although some examples of typography are presented, the book’s focus is on why and how these exquisite volumes came to be created. Both The Art of the Book and Beauty and the Book provide a marvelously in-depth view of the book world in its best attend-the-opera finery. They introduce a facet of elegance not often seen in the era of mass publishing, and they complement each other well in their coverage of information. Taken together they provide a nice running narrative on the evolution of fine printing going forward into the early 20th century. Lynn Wienck operates The Chisholm Trail Bookstore out of Duncan, OK and can be contacted at http://www.ctbooksstore.com.

Books, Friends, and Bibliophilia: Reminiscences of an Antiquarian Bookseller, by Anton Gerits. New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2004. Anton Gerits’ reminiscences start off on a very personal level. His was a rather awkward childhood, filled with youthful soul searching that blossomed into a permanent state of introspection. From the introduction, “there were painful memories of mistakes, of selfish acts, of all kinds of unhappy incidents that had caused old sorrow and guilt that I had carefully buried in my mind and that now came to the surface once more.” Not what I am used to in booksellers, particularly of the blustery American or British type, but tolerable if there was lots to learn about the profession amid all the self-reflection. But Mr. Gerits also establishes very quickly that he does not have a very good memory for details, bibliographic or otherwise, and that it would be hard for him to do justice to the task at hand. His father was a stern tailor in The Hague, and as The Netherlands went from the Depression to German occupation, and it became obvious that his son would not be joining any religious orders as anticipated, he was allowed to bicycle to a rural region of the country for safety and sustenance. When Gerits the Younger was still stealing his first kisses from farm girls on page 24, I began to have some doubts. In short order, however, the Germans are pushed out, and young Anton secures a job interview with the prestigious Nijhoff Company back in The Hague. Established in 1853, with roots going back even further, Martinus Nijhoff and his descendants were true bibliophiles. Although they admired fine bindings and exceptional printing, they were mostly interested in the contents of books, and their goal was to preserve and advance learning. It is explained to Anton that he was in for a six year training period filled with reading catalogs, studying bibliographies, and pulling books, and that during this time he would not be contributing much to the company. Not that many years earlier his parents would have paid for this apprenticeship, but as that practice was falling out of favor, they would provide a small salary during this stage. When he was called in by Wouter Nijhoff Pzn after six months and offered a position in the publishing department which he had first applied for, Anton chose to stay with the antiquarian department. “‘I hoped so,’ he said, smiling, and I think that from that moment on we were friends, although we would never have said so.” If new booksellers ardently interested in the profession could only read one chapter, the second, “From Necktie to Bowtie,” is a wonderful primer on learning about the world of antiquarian books. Although the methodology it chronicles has sadly disappeared, there are still many lessons to learn. Frederick Muller, who trained an earlier generation of booksellers in the 1800s and whose shadow was always in the room at Nijhoff’s, was said by Menno Hertzberger to be, “the one who, at least for Holland, founded the antiquarian book-trade on a bibliographical footing.” And bibliographical it was. In what they called the “catalogue-room,” the walls were all filled with reference library works, from important bibliographies to obscure pamphlets. The large “pricing table” sat in the middle of this room, and huge piles of books were sorted, described on white sheets of paper with “dip pens,” and priced by the inner circle. Mr. H. E. Kern was the expert who devoted himself to Anton’s apprenticeship, and joining Mr. Nijhoff at this table were Henk J. van Tienhoven and other notable bookmen. Although Anton was not allowed to write catalog descriptions for some time, and then only for modern books, his work space was at this table. “Sitting here gave me the opportunity from the start of my career to follow the discussions about the bibliographical descriptions and the prices.” In another room in a large fire-proof safe, title archives were kept in 128 wooden drawers. The file cards they contained were divided into “living titles” and “dead titles,” depending on whether they were in stock or sold. Recorded on these “titles” were the purchase price in code and the asking price, many in the hand of founder Martinus Nijhoff, his son Wouter, and Wouter’s nephew of the same name (hence the Pyn, or son of Paul, to distinguish them). A certain bow-tied future head of the antiquarian department (he started wearing them when his regular tie kept ending up in the middle of piles he was pulling from the warehouse) added many more entry points during his tenure. These included the date of acquisition and sale, the name of the buyer, and other customers who were looking for the same title. For important works, details from other bookseller catalogs offering the same title and prices realized at auction were also added to the cards. Anton proved himself useful more speedily than his employers first anticipated, and he quickly rose through the ranks. Even such soundly established firms need to modernize, and his claims to fame include recognizing the importance of and gaining access to Eastern European antiquarian works languishing behind the Iron Curtain; as well as the primacy of periodicals and ephemera. His command of many languages was a major asset in this pursuit. The confines of this review do not permit much mention of the treasures that passed through his hands throughout a long career, but they are truly breathtaking, and will of course never be seen again in such profusion. Collections were another specialty, and he handled large numbers of them on such subjects as the emancipation of Jews in France; Protestant history; the revolutions of 1848; early newspapers and satirical journals; works on and by Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier; the Austro-Hungarian monarchy; Central Africa; Dutch and other plays (one numbered over 2,300 dating from the late 1600s to 1830); and Mazarinades, or writings for and against the famous Cardinal Mazarin during the 1830-1841 revolt known as the Fronde (one of which contained 2,440 pamphlets). Collections of French political trial material were very important and instructive, as they contained reports, transcriptions of confiscated documents, witness examinations, and speeches of the prosecution and defense that were mostly stenographic copies only available