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March 21, 2022 By Greg Gibson Back in the old days, whether you were a catalog dealer or a brick & mortar seller, you probably worked with book scouts. These were people who haunted other shops, yard sales, auctions, and flea markets in search of what they knew to be desirable items, which they’d then pass on to those of us who had more elaborate means of marketing our wares – like in a shop window or on a catalog cover. Some of these scouts were brilliant at what they did. A few of them even made money, though many barely scraped by. Of course, as with so many other things, the rise of the interweb made book scouts relics of the past...(continue reading at The Bookman’s Log)

The IOBA is offering up to six (6) scholarships for continuing education opportunities in 2022! Specifically, IOBA is offering: 3 scholarships open to all members for the 2022 CABS-Minnesota 2 scholarships open to all members for the non-CABS book school of their choice: RBS (Rare Book School in VA, USA) , CALRBS (California Rare Book School) , LRBS (London Rare Book School), and YABS (York Antiquarian Book Seminar). 1 International scholarship for use at YABS or LRBS Completed entries must be received via email no later than May 2, 2022. Applications and letters of recommendation should be addressed to: scholarshipcontest@ioba.org. The winner or winners will be chosen by the IOBA Scholarship Committee, and will be notified by May 24, 2022. For more information, and full terms and conditions, please go to Scholarships for Members. You must be logged into your IOBA member account to view this page. We look forward to receiving your applications and good luck!

Discover 9 rare bookselling businesses owned by women. [NB: These women are not members of IOBA, but we celebrate them anyway!] These businesses owned and operated by women are located in the United States, Canada, the UK, Sweden and Germany. Discover how these rare booksellers launched their careers and their advice to young women wishing to enter the profession today. Read the full article on Abebooks.com

In the quiet darkness of a late fall night, circa 1923, my grandfather Charlie and his family packed their belongings and quietly left Birmingham, England. Times were not good in Birmingham for union organizers and efforts to bring a reasonable standard of living to the bakers there came at a very high price. Charlie and family moved to Glasgow, Scotland. The small used bookshop that he started there was stacked to ceiling with dusty shelves which held a mixture of magazines, books, old toasters, and soft-core British pornography. The bookshop was eventually taken over by my aunt and I visited there a few years before she died. Perhaps my own relationship with books and selling them was genetic. Coincidentally, I also spent several years as the chief negotiator for a teachers’ union. Times had changed and, happily, I didn’t feel the need to flee Fort Dodge, Iowa – at least not because of my union organizing activities. The IOBA booksellers are gently tied to one another, even though much of what we do is rather solitary. Our days may be spent hunting for books, keying in data, and dealing with sales orders. The ‘Independent’ aspect of our work is significant. Paradoxically, we are united in our sense of personal freedom and charting our own course. When we buy a book (or a thousand) we rely on our personal intuition and knowledge to determine if we’ll be able to convert that book into a profit. Much of our day-to-day survival rests on our own shoulders. But not entirely. Being part of an association of like-minded people provides a sense that we’re not in it alone. While there may be 15,000 independent online sellers, it’s comforting to know some of them e-personally. It’s also significant that those who choose to join together share a commitment to quality, service, and a code of ethics. As a group we independent people make a statement of our commitment to a standard of excellence. It’s a good business decision to let others know that you stand for something. Our customers are people who are interested in knowledge and education. It pays us to be knowledgeable and educated about what we are doing. There is no better way to accomplish this than by joining together. There’s a fair amount to know about the art and science of our business, especially since little more than a decade ago our business model didn’t even exist! Through association with others in the field we each have the benefit of shared experience, such as learning about the cutting-edge information that can have a positive impact on our business. Frankly, why keep reinventing the computer chip, or the wheel, when others can provide you with some of the basics? My involvement with IOBA has enhanced my work. It’s been an association that has given me a great deal–and offers the potential for much more. IOBA is a unique organization that is dedicated to serving our shared interests. It helps each of us be a little bigger and have the potential to be a little more independent than we were without it. My membership in IOBA has been of substantial value to me. We face increasing challenges in our business on a day-to-day basis. The explosion of the digitized world continues to provide tremendous opportunities as well as significant challenges. One of the challenges affected many of us when a few months ago a major on-line service had a significant glitch and interruption of service. Potential changes in postal regulations could impact the shipping of our books we sell. Together, we can learn how to deal with any adverse effects on our business, and have some potential to impact issues as they emerge. As we know, right now anyone with a book can be a bookseller. For better or worse, it’s what allowed most of us the opportunity to become a part of this field. Is there more to what we do than the very simple act of offering our goods in the market? I believe that without our willingness to ‘associate’ with one another in our common best interests, we will merely be reactive to the market place. Our potential strength and effectiveness lies in creating opportunities to make a difference in the market place and, ultimately, to influence that same marketplace. There’s a lot for us to think about! IOBA offers an expanding array of education and services to the on-line community. It provides substantial value for all of us. I’m dedicated to trying to help our association increase that value, because membership in IOBA is among the best investments an independent on-line seller can make. David Friedman Barner Books 3 Church Street New Paltz, NY 12561 Originally published in the Summer 2005 issue of The Standard.

