(Ed. Note: We suspect that every dedicated reader and book lover remembers at least one library from his or her past in a special way. We hope that the following article will stir up some of those memories among readers of The Standard. We hope further that some of you will be moved to share them with us in future issues. Send your paeans to libraries past, or present, to editor@ioba.org .) The old adage that you never forget your first love holds true for libraries, too. I still have fond memories of the McGregor Public Library at 12244 Woodward Avenue, Highland Park, Michigan, even though it’s been nearly 70 years since I applied for my first library card there and more than 60 years since my last visit. I recall being awed by my first sight of the imposing granite and limestone building. Built in the Beaux Arts style and designed by noted New York City library architects Tilton and Githens, the rectangular two-story library sat in a park-like setting about half the size of a large city lot. Magnificently crafted doors topped by a striking half-dome (see accompanying photos) sat squarely in the center of the McGregor’s symmetrical façade. Inside, even more wonders awaited a seven-year-old newly initiated into the wondrous world of reading and books. I craned my neck to look up at the soaring ceiling of the central hall. I marveled at the rows upon rows of books that stood upright on the orderly ranks of shelves, more books than I had thought existed! I walked home beside my father in a near daze, clutching my new library card in one hand, my quota of four books from the Children’s Section in the other. The McGregor was less than a mile from our flat over a store at 12023 Hamilton, where we lived when Dad and I walked to the library. It was only a tad further, perhaps a mile, when we moved to a larger two-family flat at 377 Richton a year or so later. By then, I was able to walk to that magic structure on my own. (Remember that this was the mid-1930s, when the streets were safer for kids in those days.) I made the trek often. Librarians stamped your library card with the return due date then, once for each book you took home. My cards filled up rapidly as I progressed from simple “See spot run” kids’ books to Black Beauty, Tom Swift, Nancy Drew, then to the likes of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Alfred Payson Terhune’s dog stories, and Zane Gray westerns. My crowning McGregor reading achievement came in the summer of 1936. All my friends were away at camp or visiting relatives. I walked to the McGregor after breakfast on Monday and read a Tom Swift book in the library. I took out four more titles (all in the Treasure Island, Nancy Drew orLad, a Dog category) read them at home that afternoon and evening. I did the same thing Tuesday and every day for the rest of the week, going through 30 books in six days. If I had been the librarians’ pet before, now I was their reading poster boy! One of the librarians introduced me to Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazon books. I was enthralled, and a small sailboat replaced a Schwinn bicycle as the top item on my wish list. (An impossible dream in the midst of the Depression.) Other librarians turned me on to other books and authors. They were delighted when I returned the books with my thanks for their recommendations. Part of my voracious reading habit developed from the fact that I suffered from severe asthma attacks in my youth. This meant that I was sick a lot, often missing a quarter to one-third of the school year from grades one through eight. No television then, of course, so I spent sick days reading and listening to the radio. (I’m still a radio buff, especially the oldies and NPR.) When I couldn’t go to the library myself, my hard-working father often stopped at the McGregor on his way home from work to get me books. At age 12, as I recall, I became eligible for an intermediate library card. This meant you could take out six books at a time, two from the adult section and four from the children’s section. At about the same time, I came under the care of a doctor located just a few blocks from Detroit’s Main Library at 5201 Woodward Avenue. I took the bus to his office three times every two weeks-and visited the Main Library to take out my six-book quota every time. The treasury of books here was even greater than at the McGregor. And like many an adolescent swain, I began to forsake my first love for the lure of a new, more enticing romance. My reading horizons broadened considerably as my tastes became wildly eclectic. I discovered such varied authors as P.G. Wodehouse, Thorne Smith, Kenneth Roberts, James T. Farrell, Owen Wister, Ernest Hemingway, Alexander