to the judges. In 1968 he laid out $3,300 as a favor to another bookseller who needed to unload 9,000 laxly counted pieces of early printed music, most with engraved covers. It turned out to be more like 20,000 pieces, and was flipped for $34,000 the following year to the National Library of Canada. There are many funny and interesting anecdotes throughout. Breaking Mr. Nijhoff’s antique globe as a new employee; how the young women of the order department pulled more than old slips in the archival cellar; taking inventory in the huge warehouse for the first time in over a century; buying trips to Europe and the U.S.; failing castles and manor houses in France that allowed his colleagues to reduce formerly overcrowded library bookshelves in such a way that their owners did not appear to be going broke; and one colleague deceiving another into flying to Malta for a collection of fifteenth century books that did not exist. Gerits provides many thumbnail sketches of the famous and infamous booksellers of the day, and recounts great friendships with the likes of Michel Bernstein. There is lots of local color from his travels and adventures, and much on the trials and rewards of the profession. Most illuminating were the sections on the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of The Netherlands (NVvA) founded in 1935, and the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers (ILAB) founded in 1947. Our fledgling Independent Online Booksellers Association is facing many of the same challenges they have overcome or are still struggling with. Gerits was president of both these organizations for fairly long terms, and he cites our individualistic natures, management by improvisation rather than strong planning, the difficulty of getting members to help with projects and committee work, limited financial means, and an unwillingness to discipline colleagues who are established and powerful. An example of this last occurred when one business caused others to be audited by recording fictitious transactions for tax purposes, and they reached an agreement that would not have been extended to a novice. In what comes close to qualifying as an international bookseller crisis, a dealer at an ILAB book fair in connection with an ILAB congress in Tokyo touched a raw nerve when he was overheard defending his high prices by saying something close to, “That does not matter. The Japanese will pay them.” Nijhoff Company was a rather formal but happy family when Anton Gerits joined the firm in 1950. His observations on creeping corporatism and merger mania in the decades to come as they apply to this great book palace are very trenchant. His career took several interesting twists and turns before (and after) finally leaving in disgust, culminating in the formation of A. Gerits & Son run by Arnoud Gerits as we know it today. (I just took the virtual panoramic tour from the website and fear it would blow old Martinus Nijhoff’s socks off!) Two things nagged me as I proceeded through the book. The first was the large amount of unique Dutch material that was being sold outside of the country, often to libraries in places like the American Midwest and Japan. Over 1,000 rare Dutch historical pamphlets, for example, were purchased by the National Library of Australia in 1966 for a mere $8,850. There are many such examples where the material was more important and the price was much lower. The low prices themselves were also puzzling, even accounting for inflation. In many instances, a single piece today would sell for more than the entire collection it came from sold for as recently as the mid to late 1900s. Obviously values have escalated due to a variety of factors such as collector interest, but it is still jaw-dropping to see how low they were at the time. Remarking on Nijhoff’s 800th catalog, entitled The Freedom of the Press in the Dutch Republic (1581-1795), and consisting of 230 rarities set aside by Gerits for that occasion, he admits, “These 1968 prices seem ridiculous in the light of the market-value of such books now.” Gerits does not address aiding and abetting the loss of national heritage until late into the work. He basically explains that the Dutch government was simply not interested in paying what the material was worth. In his experience, librarians have a certain disdain for booksellers, and it is worse between national libraries and local booksellers. Why? “Maybe it hides some jealousy. Never having the courage themselves to accept the risks of being a dealer, and having chosen a safer existence in their profession, academics probably envy the freedom, independence, and adventurous life of the antiquarian bookseller.” On top of this, Nijhoff’s had a reputation for being pricey, perhaps because, “It sometimes happens that such myths come into existence through some trivial incident and then acquire a life of their own.” The important thing is that somebody wanted this material, and that large collections of related items tend to be taken care of and cataloged rather than neglected and dispersed. Still . . . As for my initial reservations about all that introspection and sensitivity, it makes Gerits’ narrative that much more understandable and enjoyable. His stated need for respect and recognition, for example, clearly bore rich fruit. And when he raised an alarm by admitting a fuzzy memory for titles, dates, and amounts, that was not the mere false modesty so conventional in introductions to older writings. Luckily the Nijhoff title cards were safely transferred to the Royal Library in The Hague before the firm was fully ravaged, and he toiled there for hundreds of hours, in addition to many other researches and verifications. As a matter of fact, one of the best aspects of the work is the extraordinary number of sales that are reported. The bookselling industry is far too tight-lipped about pricing, and Books, Friends, and Bibliophilia should serve as a model for such retrospective disclosures. In closing, this is a highly entertaining and informative contribution to the field by a learned man who bestrode the ancient and modern eras of bookselling, and it comes highly recommended. Some excerpts follow. “I worked on the first floor of the splendid building at the Lange Voorhout. On that first floor was the so-called room 13 [across from the catalogue-room], with a view onto the Voorhout. In this room Wouter Nijhoff Pzn and H. E. Kern had their work tables opposite each other. The walls were covered with books from floor to ceiling, except for one wall, where a beautiful old-style bookcase with glass doors stood. This bookcase contained only very expensive items. The door of room 13 was always open, unless strictly confidential staff matters were being discussed. And the room was always filled with a thick haze from cigars and cigarettes, for both Nijhoff and Kern were heavy smokers. When in the first week of my presence in the antiquarian department I opened a window, Mr. Kern shouted: ‘Gerits, close that window! Mr. Nijhoff and I do