Why does IOBA offer scholarships to seminars and classes for our members? Because IOBA wants all its member booksellers to be the best booksellers they can be. Their perspective on bookselling will have widened, they will have met a faculty whose bookselling knowledge is deep and varied, and they will have made friends with fellow seminarians who include librarians and book collectors, along with other booksellers. These are good relationships to forge! An application that wins you a place in one of these classes is not difficult to prepare. Provide the required information, tell us about your business, and remember, IOBA’s membership is not overly large so you won’t be overwhelmed by competition for these scholarships. If you have already attended, you can still apply for another program. Rare Book School has many classes on a variety of advanced subjects, and CABS has a rotating faculty. This seminar has grown up along with the internet age. You are sure to learn new material, and get an always needed refresher in the basics. I have spoken to quite a few repeat attendees to CABS and they are amazed at how much they benefited from a second trip. If you’ve applied in the past and didn’t win, please, apply again. You’ve had another year or more of bookselling experience and that will help your application. A number of winners were awarded their scholarship the second time they applied. We want you to be great booksellers. There is no reason for you to learn it all the hard way! Mark your calendar now to apply in the new year. Applying would make a terrific New Year’s resolution. Thank you, and we hope to hear from you next. Heidi Congalton IOBA Vice President Chair, Scholarship Committee Between the Covers – Rare Books, Inc. #IOBAScholarshipContest #IOBAScholarshipProgram