Dumas, Conan-Doyle and Upton Sinclair, to name a few. My non-library reading habits, however, leaned to Doc Savage Magazine, daily paper “funnies” and early comic books. One such wasThe Phantom. (He made his debut on February 17th, 1936 and was the first costumed hero.) My next well-remembered library was a tiny one, compared to the McGregor or Detroit’s Main Library. Housed in a small room of the USO at Camp Wolters, Texas, it amounted to a few shelves stocked with donated books. I recall it because it was responsible for one of the most prodigious reading feats of my life. I was now an 18-year-old private going through an extended infantry basic training that emphasized jungle warfare and amphibious invasions. One Sunday when we had a rare break from our arduous schedule, I browsed the meager collection at the USO and spotted a copy of Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward Angel. One of my best friends back in Detroit had been urging me to read Wolfe, so I signed up to borrow it. Wolfe’s prose, often akin to poetry, and his characters, captured me completely. At times, I got up from my bunk and paced the aisle of the near-empty barracks, reading some of Old Man Gant’s passages aloud. This understandably cemented my reputation as the company character. The only thing that elevated me somewhat in the eyes of my fellow soldiers was that I was on the battalion boxing team, and eventually won the camp flyweight division championship. (An added, admittedly non-book related footnote: Maximum flyweight limit was 114 pounds. Yet once some guys in my platoon weighed me just before we set out on one of our many 25-mile full field pack marches, I tipped the scale at 211 pounds. My pack, rifle, ammo, cans of C rations and other gear totaled just 19 pounds less than my body weight.) I finished Angel by mid-afternoon and hurried back to the USO to return it and take Of Time And The River, which I had spotted during my earlier browsing. I started reading while walking back to the barracks, then kept on through the afternoon and into the night. I finished the book in the latrine after “Lights Out,” about 10 p.m. (I later read everything Wolfe wrote, and everything I could find written about him. This made it easy to do an in-depth paper on him later when I was a junior in college. My teacher gave me an A+ and said the paper needed only a little more work to qualify as a Masters thesis.) Libraries continued to be important in my life, but a career, marriage and children overshadowed them. Most were commonplace and forgettable, a blur in my memory. One exception were the libraries at Ford Motor Company in Dearborn MI, where I learned a lot that that helped me tremendously during my later years as an auto and racing writer/editor. I moved to California in 1966 as editor of a new Petersen Publications camping and RV magazine, Wheels Afield. When my family and I moved into a home in a west San Fernando Valley suburb of Los Angeles, I soon discovered that one of the location’s benefits was the nearby Woodland Hills Branch Library. Shaded by trees, the one-story building featured a red brick and glass exterior and was contemporary and “homey” at the same time. The same was true of its charming, comfortable interior. It quickly became a magnet for the family. (My girls, 15 and 13, and 8-year-old son had inherited the reading gene.) The original Woodland Hills library was torn down in 2000 and replaced by a new one that opened in August 2003. It has two stories, is twice the size of the old facility, but retains hints of the previous building. The trees remain, by request of the community, and the exterior again is red brick and glass. The new library and I are going through a flirtation stage right now, but I’m sure a lasting love will develop. I’m active in the Friends of the Library again, serving on the executive board and as newsletter editor. Another library has captured my heart in recent years also. My wife and I have spent a week or two in Palm Springs, California, in recent years. We discovered that the Palm Spring Library Center on Sunrise Way is a true treasure. In my case, love of libraries, books and reading literally (pun intended) shaped my life. By age 10 or 11, I decided I wanted to be a writer. And that’s what I became. My first paid writing job was on a small Michigan weekly paper in October 1947. I’ve made my living as a writer, editor and journalist ever since. Now, 56 years later, I look back on a career that has been varied, challenging and rewarding in many ways. I never got rich but seldom was bored and always got by. And I can thank the McGregor, my first library love, for planting the seed that grew into a lifelong vocation.