not like fresh air!’” “Once Kern even yanked an expensive book from a client’s hands because the man appeared not to understand its importance, and he was not allowed to buy it.” “As soon as the mail had been sorted, the five groups were carried to room 13 and placed on a table where Mr. Nijhoff looked through each stack while the heads of the various departments stood around the table. He commented on various letters, gave instructions, and asked questions. A department-head would have to explain or justify his decisions, especially when a complaint appeared among the letters. In these sessions the impressive memory of Wouter Nijhoff Pzn played an important role. Nobody could lie because Nijhoff never failed to remember what staff members or other employees had said weeks before; and when he asked someone to check something and report to him, nobody could hope that Nijhoff would forget this request. These time-consuming sessions around the mail were detested by quite a few of the staff members, but Mr. Nijhoff achieved two important goals by them: he remained very well informed about everything that went on in the company, and the various heads of the department were daily confronted with each other’s problems and with everyone’s successes and failures. These sessions thus served a unifying function, the significance of which can hardly be overestimated.” “I am lucky enough to have known the period when complete runs of scholarly journals and periodicals were collected, collated, and, if necessary, bound or rebound.” “A large number of atlases were in stock in those days. I remember at least two Ortelius atlases, a beauty of a Janssonius atlas, and a complete Theatrum urbium with its many topographical plans and views of European cities, which we sold in 1962 to Belgium. At least three Blaeu atlases were on the shelves when I entered Nijhoff’s, a Spanish, a French, and a Dutch set. The most beautiful Dutch copy of all was the property of Wouter Nijhoff Pzn himself and was kept in his reception room. The nine folio volumes, printed between 1648 and 1665 and containing some 600 contemporary hand-colored maps and plans, were bound in red morocco at the office of Blaeu.” “As a matter of fact it was the Nijhoff policy to pay smaller dealers very quickly. ‘It is the best form of publicity,’ Mr. Nijhoff used to say.” “Why is it considered self-evident that antiquarian booksellers make their expertise available free of charge?” “The price Mr. Kern paid to his brother’s heirs seemed to me quite low. When I mentioned this matter to Mr. Kern he answered laconically, ‘It is sufficient. They do not need more.’ At that very moment I made up my mind never to allow myself to use such an argument when buying, and I believe I have succeeded. However, when dealers asked too low a price for a book I accepted the offer without scruple because in my opinion you may take advantage of an expert’s lack of knowledge. In the case of heirs of a collector, who often have little or no idea of the value of that part of the inheritance, you should, in my opinion, act differently. That is not always easy, for if you offer too much you run the risk that the reaction will be, ‘Ah, if it is worth that much, we will think it over a bit longer,’ and they will use your offer to try to get more elsewhere. To protect oneself in such situations is not easy; but it is not impossible. Once, when an old lady entered Nijhoff’s with a small but extremely rare pamphlet of only forty-eight pages that she had discovered among the papers of her deceased husband, I found a good solution. The pamphlet was the famous Breedan-raedt aende Vereende Nederlandsche provintien (Broad advice to the United Dutch Provinces), Antwerp: F. van Duynen, 1649. It is one of the most important documents concerning New Netherland. It deals with the deception of the directors of the West Indian Company by the general director of New Netherland, Willem Kieft. Peter Stuyvesant succeeded him. Stuyvesant had much to put right and executed this task with great vehemence, which in its turn, is criticized in this pamphlet. It also deals with Brazil and criticizes the Portuguese as well as the Dutch. Historians still disagree about the identity of the author. I was afraid that if I offered some hundreds of Dutch guilders the lady would walk away with her pamphlet, so I said that I believed that I could guarantee her at least one hundred Dutch guilders, but that I had a client who would probably be prepared to pay more. If she would allow me to keep the pamphlet for one day, I would try my best for her. She agreed, and I gave her a down-payment of f100 ($45). When she returned the next day I told her with enthusiasm that the client had made a generous offer and that I could hand over to her another f500 ($226), at that time a very good price. She was extremely grateful, and the pamphlet lay on my desk; the real buyer remained unknown to her.” “During one of my wanderings in Braunschweig I arrived at a beautiful cemetery, where light blue crocuses were moving gently in a soft wind and spreading their scent under a pale February sun. Suddenly I found myself before the grave of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, which was adorned with a lovely little bed of winter violets. After such an experience, holding the first edition of Lessing’s Nathan der Weise (1779) or a copy of his at the time sensational so-called ‘Reimarus-Fragmente’ entitled Von Duldung der Deisten (1774) is no longer only a commercial event.” “When during the last years of my career when I was confronted with modern automation, which enables the antiquarian bookseller to save long descriptions with just one key and where an efficient search-engine makes it possible to retrieve a title without being obliged to look through long files, I sometimes asked myself whether an excellent way of training the memory of younger assistants had not been lost.” “Fortunately, even in modern times the fear of work still exists and often offers the ardent collector and the industrious antiquarian bookseller splendid opportunities.” “I stuck to my bow-tie for the rest of my life. In Japan it would earn me the nickname of Mr. Butterfly, a not unwelcome distinction. Soon it proved to be an effective promotional device. At large gatherings, receptions, and the like, I never needed to introduce myself. The man with the bow-tie was Mr. Gerits.” “It is often said that the greatest enemies of books are water and fire. There is, however, one greater and more frequent threat to large concentrations of books, be it a modern bookshop, an antiquarian bookstore, or a library. That bigger danger is an indifferent or inexpert management. Usually the two go together.” “That the future will offer sufficient potential for the antiquarian book business seems certain (I will speak about some encouraging aspects later), but only hardworking and inventive individuals will succeed.” Shawn Purcell operates Balopticon Books & Ephemera and can be contacted at http://www.balopticon.com.