The Summer 2016 issue of The Standard features several pieces on the Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar (CABS), including an essay on the IOBA scholarship program, and accounts from three IOBA Scholarship attendees of the 2016 seminar. Rounding out the issue is a piece on book fairs by Jonathan Smalter, and a fluff piece (literally!) profiling Blake, shop cat at Philadelphia Rare Books & Manuscripts Company. Paul Shelley of Churchill Book Collector attended the seminar as an IOBA scholarship recipient, and describes it as an annual event where “successful professionals volunteer their time to share most of the secrets of their commercial success with their up and coming competition”. I have had similar conversations with people outside of the trade, about the articles I’ve written that share some of the bookselling knowledge I’ve picked up over the years. And we all see and participate in this behavior every day on the various book boards and exchange lists, where booksellers freely share the benefit of their hard-won experience with anyone who asks. So why do we do this? How does it make sense to give away any advantage to our competition, with no immediate obvious return? An approach to one answer can be found in a remark from another of this year’s IOBA CABS scholars. Mike Brenner, of Brenner’s Books, refers to the bookselling trade as a “vibrant, vital ecosystem”. This certainly resonates with some of the ecological terms one encounters in discussions of the trade and how it has changed – evolved – in recent decades. Some sellers can be referred to as big fish while others are guppies; still other sellers – and we all know who they are – are described as bottom feeders; and big-spending customers are sometimes called whales (borrowing a slang term from gambling). This led me to think about a topic in behavioral and evolutionary theory referred to as “competitive altruism”. This theory attempts to explain why individuals make choices that would seem to involve some form of sacrifice – of time or money, for example – for no obvious material return. Some have used it in an attempt – one that some call cynical – to explain why people choose to do things that benefit others. The crux of the theory is that there is actually a return on the so-called altruistic behavior: the act produces an increase in prestige or reputation or social rank, something that is akin to currency in our human primate culture. Or as the Syrian-born Latin writer Publilius Syrus said over two thousand years ago: “A good reputation is more valuable than money.” But I think this reductionist approach to explaining human behavior as the sum of some sequence of transaction-based interactions will never capture the full breadth and depth of the human experience. Two philanthropists fund new wings at two hospitals; does the one only think about how everyone knows his wing is bigger? Another example that is often used in discussing altruistic behavior in humans is early adopters of hybrid technology automobiles. The early models of hybrid cars were more expensive than their equivalent conventional models. There was a real possibility that they would be more expensive to maintain – repair and maintenance would mostly need to be done at the dealer, since none of the independent mechanics had any experience working with the new technology. Plus no one knew what problems unique to hybrids would crop up in five or ten or fifteen years. And while there were economic advantages to owning a hybrid vehicle in the form of tax credits (that have since lapsed) and reduced gas consumption, most economic analyses published at the time showed the hybrid vehicles ultimately still being slightly more expensive over the course of their lifetime. But there were also very clear reasons, some might say altruistic reasons, for buying a hybrid car, in the form of reduced or eliminated harmful emissions. The competitive altruism camp would say that I chose to buy a hybrid because I placed value on the prestige that would accrue from owning the vehicle. The “HYBRID” displayed very prominently on the rear of the car would be a very visible symbol that the owner was a “good” person, a “responsible” person, and a person with enough cash that he could afford to pay more for a car that in most other ways was identical to one priced several thousand dollars less. But if I really wanted people to recognize I was driving a hybrid and so influence what they thought of me, wouldn’t I have picked the much more distinctive-looking Prius? Since I know what my decision-making process was – and setting aside the possibility that this is self-delusional retro-justification – I can tell you that I bought the car because I believed it was something good for the environment and because I was in a position to be able to afford it after factoring in the tax credits and fuel cost savings. Buying the first generation of new technology was definitely a risk – conventional wisdom is never buy the first production year of a new or redesigned model – but I felt that any major problems would be addressed by Honda because they wanted their hybrid line to succeed. And guess what, fourteen years and 225,000 miles later, I still own that car and it is going great. But look, the competitive altruists whisper, you are using this as an opportunity to tell people about how smart you were to buy the hybrid, in an attempt to increase your status and reputation within the social order of the group. Well, OK. We’re human. Humans are a highly social, hierarchically-organized primate species. EVERYTHING we do is probably in some way tied to a consideration of how others see us, from the things we choose to make public to the things we most zealously guard as private. Of course most of us do things that would have others respect us, or like us, or want to buy stuff from us, or whatever. I think that people do things for a whole hodge-podge of reasons. Some of the reasons are altruistic, and some are self-interested; some are both at the same time. Some decisions are deliberate and fully thought out, while some are based on little more than an unreasoned feeling. So here is what I choose to believe. The organizers and instructors of CABS are smart, experienced book selling professionals who understand they are part of a larger community, one that spans the globe and is the product of centuries of history and tradition. They understand that this profession has undergone a series of rapid shifts in the last twenty years or so, due to cultural and technological changes beyond our control. And they understand the importance to our profession – to our ecosystem – of balancing tradition and change. The instructors know that when a class of attendees leave Colorado that they are better book sellers, and that this is good for the profession as a whole and for all of us individually. Of course there is some personal advantage that accrues to the instructors – my parents were both school teachers, and they always told me the best way to really learn something is to teach it to someone else. And perhaps there is some personal gratification in having others look to you for guidance and direction – who doesn’t want the respect and acknowledgement of one’s accomplishments? But I doubt any of that balances out the time and effort they put forth, including time away from running their own businesses. More importantly, I doubt that any of the instructors or organizers engage in these kinds of “balancing out” calculations. The people involved with CABS do it because it is the good and right thing to do, and because it benefits the profession as a whole. CABS teaches many things, but perhaps the most fundamental lesson is that we are colleagues, not competitors. #cabs #ColoradoAntiquarianBookSchool

Welcome to the Spring 2016 issue of The Standard, the journal of the Independent Online Booksellers Association (IOBA). One month ago, incoming IOBA President Joan White approached me about taking over as Editor, and re-booting The Standard. The journal was always intended to be a quarterly publication, not that one could tell based on the five issues published in the last six years. I was guest editor of the Summer 2013 issue (the last before the recent, lengthy hiatus) and have contributed some articles in the past. Some of you may also know me from a long series of articles I published over several years as the Science Fiction editor at Craig Stark’s BookThink site. As part of preparing to take up this challenge, I have spent a good amount of time going through back issues of The Standard – an exercise I strongly recommend to anyone reading this. Serious, whimsical, erudite, unrefined, timeless, fleeting – we’ve covered a lot of territory over the years. I am going to try my best to live up to the standards set by my predecessors. This issue includes a piece from incoming IOBA President Joan White, of White Unicorn Books, in which she lays out her short and long term vision for IOBA. Rachel Jagareski of Old Saratoga Books contributes a nice article on book blogging titled “Don’t Do What I Do“. I wax somewhat philosophical on “Serendipity in Bookselling”, and on the same topic we reprint an article from July 2008 by Joe Perlman, of Mostly Useful Fiction, titled “Embracing the Unexpected”. And finally, I’m reviving a version of the solicitation that used to appear in issues of The Standard: We can always use interesting, well-written articles on subjects of interest to the bookselling trade – ideally ones not overtly solicited or strong-armed to begin with. Please query first, however, to editor@ioba.org. The general guidelines: the material should be original, it is subject to editing, you retain copyright, and of course there is no payment other than the gratitude and satisfaction of your peers. You do not need to be a member of IOBA, except for the IOBA Bookseller Profiles, though we would surely like you to join. We are particularly interested in articles on the book trade outside of the United States. Timothy Doyle Bayside Books of Maryland, IOBA Baltimore, Maryland