This is the third article on the American women’s suffrage movement. All three are overviews in which I’ve tried to emphasize the major books and ephemera of the period. Although much new material continues to appear, The History of Woman Suffrage is still the main source of information. “Dr Gannon told me I must be fed. …I was held down by five people…Gannon pushed the tube up left nostril…It hurts nose and throat very much and makes nose bleed freely…Operation leaves one very sick.” Lucy Burns in a note smuggled out of jail, where she was leading a protest against jailed suffragists treatment in 1917. (1) After nearly seventy-five years of unsuccessful attempts to pass a federal amendment giving women the vote, the Susan B. Anthony amendment passed in 1919. Why was the drive for suffrage finally successful after seventy-five years? There were a number of reasons. Suffrage had finally become respectable after the largest suffrage association, NAWSA, the National American Woman Suffrage Association, worked to gain social acceptance for the movement. Younger and more militant women, inspired by British suffrage workers, embarrassed politicians and the Wilson administration into supporting suffrage. Increasing political sophistication, better communications, the influence of the national progressive movement, and the new consumer movement were factors as well. And, as 19th Century leaders Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton had predicated, the time had finally come for right to prevail. Much of the collectible suffrage ephemera now available (mostly on ebay but also, occasionally, from dealers and private sellers) was printed between 1900 and 1920. The onslaught of suffrage paper increased after 1910, and posters, fliers (must have been hundreds, maybe thousands of these), postcards, trade cards, ads, articles, debate manuals, fund-raising items like cookbooks, and periodicals were produced by both the pro and the anti suffrage groups. Suffrage sheet music and romance novels were popular, there was Stanton soap and beauty and health hints dedicated to “Aunt” Susan. Both pro and anti suffrage arguments, influenced by the increasingly strong reform and progressive movements, were different from 19th century arguments based on traditional values, democratic ideals, the Bible, and the constitution. Twentieth century debate was less lofty, appealing more to self-interest and less to the rightness of the cause. Pro suffrage supporters argued that women who could vote would clean up society much as they cleaned up their homes: the evils of alcohol, poverty, and crime would yield to the cleansing brush of the woman’s vote. Antis argued that women could be more effective as reformers and as workers to alleviate the misery in society if they were not involved in the political process. Once women became committed to political action and parties they would, like men, lose their ability to act altruistically. The anti suffrage movement had gathered members and money between 1895 and 1910. NAOW, the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage, with an estimated membership of 200,000, passed out leaflets, took out ads, organized meetings, and continued to argue that women were more effective reformers when they stayed out of politics. (2) Collectibles of the anti suffrage movement are very similar in type to those of the suffrage movement. Remonstrance, published in Boston, was the leading anti suffrage paper. Early anti suffrage books had often been written by men, frequently by clergymen, but women dominated in print by the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Helen Kendrick Johnson’s popular book, Woman and the Republic, published in 1897, effectively presented the antis’ arguments, and a number of other women writers including prominent journalist, Ida Tarbell, produced anti suffrage books. (3) The October 1913 issue of Remonstrance includes articles arguing that legislation limiting women’s working hours and requiring additional safety measures for women will be eliminated if women have the vote, that women are more effective as independent workers for civic reform, and that, yes, women’s place is in the home as God and nature intended. There is also much criticism of the militant tactics of British suffragettes, with Emmeline Pankhurst as a particular target. Antis also used uglier tactics. Scare leaflets and ads linking suffrage with socialism, communism, atheism, and anarchy, as well the very popular cartoon postcards (usually depicting a dominating caricature of a woman smoking a cigarette while her submissive husband did the wash and cared for the children) were common, as were anti suffrage jokes and cartoons in newspapers and periodicals like Judge and Life. Much of the increased attention resulted from the pro suffrage movement’s steady gains. At the same time women worked through state organizations to pass amendments, the push for a federal amendment continued. Although a Congressional amendment enfranchising all woman citizens, first introduced in 1868, was introduced every year after that, NAWSA had long focused on the passage of state amendments. In 1906, the year of Susan B. Anthony’s death, women had achieved voting status in only four states: Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and Idaho. A disastrous non-binding referendum in Massachusetts in 1895 (most women, at the urging of the antis had stayed home to show that women did not