How do I even begin to describe what it was like to be on the faculty of the Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar—the booksellers’ boot camp—for the first time? Exhilarating, exhausting, exciting—and one of the best weeks I have spent as a bookseller! But no—it was not a vacation—except in the sense that a vacation is a break from the normal routine that can recharge you and help you to return fresher and more energized. Some of the comments from the Class of 2006 are posted on the seminar website (Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar), but I will quote one here: “I am currently implementing many of the practical applications and I am now directed to the areas where I know I need to ‘learn’ more. And this along with a notebook chocked full of real, usable information, contacts, etc. I have attended scores of conferences over the years in several fields, and this coursework was as well organized, classy, attentive to detail and interesting. All of the faculty were ‘characters’ and not shy about straight out talk or tough questions or saying “I don’t know”. I cannot recommend the seminar strongly enough, but it was not for sissies as far as the hours. Your money’s worth??? YOU BET!!” And a word of warning: if you think it might be enjoyable to see something of Colorado and the Colorado Springs area while you are at the seminar, plan on going early—otherwise Pike’s Peak will remain just a mountain in the distance! There is no “spare time” or “free time” during the week itself—you live, think, and eat bookselling. It is only when you are in the middle of the seminar that you realize how apt the nickname “booksellers’ boot camp” is! With a wide range of students’ background and experience, and an even wider range of their knowledge of bookselling and hopes for the seminar, the curriculum has to balance the amount of time spent on different areas—it has to include both depth and breadth in discussing books and bookselling and cram that all into one week—and we all know that bookselling is something you can spend a lifetime learning and still not learn everything. One of the ways that the seminar handles this mission is by long, packed days, careful attention to time and an intensive focus that did not let up even on the “breaks” or at lunchtime (most days, the faculty sat at different tables, so “seminarians” could sit with them and continue discussing books and bookselling). A significant part of the learning was in one-to-one conversations, or small group discussions either with faculty or just among the students themselves. The curriculum is also evolving to confront the changing realities of today’s bookselling world, but without neglecting the traditional knowledge base that a professional bookseller needs. Since this was my first year, I have no basis for comparison, but other faculty members commented on what a dynamic group of students were at the seminar. A large part of what makes an experience like this so valuable is not just the information given by the faculty but also that shared by the attendees from their years of experience! As a (former) teacher, I was dismayed when halfway through the week, a student asked in conversation a very basic question: “what is a trade paperback?” While I was able to answer that specific question then, the reality is that the seminar does not, and cannot in one week, answer every student’s questions. It is easy to assume that dealing with concrete “how to” topics can be more valuable to beginning booksellers—and the seminar addresses many very specific issues, ranging from details on packing for the mail order bookseller to Dan Gregory’s marketing presentation (an hour that contained enough ideas that would in itself justify the expense of the seminar) to the use of reference materials and how to approach librarians (another extremely valuable presentation given by Dan DeSimone, a bookseller for 25 years and now a Curator at the Library of Congress). And even though I am a bookseller who loves scouting and pride myself on being pretty good at it, I picked up several great tips from Michael Ginsberg’s session on scouting! Although many specific presentations focused on the practical to a large extent, that is not—in my opinion—where the real value of this seminar lies. Rather it is in opening up to booksellers the idea that they do not have to deal in “ordinary” books, but can become involved with the best and most significant and interesting books. It is in creating a sense of limitless possibilities—in telling booksellers that, yes, they can control both their business and how much money they can make—and then in showing them what they need to know to do this. Almost anyone can teach “how-to” methods, but I think the Colorado seminar is unique in its ability to convey the sense of what bookselling, at its best, can be—and I think that the uniqueness is due to the quality of those booksellers who have kept the seminar going year after year, ranging from Ed Glaser, who has given of his time, energy and knowledge for the entire 28 year history of the seminar, to Michael Ginsburg, Rob Rulon-Miller, and newer participants like Tom Congalton. They present, as booksellers, an example of collegiality, professionalism, and generosity that is unmatched. A recurring theme was that other booksellers are not your competitors; they are your colleagues, that helping other booksellers will help you, and even that booksellers can be your best customers. It is also important to emphasize that the seminar does not end at the end of the week. Since so much is covered and so quickly, the fat binder both extends the information presented and becomes a resource that can be consulted over and over again as a reminder of what was covered. The students are told that they can call upon anyone on the faculty afterwards for help. A mailing list was started before the actual seminar and it is still going on. More importantly, I am sure that some of those attending have already formed relationships with other seminarians that will survive for years of their bookselling careers. And finally, the worth of the seminar will be determined by how many of those ideas are put into practice! The ABAA has a clear sense of how significant the seminar can be, and it is reflected in their membership requirements: attendance at the seminar is worth six months of full-time experience as a bookseller. Chris Volk operates Bookfever along with Shep Iiams out of the Sierra foothills of Amador County, CA and can be contacted at http://www.bookfever.com.

I had been hearing about the Colorado Antiquarian Book Market Seminar, as it is formally termed, for a number of years. Sometime a few years back I started thinking that it might be fun to go. So, with that in mind, I began following the emails and notices that showed up in various chat and news groups online. I gradually became aware of the occasional ads that appeared in book publications such as Fine Books and Collections and Book Source Magazine. This year I attended the 2006 seminar, which was held from August 5th through the 12th. First a little more background on my decision to attend. In the early days of the Internet book selling was laughably easy. You bought a lot of books, priced them for something or other and sold them relatively quickly. It turned out that even I could do it pretty well. As time went by it seemed that this was becoming apparent to everyone with a computer. So the pressure began. With the price competition began the race to the bottom. Before the Internet there was no really reliable way to know how many books were out there of a given title. As book prices became more transparent the high prices being realized brought books out of the barns, attics, trunks and bookshelves of America. What was previously thought to be a good book was now found to be a mediocre book and what was thought to be a mediocre book now became fodder for the soon to arrive penny sellers. I had always admired penny sellers who bought books by the truckload and sold thousands of them every day. They subsisted mainly on the few pennies in shipping profit they gleaned from each book that they often sold for one penny each. They were doing America a great service in spreading literacy and knowledge and making a profit while doing it. But they were driving many booksellers to the wall. I had no desire to be one of those standing resignedly, back