Once I got the hang of blogging, I started The Book Trout, where I spent much more time carefully crafting longish essays, book reviews, and reports about the world of used and rare books. I wanted to have our bookstore blog be a polished virtual front door for our bookstore and attract booklovers to our website and open shop. Where I spent minutes dashing off a Crispy Cook entry, my Book Trout posts took hours. Guess which blog is more popular? The Crispy Cook gets many more traffic hits and comments than my poor Book Trout. As a food blogger, I’ve received new books, food items, blogger swag and even a free trip to meet Betty Crocker in Minneapolis from companies looking for a potential blog review, so I was a much more frequent food blogger than book blogger because of these larger rewards for so much less of my time. The other interesting thing that I found about my book blog was that even though I spent all this time writing and rewriting my posts, the most popular posts were ones I found the easiest to write. I could always count on increasing my blogger stats at the Book Trout by posting a hasty snapshot of our late lamented bookstore cat Sam lounging on the counter (key variations: lounging in the window, lounging on a customer’s lap, lounging on a box of books) or by recounting a trip to a colleague’s bookshop or antiquarian book fair. A few artful photos and a snippet of conversation with a bookseller, and the post writes itself. I should do more posts with lists of new book acquisitions or books arranged by a subject or author/illustrator. I have found that in the long term, the books I’ve flogged in these Book Trout posts sell better than my other stock. Perhaps it is because I have focused on blogging about the most unusual titles or those with the most arresting jacket art and bindings, or perhaps it is a result of having another set of book images and descriptions floating around the Internet. Three of my top five most popular Book Trout posts are book reviews of specific titles I had in the shop. I have never had anyone purchase our copy of these titles as a direct result of these reviews, but I am sure the authors and publishers enjoyed the results of my labors. I don’t do book review posts anymore. So what have I learned from all this bloggery? I have learned that I should spend much more time analyzing my blogger data and focus my efforts on blog posts that actually deliver customers for my books. I know now that my book blog posts shouldn’t be so long and overworked; it’s image-rich, short, chatty posts that are the ones that get visited and shared the most. I have learned that I should spend much more time feeding my blog. My haphazard pattern of posting when I have the time or am feeling particularly inspired just doesn’t cut it. I have also gotten the sense that blog readers really want to learn personal details about the blogger’s life and I have generally not been comfortable with writing those kinds of posts. That’s what I SHOULD do. However, I have discovered that when I HAVE to blog, I drag my feet through my writing. It’s more of a chore then, and becomes unfulfilling. Instead, my desultory blogging method works for me because it feeds my creative impulses. I like to write, I like to read, and I like to connect with other bibliophiles, so The Book Trout is my vehicle for those passions. Feeding posts into The Book Trout on a much more consistent basis and dashing off shorter, more targeted posts, is something I could do to make it a zippier and effective marketing tool, but in the past several years I have focused my marketing efforts on more direct contact with my regular customers, periodic tweaking of the bookstore website and dashing off quick posts (always, always with a photo) to feed the shop’s Facebook page. The Book Trout remains my somewhat neglected, but fondly regarded, book baby. In short, there are many other more successful book bloggers and bookstore owners with blogs out there and if you are thinking about adding a blog into your marketing toolbox, you should seek them out and analyze their blogs. Despite my longevity as a blogger, I am still too haphazard at nurturing my bookstore blog, though it remains a creative outlet for me. Links to the two blogs are below: Book Trout can be found at booktrout.blogspot.com Crispy Cook is at wheat-free-meat-free.blogspot.com Rachel Jagareski Old Saratoga Books, Schuylerville, NY #blogging