want to vote) had strengthened the suffrage opponents’ argument that many women either did not care about or did not want the vote. By 1900 anti suffrage forces were increasingly organized, the old suffrage leaders had retired or died, and the movement appeared stalled. Suffrage leaders knew the “radical” image, which had haunted the movement for half a century and turned middle-class women away, had to be changed, and historians of the suffrage movement now see the period between 1900 and 1910 as significant for the progress made toward making involvement in the movement not only respectable, but socially desirable. Before her death in 1906, Anthony had recognized the need to change the image of the movement and had urged younger leaders to gain acceptance by drawing the socially and financially elite into the movement. Memories of her “unwomanly” youthful radicalism had faded and she was well on the way to sainthood, an idealized icon of the movement, the womanly, domestic Aunt Susan who symbolized a socially acceptable reform movement. Her long-time friend and co-worker, Stanton, who definitely did not become “conservative when old” had become something of an embarrassment and was de-emphasized. Carrie Chapman Catt, Anthony’s choice to succeed her as President of NAWSA, and Anna Howard Shaw led the drive for respectability. They made a successful effort to draw wealthy, elite women into the movement, giving it social cachet, though the tactics were not such as would draw more militant, reform-minded women who found leaders in Alice Paul, Lucy Burns, and Harriot Stanton Blatch (Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s daughter). NAWSA’s approach worked. Between 1906 and 1910 membership increased from about 12,000 to more than 117,000, a dramatic increase, and by 1916 there were over 200,000 members. A tightly organized campaign and a million dollar legacy from Mrs. Frank Leslie helped strengthen NAWSA’s position. (4) Collectibles from the first decade of the twentieth century include the usual meeting notices and convention-related material, as well as more of the “official” documents of the movement. Volume 4 of The History of Woman Suffrage was published in 1902 and Volumes 5 and 6, written by Ida Husted Harper, Anthony’s carefully chosen biographer, appeared in 1922 and cover the twentieth century movement. Volume 3 of The Life and Works of Susan B. Anthony, also written by Harper, was published in 1908. Both The Life and Works… andThe History continued to be available from NAWSA headquarters through most of this period. Several groups, leaders, and philosophies (sometimes conflicting) were at work during the second decade of the century. NAWSA, the oldest and most conservative suffrage organization, was increasingly effective politically, utilizing committees in states where suffrage amendments had passed to influence elections and garner support for passage of the federal amendment. This, combined with the politically-oriented and popular approach of the Women’s Political Union, headed by Harriot Stanton Blatch, and the confrontational approach of the National Woman’s Party, led by Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, led to the successful passage of the 19th amendment, but keeping the cast of characters straight during this period of time is difficult and unnecessary in an overview of the movement. It’s helpful, however, to the collector or bookseller trying to identify the source of the many leaflets and pamphlets from this period, to be aware of the number of sometimes competing groups. These have been analyzed in recent scholarly books; a few of the most useful are listed in the bibliography. Between 1910 and 1915 seven more states (mostly western) had passed suffrage amendments and by 1920, another seventeen states had done so. When the federal amendment was finally ratified in 1920, 339 of 531 presidential electors represented states in which women could vote. This, of course, made possible political action, capitalizing on the support of those states in which women could vote. By 1912 popular suffrage novels, sheet music, ads, postcards, books of argument aimed at high school and college debaters as well as Suffrage Schools established by NAWSA had become common. World War I presented a dilemma—to continue the fight for suffrage or to hold off in deference to the war effort. The NAWSA, while not abandoning the fight entirely, largely adopted the second course. The New Woman’s Party, led by Paul and Burns, who learned their tactics from the British Women’s Social and Political Union led by the Pankhursts, did not. Instead they pointed to the contradiction of “fighting for democracy” when the nation excluded women from voting. They embarrassed the administration with parades and demonstrations, set fire to copies of presidential speeches and chained themselves to the fence of the White House. The government obligingly martyred them with increasingly lengthy jail sentences, in terrible conditions, and force-feeding. The conflict, though never as extreme as the British suffrage battle, became increasingly violent. Two especially interesting and fairly available first-hand accounts of the period by New Woman’s Party leaders are Doris Stevens’ Jailed for Freedom and Inez Haynes Irwin’s The Story of the Woman’s Party, reprinted as Up Hill With Banners Flying. Yes, she’s also the author of Maida’s Little House. Some of the most interesting and elusive books of the