to the wall, with a blindfold across his eyes and a cigarette in his mouth. I had started very modestly, worked hard and gradually built up a decent inventory. It had become clear to me early on that my only salvation was to buy those books that were sufficiently scarce not to decline in value as more and more books were driven to market. It seems that at some point soon fewer and fewer of the modestly uncommon books will be appearing and even the cheaper books will again turn and head back up a bit. Surely at some point the reserves will become at least partially exhausted. For most of the cheap books, say less than $25 today, it seems unlikely to me that anything will ever save them—not even time. As sources dry up, and long before retail prices began to rise significantly, the cost of acquisition increases. Increased acquisition costs are a direct result of new sellers willing to work for less, a lot less, maybe even nothing. I found it no longer feasible to compete with hobby sellers. The more so because most of them seemed blithely unaware that their business was a hobby. There was another factor that concerned me as well. I was regularly logging 80 hours or more a week. I knew that it wouldn’t be too many more years before this would begin to lose its attraction. I had been there before in other businesses and wanted to avoid that downward spiral at all costs. It was fun and I wanted it to stay fun. So with these concerns turning in my mind I felt that I had to get a different perspective on book dealing. Maybe I had to get many different perspectives. Up until now I had done only Internet sales, some being fixed price sales and some auctions. I don’t mean to imply that I wasn’t doing well. Actually I was doing better than I had any right to expect, up 20%+ every year. If I had thought this would go on indefinitely I could have slept peacefully. But I didn’t see this going on forever. I felt I had to find new venues, new philosophies, new perspectives, new sources and new customers. In a word I had to reengineer my business or run the risk of perishing as I continued upon what I felt was a perilous path. There was another concern which made this cross country jaunt to Colorado almost a perfect fit for me. With recently increasing sales I was badly in need of income tax deductions. You might wonder why I was so concerned if sales were on the uptick. The book business, while not exactly boom and bust, is not a “steady as she goes” business either. It needs careful tending. Ignore your income stream at your peril! I needed just a few more tricks in my basket than I already had if I was going to feel at all secure. So I called and spoke to Kathy Lindeman several times. She was quite forthcoming about the ins and outs of travel, housing and so forth. I owe her a lot and want to thank her again right here. Her assistance in getting me oriented was invaluable. She held my hand while I decided what the best arrangement would be for me. I hadn’t been in Colorado for more than 25 years. I had passed through once when I was living in Nevada and had found the people so friendly that I seriously considered moving there. I am happy to say I found them just as helpful this time as I did the first. While I was there I checked the real estate ads as I usually do in a new area. There are many very beautiful homes available much more cheaply than is common elsewhere. It is high desert with low humidity. The elevation is about 6000 feet. Annual snowfall is 33 inches. So far, so good, then I found that low temperatures reached -10 degrees F or so. So I’ll stay in New Jersey a little longer. I have half a dozen online travel discount sites that I use. They are farefox.com, cheaptickets.com, air-gorilla.com, allcheapfares.com, travelticker.hotwire.com, and priceline.com. To my surprise I found the best fare by a considerable margin on a site I didn’t care for much, orbitz.com. I made a $350 deposit by Visa over the phone to hold my spot, made arrangements for a place to stay, purchased the airline tickets, and I was in! I stayed at the Colorado Inn. This is on campus. It was purchased by Colorado College recently and refurbished. It is quite adequate and a cut above college dorms but just barely. There is an Econo Lodge right next door. Most seminarians chose to stay at one of these. There are a few other choices of lodging including a couple of bed and breakfasts and a Sheraton about 2 miles away. But I wanted to be in the heart of things. As it was I was just about 3 ½ blocks from the cafeteria and from most of the classes. So it worked out well for me and I was able to walk almost everywhere. At the Colorado Inn there are laundry facilities downstairs. Food shopping opportunities are just about non-existent within 2-3 miles. My plan, which is the recommended one, included breakfast and lunch with the students. All but 2 of the dinners were provided by the seminar. In addition there are frequent snacks. So meals are definitely not a problem. Downtown is about 8 blocks and a pleasant and safe stroll away. There are many bars, restaurants and several book stores. Basically a college town within a town. The city of Colorado Springs itself has 600,000 people and is mainly supported by the two military bases there. Many of the military personnel retire and take another job in the tech or the security industry. Because of the difficulty in making connections from Atlantic City I flew in a day early and left a day late. I could have flown much cheaper into Denver which is 80 miles away and taken a shuttle. Full details are provided in the registry materials. However the people I talked to who had flown into Denver had not found the arrangement particularly congenial to their needs. The next morning we began congregating in the cafeteria at about 7. The food was like cafeteria food all around the world but still quite a bit better than I remember it being during my own long distant university days. We were given full materials for the course including a hefty notebook. The notebook is nicely laid out with sections on everything from where to stay to how to paginate an antiquarian work. This contained invaluable materials compiled from the experiences of the best minds in the business. We also received daily handouts and amplified notes for each class. The whole thing was very carefully thought through and cleanly executed. This is a very valuable resource and one to treasure. At 8:30 sharp class began. Morning classes ran 3 ½ hours with a 15 minute break. Afternoons about the same. For the most part we ran 6 classes a day. And none of these, and I do mean none, were lightweight fill-ins. One thing that struck me was how often staff members mentioned that they learned a lot every year from attending. There are so many experts from so many areas. Then came a breathless staccato-like presentation by Dan Gregory on How to Market Your Book Business. Later on he followed up with Technology of the Book Trade. It was almost impossible to take notes because of the speed at which he covered the work. And it was ALL critical material. He generously agreed to email us expanded notes after the seminar. He obviously firmly believed in his message of promoting your business. If people look at your business card, bookmarks or whatever and don’t say “Wow!” then they aren’t good enough. Book selling is story telling. Dan believes that 90% of ABE and Biblio customers are collectors. I especially liked Dan’s summary of communicating with customers and advertising. Customers don’t think Customers are blind Customers have short attention spans Customers are more valuable than your books NEVER underestimate you customers Ed Glaser and Dan DeSimone gave a session on Reference Books. The bibliography handout for this talk alone may well be worth the cost of the course. I have since picked up some of these that I never knew existed such as the English Short Title Catalogue. Tom and Heidi Congalton contributed a copy of First Editions of Dr. Seuss Books which I won at their auction later on. I finally have the title of the mysterious and often cited “Wing” and will be picking that up soon. Angela Scott presented an amazing display of paper making materials including leathers and papers and a discussion of bookbinding. Dan DeSimone presented an illuminating discussion of book illustrations. Then we wrapped up the day with drinks, alcoholic and otherwise, and eats at a gathering