As a part of our efforts to revise the IOBA website we have worked to add images to our Book Terminology page. We have also been looking to add additional terms to those found on our older website. One such term is Pirate Edition. These are books created without the authorization of the original author and/or publisher. When we refer to pirate editions we are often discussing those created in Taiwan. Internet research located an article from the Hugh Stevens Blog (article linked here) that discusses these books. A great many of these "pirate" editions were produced in the 1960s. While US publishers were unhappy with these books, Taiwan was not a signatory to the treaty regarding copyrights and these books were produced there in compliance with their laws. See the article for more. The impetus for adding this term to our page was a copy of Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet. The copy found had a pencil notation at front from a prior bookseller indicating that it was from the First Edition as published by Grove. Scrutiny of this book raised some questions about this attribution. This book is now featured as an image under that term on our Book Terminology page. The "pirate" copy has been put together with a copy of the actual Grove edition. These images are the result of an effort to illustrate the differences between the two books. The following is presented in the hopes that booksellers and buyers alike will become better at recognizing these books when they are seen. In each image, the "pirate" edition appears first with the true Grove edition following. The books are very close to the same size but the dust jacket printing is not quite as clear. On the rear dust jacket panel we see that the credit to the photographer is omitted on the "pirate" copy. Looking at the spine of the dust jacket we see that the name of the publisher is omitted. You can also see that the Grove edition is thicker. Both are approximately 8 ¼” x 5 ½”, but the Grove version is 1-5/8” thick, while the "pirate" copy is only 9/16” thick; boards on each approximately same thickness, so it’s all differences are due to the paper thickness. The difference in thickness is even clearer when looking from the top. The difference in thickness is also quite pronounced when comparing the spine of each book. Looking at the rear inside flap of the dust jacket, we see that the publishers name and address are omitted on the "pirate" copy. Comparing the cloth we see that the "pirate" copy is bound in a purple cloth while the Grove edition is bound in light green cloth. Comparing the half title pages, we see the improved quality of the binding and that the page can lay flat. The images do not show this, but the paper of the "pirate" edition is thinner and has a grayish tint. The Grove edition is on thicker paper that is a purer white. Comparing the title pages we see that publisher is not identified on the "pirate" copy. We can also again see the rippling of the pages on the "pirate" while the Grove copy lies flat. Comparing the copyright pages, we see that the "pirate" copy notes the 1961 copyright date but does not say who holds the copyright. This is one of the best tells when looking at these books. Both have First Edition stated. We also see a notation that the Grove edition is "Manufactured in the United States of America". No such notation is seen on the "pirate" copy. Both books have 318 pages with one preliminary blank endpaper and two final endpapers. Following the last page of text we see publication info only on the "pirate" copy. *** We hope that reviewing the differences between these books in some detail will enable you to spot the "pirate" editions. This exercise illustrates that there is no substitute for a careful examination of all aspects of a book. *** This article was developed as a collaboration between Stephen Clauser of Arroyo Seco Books and Andrew Langer, doing business as Andrew Langer, Bookseller, together with edits from other interested IOBA members.

Table of Contents From the Editor PopShops offers Booksellers a New Deal Michael Tokman – Choosebooks (ZVAB) P. Scott Brown – ABookCoOp (dba Tomfolio.com) Richard Weatherford & Marty Manley – ALIBRIS Brent James – Advance Book Exchange (ABE) Bibliodirect Opening Leo Harrison – Biblion.com Announcements IOBA Visits the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books Lee Miller, author of “Roanoke” American Indian Authors & Literature Keeping Track Of A Changing Marketplace The Interview: Andras Bereznay, Historical Cartographer Extraordinaire Lisa & Leon Martin – Global Book Mart Thoughts on a Friends Passing – Leonard W. Lanfranco Joyce Meskis of Tattered Cover Bookstore, Denver, CO Bob Fleck & Jelle Samshuijzen – ILAB/LILA Ephemeral Assays—Use Protection!

Table of Contents From the Editor From the President “Don’t Do It!” A Small Association Building the World’s Best Collection of _________ Using the Internet William Knox, The Penang Bookshelf, Penang, Malaysia

Table of Contents From the (Guest) Editor Books Are Still Alive and Well From On-Line to Selling at Antiquarian Book Fairs Book Selling at Antique Malls Book Selling at Genre Conventions 2013 IOBA Scholarship Announcement Bungalow Books – Pueblo, Colorado Squid Ink Books – Tucson, Arizona Warwick Books, South Pasadena, California