period are by suffrage workers recounting their experience during this period. That it was a “peak’ experience for the women involved is clear. Their reminiscences, like the reminiscences of war veterans, are full of the desire to tell “what really happened” and reflect the great significance the events had to the teller. Some of these accounts have not been reprinted and are serendipitous finds for the collector. Accounts by NAWSA leaders and historians, Harper, Catt, Shaw and others are more readily available than Women’s Party material and are listed in the bibliography. By 1918, with the war over, a suffrage amendment passed in New York, and with a President now committed to the suffrage cause, prospects for passage of a federal amendment looked good. There was still plenty of resistance, however. The Susan B. Anthony amendment passed in the House, but two more votes were needed in the Senate. Two postponements of a Senate vote led to renewed picketing by the NWP. Forty-eight women were arrested and sentenced to fifteen days in jail. The vote was rescheduled after an embarrassed President Wilson took the unusual step of personally addressing the Senate, but the amendment again failed by two votes. In 1919, the House again passed the amendment, but the Senate was still one vote short. After considerable maneuvering, the amendment finally passed on June 4 of 1919. It was ratified in fifteen months and in 1920 women all over the United States were eligible to vote. Notes Irwin, Inez Haynes. Up Hill with Banners Flying. (Traversity Press, 1964) p. 289. Jablonski, T. “Female Opposition The Anti-Suffrage Campaign” in Jean H. Baker, Editor, Votes for Women: The Struggle for Suffrage Revisited. (NY: Oxford University Press, 2001) p. 206. Thurner, Manuela. “Better Citizens Without the Ballot” from One Woman One Vote. (Troutdale, OR: Newsage Press, 1995) p. 206. Fowler, Robert Booth & Spencer Jones. “Carrie Chapman Catt and the Last Years” in Jean H. Baker, Editor, Votes for Women: The Struggle for Suffrage Revisited. (NY: Oxford University Press, 2001) p. 139. Primary Sources Blatch, Harriot Stanton and Alma Lutz. Challenging Years: The Memoirs of Harriot Stanton Blatch. Catt, Carrie Chapman, and Nettie Rogers Shuler. Woman Suffrage and Politics: The Inner Story of the Suffrage Movement. Irwin, Inez Haynes. “Up Hill with Banners Flying” The Story of the Woman’s Party. Originally titled The Story of the Woman’s Party. First-hand account with many quotes from NWP members. National American Woman Suffrage Association. Victory How Women Won It: A Centennial Symposium 1840 – 1940. A collection of articles including one by Carrie Chapman Catt and several by her biographer, Mary Gray Peck. Shaw, Anna Howard. The Story of a Pioneer. Shaw’s autobiography. Stanton, Elizabeth Cady; Anthony, Susan B.; Gage, Matilda Joslin; and Harper, Ida Husted. The History of Woman Suffrage. The six volumes were published between 1881 and 1922. The first three volumes are by Stanton, Anthony, and Gage, Volume 4 is by Anthony and Harper, and Volumes 5 and 6 are by Harper. They have been reprinted a number of times and are also available on CD-ROM. Stevens, Doris. Jailed for Freedom. Probably the most readily available first-hand account of the NWP. Secondary Sources Baker, Jean H., Editor. Votes for Women The Struggle for Suffrage Revisited. A good and very readable collection of articles. Dubois, Ellen Carol. Harriot Stanton Blatch and the Winning of Woman Suffrage. Dubois may exaggerate Blatch’s importance a little, but the story of the 1915 New York suffrage campaign is interesting. Jablonsky, Thomas. The Home, Heaven and the Mother Party: Female Antisuffrage in the United States 1868-1920. Kraditor, Aileen S. The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement. Classic. Linkugel, Wil A. Anna Howard Shaw: Suffrage Orator and Social Reformer. Lunardini, Christine. From Equal Suffrage to Equal Rights: Alice Paul and the National Woman’s Party, 1910-1928. Lunardini’s discussion of the NWP is as complete as any I’ve found, especially since no biography of Alice Paul is available. Contains a helpful bibliography of secondary sources. Peck, Mary Gray. Carrie Chapman Catt: A Biography. Van Voris, Jacqueline. Carrie Chapman Catt: A Public Life. Most recent biography of Catt. Wheeler, Marjorie Spruill, Editor. One Woman, One Vote: Rediscovering the Woman Suffrage Movement. Good, scholarly introduction to the historical issues. Martha Kelly Gutenberg Books mkelly03@rochester.rr.com

They sleep in attics, less frequently in lower rooms, silent survivors of the ravages of expediency and modernism. Most of these ephemerons, “hovering over a pool for its one April day of life,” disappeared shortly after birth. The remaining population dwindles on a regular schedule. Like ancient Anne Rice vampires, they grow weary of prolonging fate, and molder away or burst into flames. The final survivors rely on the initial act of preservation, dry storage space, rag content, and the serendipity of discovery and restitution. An undiscovered sole survivor has little chance of research-level reacquaintance with the modern world around it. And yet these ancient ones do rise to prowl the earth again on occasion. “Found: the Long Lost ‘Ulster County Gazette’!” by Henry S. Parsons appeared in Antiques (1/1931, Volume 19, No. 1, pp. 14-19), as follows. When does an old newspaper cease to be a bibliographical rarity and become an antique? The question