from 7 to 9. Day One was pretty much a template for the days that followed. The average age of the seminarians was a little over 40 and the experience level was from “thinking about it” to “full professional.” The majority had been involved for perhaps a few years and wanted to become more involved. There were also a number of librarians and attendees sponsored by various of the book industries. In the next 4 days there were two microphones in the aisle between the seats. Those with questions would (ideally) line up at the microphones and ask their questions. Additionally there was a question box available to drop queries in. These boxes were emptied after each break. I can’t begin to do justice to the material covered. Each topic would require a paper of its own. The best I can do is to skim the subjects to give you the flavor of the sessions and the materials they cover. And perhaps encourage you to find out more for yourself. I have been a long time reader of the works of Kraus, Rosenbach, and other famous dealers. Unfortunately these books are long on stories and short on method. Here are the methods. After a lifetime of boring and often feckless classes and seminars this whole affair came as the most pleasant of surprises. As I sat in the room gradually the awareness grew on me that I was surrounded by a whole lot of very bright people. I have been to Mensa gatherings that were not half as impressive. Rob Rulon-Miller was the seminar director. His discussion covered the areas of Catalogue Making, Ethics, and Appraisals. His discussion of catalogues I found particularly useful. There were probably close to 100 different catalogues along a back table in stacks from various dealers, and they were laid out in such a manner that it made choosing the format most suitable for my business much easier. I definitely have a color laser printer on my list of acquisitions for next year. We were free to take what we wanted and there was an open discussion about costs, efficacy, production and problems. Rob also spent a fair amount of time on ethics. Although some might find it restrictive, I thought it simply the best way to run a successful business with as little pain as possible. Terry Belanger gave an exhaustive and witty talk on Bibliographic Description, Format and Collation. This covered such esoterica as different types of laid paper, watermarks, counter marks and their origins, pagination, and printer’s marks. It was as intensive as it could reasonably be in the short time available. Printed 18th century folio sheets were handed out to the class to help explain various of the printing processes. We were taught how printers numbered sheets so the binders could fold them to form signatures in 8vo, 12mo, 4to and so on. There was a fascinating talk on paper making and how it advanced. Terry said that there was an old saying that the size of the initial sheet of paper was determined by the length of the arms of the papermaker. By the time he finished it was pretty clear why he had been awarded the coveted “MacArthur” in bibliography. Terry Belanger oversees The Rare Book School at the University of Virginia with auxiliary classes in New York, Baltimore, and Washington DC. These classes are subsidized by the University and the tuition charge is about half of the actual cost. They offer about 30 five day courses each year. Tuition is $845. More information is available at virginia.edu/oldbooks. There was a faculty directed workshop on how to write book descriptions and two more on book pricing. We spent some time in class on this and then broke up into groups in various rather nice rooms. There we submitted our books and descriptions for criticism. The groups were, as always, small, with one or two faculty members assigned to each. There was an on-site tutorial on running a used book store by the Ciletti’s, Mary and Jim. The class was split into two groups and bussed to their Hooked On Books book store. There we were treated to talks on running a book store and a packing demonstration. The inventory was also available at standard book dealer’s discounts to us. The class picked up a fair number of books. Half of the class did this on one of two nights while the other half attended Conservation and Preservation by Dan DeSimone and Angela Scott. Angela does antiquarian restoration and book binding at her shop in Washington DC. Dan is the curator of the Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection of rare books and manuscripts at the Library of Congress. They combined their skills to give an invaluable look into the nuts and bolts of antiquarian works. Displayed were many materials not commonly seen such as rare leathers and papers. Later on Dan DeSimone presented Libraries as Markets for Books. This was a look into a world that is a pole apart from internet bookselling. With this information, and its diligent application, anyone with at least a modicum of talent could gain entry into this area. He covered the area pretty thoroughly including why the library market, identifying potential customers, how to create bibliographical lists and dealing with librarians. Evaluation and Pricing was taught by Ed Glaser, an internationally known specialist in rare and important books in science, technology and medicine. He noted that the keystone for rare books is 1/3, 1/3, 1/3. He explained this as being 1/3 for acquisition, 1/3 for handling and marketing, and 1/3 for profit. Ed covered auctions, price guides, dealer’s price lists, the Internet and other resources in detail. Chris Volk discussed Internet Bookselling as well as Buying on the Internet. She went into various websites and their peculiarities as well as the ability to move books. We discussed dealing with customers and their questions. One of the promotions she offers is gift wrapping—certainly essential for any Internet seller. Chris offered some caveats about buying stock from eBay sellers. Various database programs for book dealers were also discussed both in her talks and Dan Gregory’s. The general consensus was that BookTrakker is the best available setup for controlling your books next to having your own proprietary database custom designed. Mike Ginsberg discussed Book Fairs, Scouting, and gave a session on Auctions. Then he conducted an auction of donated materials, some of which were quite worthwhile and brought good prices. The auction included various reference materials, book related items and a dinner with the faculty. Mike has an interestingly disciplined approach to scouting. He lays out the route ahead to time with specific objectives in mind. His comments on equipment for book fairs was very useful. One tip he gave was, “Always bring a flashlight for the top and bottom shelves that no one can see.” Tom Congalton is the proprietor of Between the Covers Rare Books. He is also co-owner of Allottabooks.com. Tom made the comment that only 10% of his income came from the Internet. This was a sentiment echoed by many of the faculty. His specialty is modern firsts, however he easily fielded questions in any area that came up. He does a number of major shows each year and is well known there. Currently he is chairman of the ABAA membership committee. There was a conducted tour of a number of the downtown bookstores which I did not attend. A CPA, Bradley A. Walberg, conducted a session on taxes and accounting. He specializes in the area of books and maps. The more so as his wife is a book dealer of 20 years standing. I had to skip this talk in order not to miss Dan’s second presentation. I hope that the faculty will address this issue so that future seminarians won’t have to share my disappointment. They were, however, most cooperative in providing substantial outlines of both talks to help us make the decision as to which to attend. During the whole time the faculty were punctilious in making themselves available to answer all questions and give advice where possible. I tried to pick a different table at lunch each day to get a cross section of their philosophies. Everyone was helpful, everyone was gracious and everyone boasted a wealth of experience. A word about the staff which included 5 past ABAA presidents. These men and women are the legends of tomorrow and the frontrunners of today in the rare book trade. They are well worth listening to. Kenny Parolini operates Poor Man’s Books out of Vineland, NJ and can be contacted at http://www.poormansbooks.com.

My name is Joe Perlman and I am the proud owner of Mostly Useful Fictions. The name describes my specialty, which I like to think of as “Useful Fiction” (i.e., twentieth century world literature). I sell what I love, mostly serious fiction, including lots of literature in translation. My journey to becoming a book dealer has been long and meandering. It best described by some lines in a poem called The Waking, by Theodore Roethke: “I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. I learn by going where I have to go.” In college, I majored in Psychology and English, and moved from New England to New York City in 1973 to start graduate school in Educational Psychology. In spite of the heavy work load, I would stop studying around midnight, just as the heat in the apartment building went off, turn on the oven for warmth, and pick up a novel. At the time, I was enchanted by the South American magical realists. Unfortunately, their writing did not lull me to sleep. Rather, I had to fight with myself to put the books down so I could wake up in time for classes. The last vestiges of the Book Row on lower Broadway and 4th Avenue were still in existence at that time, so I spent hours browsing and managed to acquire quite a few books, in spite of my meager student income. In 1983, married with two children and three rejected doctoral dissertation topics, I dropped out of graduate school, left the not for profit world, and accepted a position on Wall Street as a computer programmer trainee at the infamous Drexel Burnham Lambert. I worked for several firms and progressed from trainee to programmer to programming manager. Eventually I left the technical side and became a business analyst specializing in the relationship between banks and brokerage houses. As my income rose, so did the number of books that I was able to buy. By 1985, we left Manhattan for the suburbs. We moved to East Northport on Long Island and my commute to Wall Street grew to nearly two hours each way. I was able to buy and read more books than ever. In spite of the fact that the house had a den with wall to wall bookshelves, I still did not have enough shelf space. Every year the number of cartons of books in the attic increased. I collected modern first editions, South American and Eastern European writers in translation, and writers I fell in love with on the train—Yukio Mishima, Naguib Mahfouz, and William Trevor, to name a few. In the early 1990s I saw an article in Biblio magazine about book collector groups. A Long Island group was mentioned, so I wrote a letter to the secretary asking for information about the group. They sent me an invitation to the next meeting, and I have been a member ever since. The organization, Long Island Book Collectors, meets monthly on Sunday afternoons at Adelphi University. Each meeting is hosted by a member on a rotating basis, and the member either recruits a speaker, or talks about some aspect of their own collections. I spoke several times, and continue to learn a lot from other members. One of the valuable lessons that I learned about collecting was to focus and collect in depth. While I continue to buy modern firsts, I now seriously collect Jack Kerouac (who lived in Northport, Long Island for several years), James Joyce, particularly Ulysses and books about Ulysses, Anne Frank, and my newest collecting passion Alice Munro. The best part of belonging to a collector group is that you can talk about books with people who love them as much as you do. It is the only place I know where you can lament the fact that the one book you need to complete a collection costs $1,200, and the person next to you will not look shocked that a book could be so expensive, but instead will reply, “Well, you really should get it, you can afford it and you’re entitled to splurge every once in awhile!” The other important lesson that I learned from the group was that one third of the members were also book dealers. They had formed a separate organization, the Long Island Antiquarian Book Dealers Association (LIABDA), and I was asked to speak to the group a few times about my collecting interests. I became friendly with some of the dealers, attended their twice yearly book fairs, and realized that I should become a dealer myself. When my eldest child left for college in 1997, I started buying books for resale. I had decided that once I had 1,000 books to sell I would put them on-line. I gleaned through the cartons in the attic, scoured tag sales, library sales and used bookstores and by the fall of 1998 I was ready to start. I went to the county office to register my business name, received a tax ID number, and began to price and catalogue the books. Fortunately, I had a teen-aged daughter at home who was glad to earn some extra spending money by helping to enter the books into the database. I would make notes about the condition and price on a post-it attached to the front of each book. She in her typical teenage fashion would emerge at midnight and type away until dawn. When I awoke there would be a large pile of books without post-its, meaning the data had been entered, and a small pile of books with additional post-it notes with her questions. When the one thousandth book was entered, I uploaded them to Bibliofind, and was open for business. I remember the first order—a first American edition of Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, the Sea. The orders increased slowly each year. I discovered that in part, it was a numbers game—the more books listed, the more orders. I now have about 8,500 books on-line at any given time, and hope to increase that number to 12,000 over the next year or two. Bibliofind is long gone, but I list on the standards, ABE, Alibris, Amazon, as well as my own website, Mostly Useful Fictions. Since I always enjoyed writing, I began to write some humor pieces on making the transition from collecting books to selling them. They were published in the now defunct Book Quote magazine. When the editor of the LIABDA newsletter retired, I was quickly recruited, so I have been the corresponding secretary and newsletter editor for that organization for the past four years. Some of the pieces I have written for that newsletter have been reprinted in the Standard, and Book Dealer Monthly. Others are on my website. Working full-time during the day, commuting two hours each way and trying to build an internet business have kept me pretty busy for several years. As of July, I have cut back on my day job to 21 hours, so that Mostly Useful Fictions could become my primary job. Awhile back I wrote a piece about bookselling and the lottery. For me, most of the time being a book dealer feels like winning the lottery even without the big check from the State of New York. Mostly Useful Fictions really did start as the saying goes with just “a dollar and a dream.” That was the first time I actually bought a book at a tag sale, not for my own collection, but to start to build up an inventory to put up on the internet. I can even remember the name though it was sold a long time ago—Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity. It is a great book and I still pick up and list copies whenever I run across them. A dollar here and a dream there, and the books began piling up. I may have chosen a few bad sets along the way, but the dream persists, and grows stronger over time. I have held many jobs in my various careers. I lasted one night as a cook at McDonald’s back in high school. I have been a car jockey, a psychiatric aide in a drug and alcohol hospital, a supermarket cashier, a research assistant and a grants writer. I have taught early childhood development as an adjunct at a university in New York City. I have designed and developed numerous computer systems for Wall Street firms including money transfer that handle several billion dollars worth of wire transfers every business day. None of these jobs has given me the satisfaction that I get from selling a book that I love to someone eager to read and to own it. Joe Perlman operates Mostly Useful Fictions out of East Northport, NY and can be contacted at http://www.mostlyusefulfictions.com.

I got into bookselling by purchasing an existing inventory about four years ago. Nothing spectacular—3,500 general inventory titles. The descriptions had to be re-written, conditions checked and photos or scans taken of the more interesting titles. Very time-consuming, but I felt that if I were to represent these books properly, I had to grade them on my own. At the same time I was trying to come up with a specialty, because that’s all I heard—“specialize, specialize” from other sellers (Thank You). Knowing I had to specialize meant it had to be in something that would hold my interest, because our enthusiasm and knowledge of our books shows in our listings. Well, one day I walked into a bookstore and found a back room full of Astounding Science Fictions and Weird Tales and Dell Mapbacks and Ace Doubles and thought, now this is something I could specialize in. The combination of the writing and the illustrating, coupled with the era and the politics, etc. really appealed to me. Since then my inventory has almost doubled, mainly in the speculative fiction area, from the 1920s and onward. The more I began to focus on pulp fiction, the more fascinating the subject became. The authors, artists, publishers and editors combined to make some incredibly thought provoking books and pulps. The effect of the atomic age on science fiction writing and publishing really opened up the field. It’s interesting to note that many of the authors used pseudonyms in the beginning for a variety of reasons creating a challenge when trying to track down information to chart an author’s progress. On the weird fiction front we have the triumvirate of Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E. Howard. Combine those three with Weird Tales and Arkham House and you have some wonderful stories with even better stories behind the stories. The market for historical speculative fiction is still growing. There are areas in the world that I sell to more than others. Sweden and Germany spring to mind, as well as Great Britain. There are specific issues that confront the Canadian bookseller. The main one in my mind is our Canadian postal system which is downright expensive when compared to media mail or m-bags in the US. An American seller can charge $4.00 for shipping and still make a bit, but up here we have to charge $7.00 just to break even on the shipping component. Multiply that by 500 sales a year and you get a sense of how much we have to subsidize our shipping charges just to stay competitive. Another issue for us is the exchange rate against the US dollar. Four years ago or so, when I first started listing, the US dollar was worth $1.39 against the Canadian dollar; now it’s worth $1.11. That’s a 20 percent drop, for those of us who list in USD. On the positive side, a lot of my purchases and listing fees are cheaper now because of the relative strength of the Canadian dollar. But there are lots of issues confronting independent booksellers globally. That discussion is best left for another day. I still deal in general inventory as well, because, let’s face it, they sell. Not everyone is a collector and the general public seems to have a voracious appetite for reading, whether it’s for entertainment or knowledge. My general impression is that most of us didn’t get into this to get rich. What we’re looking for is the ability to make a comfortable income, doing something we love to do. To this idealistic soul, there’s something to be said for the promotion of literacy in this day and age of iPods, Xboxes and downloadable ring tones. Marc Monsarrat operates Bookmarc Books out of Malahat, British Columbia, Canada and can be contacted at http://www.bookmarc.ca.

I’m John Hardy of Hardy Books, Nevada City, California. We’re in our 10th year of business. Hardy Books specializes in “All Things Californian” (California history, fine Press, authors, poets, photographers, artists, food and drink, flora, fauna, movies, books to film, photoplay editions, law and order, San Francisco, Yosemite, Sierra Nevada, and on and on), Western Americana, and Books About Books. As to marketing, we are open by appointment, and on the internet at www.hardybooks.com, which leads prospective buyers to our books listed on www.abebooks.com. Hardy Books is also one of 15 local dealers in a co-operative open shop called Booktown Books & Tomes in Grass Valley, California (4 miles from Nevada City). My wife Susie and I also produce the Gold Rush Book Fair in May each year at the Nevada County Fairgrounds (“California’s Most Beautiful Fairgrounds”). The 7th Annual Gold Rush Book Fair will be held on May 19, 2007. We have over fifty dealers with all kinds of books and paper material, although the preponderance of the material is Western Americana. The GRBF is on Saturday, with the Dealer move-in on Friday. On Friday night, we host the Booksellers Banquet, a complimentary sit-down dinner for all our dealers held in the historic Masonic Hall in Nevada City. Each year we name an “Honored Guest Bookseller,” based upon “Ethical leadership and scholarship in American bookselling.” The Honored Guest Bookseller is given Booth #1 at the GRBF and we put them up at a local hotel, all with our compliments. Past recipients of the honor have been William Reese Company, The Arthur Clark Company, Emmett Harrington Fine Books, Michael Heaston Rare Books and Manuscripts, Edwin Glaser Fine Books and Michael Ginsberg Books. Visit Gold Rush Book Fair for more details and photographs. Susie and I attended the eBayLive! Conference in Las Vegas this year and learned about eBay Stores. Hardy Books opened an eBay store several weeks ago and the results are very promising. As one would expect, the eBay folks are very helpful in providing all sorts of templates, marketing tools and suggestions to help one succeed. I have been a collector of books, primarily Californiana, all my life, as was my father. He was a member of The Book Club of California, as am I. I retired after thirty-five years as a trial lawyer in San Francisco. We bought our house in Nevada City in 1994 and moved here full-time upon my retirement in 1999. Nevada City is a wonderfully restored Gold Rush town, in the Sierra Nevada Foothills, about half-way between Sacramento and Lake Tahoe. The area has been designated by Hay-on-Wye’s Richard Booth as “Gold Cities Book Town,” because of the many bookstores, printers, bookbinders and bibliophiles located in Nevada City and Grass Valley. I’ve attended the Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar twice; the first time at the dawn of the internet and the second time after the internet explosion. Other than a long apprenticeship in a famous bookshop somewhere, it’s the best thing that ever happened to the education of booksellers, be they fledglings or seasoned veterans. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the company of all book people, be they dealers, customers, librarians, bookbinders, printers or whatever. It’s a vast club to which we all belong. John Hardy operates Hardy Books out of Nevada City, CA and can be contacted at http://www.hardybooks.com.