was recently raised at the Library of Congress in connection with the receipt of a document so rare as to be perhaps unique: a genuine specimen of the Ulster County Gazette for January 4, 1800. Accompanied as it is by a specimen of the preceding issue, for December 28, 1799, and one of the succeeding issue, for January 11, 1800, this happy discovery constitutes the most noteworthy recent addition to the Library’s large collection of early American newspapers. This number of the Gazette has, on many occasions, been more or less faithfully reproduced; and has become famous largely because no original from which the copies might have been made has hitherto been found. The Library of Congress itself has examples of twenty-six different versions of these reprints. A recent Bulletin of the New York Public Library (April 1930) carefully compiled by R. W. G. Vail from available collections, lists a known total of sixty-four spurious editions. This extensive series began during the first half of the nineteenth century, perhaps as early as 1825. In 1876, the year of the Centennial Exposition at Philadelphia, thousands of fresh copies were sold as souvenirs. Meanwhile, librarians had so long watched for the discovery of a genuine original that they had given up hope of such a miracle. As time passed and the fame of the Ulster County Gazette was spread abroad through the medium of newspaper write-ups and more weighty articles, innumerable bogus specimens began to appear as claimants to the honor of acceptance as originals. Many an insistent owner brought a treasured sheet to the Library of Congress, only to learn, incredulously, that what grandfather had preserved in the family Bible might be of some faint interest as a curiosity, but was quite lacking in appreciable monetary value. It was sad to disappoint the widow who hoped to give her son a college education on the proceeds from the sale of her supposedly priceless heirloom; but hers was only one case among many. Another test sometimes applied concerns an estate item headed Last Notice on page 3, column 2. In this, the name of the deceased as reprinted is “Johanais Jansen,” and that of the executor “Johannis L. Jansen.” Librarians were sure of the incorrectness of these forms, because the same notice reappears in the Gazette for April 26, 1800 (in the collections of the New York Historical Society), giving the names, respectively, as Johannis Jansen and Johannis I. Jansen, Executor. Over a period of some decades, the Library of Congress has encouraged the submission of copies of the Gazette for examination. Always the specimens that came proved to be spurious, until the hope of finding an original grew so faint that its expression could elicit nothing more than a pitying smile. A moment of optimism dawned when it was learned that the Freer Art Gallery in Washington had unearthed a copy among the possessions of its founder, Charles Lang Freer, a relative of the Kingston publisher; but it quickly subsided into the usual disappointment. Hence, when a modest note from Mrs. James Lydon, Jr., of Suffern, New York, asked for an opinion concerning three copies of the Ulster County Gazette, it was only the magic three that differentiated her request from hundreds of others. When Mrs. Lydon’s package was opened, it revealed copies for December 28, 1799, January 4, and January 11, 1800. And these met all tests. They are printed on rag paper, with the same watermark throughout, slender parallel lines, 1 1/16 to 1 3/16 inches apart. The title is set in italic capitals. The print shows the blurred edges of hand-press work. The old-style s appears where it should. Spelling and initial are correct in the Last Notice. In a subsequent letter from Mrs. Lydon, the Library received the following history of these papers. Mary Crawford Lydon (Mrs. James Lydon, Jr.) is descended from Petrus, or Peter, Decker, a Revolutionary soldier from the northwest side of the Shawangunk River, in Ulster County. He served in the New York militia, was ensign in the Fourth Regiment, and was promoted to a first lieutenancy under Captain Mathew Jansen, March 9, 1773 (New York State Archives, Vol. 1, pages 301-302). In early days the family attended church at Kingston, and thus Peter Decker came to have copies of the Ulster County Gazette, three of which have been preserved to the present time. So the long search for the lost Ulster County Gazette for January 4, 1800, ends triumphantly, with the discovery of three missing copies instead of one; for, though only a single member of the trio had risen to fame, its companions had also been counted among the irretrievable strays. Consigned now to the safe-keeping of the Library of Congress, they bring a long-standing mystery story to a satisfactory ending. Shawn Purcell mail@balopticon.com

This article offers some basic suggestions for those who own or plan to open an internet book store. You can also read it just to get a flavor of what is involved in setting up a commercial internet site although the emphasis is on books. It is offered with the hopes that it will help someone get started. It doesn’t tell how to sell books (other than maybe making a better web site), it doesn’t tell you what the book grades are, and it doesn’t discuss the aspects of being a bookseller. You should know these before you even consider opening an internet based bookstore. The article does discuss some aspects of becoming a webmaster apprentice and some of the things you can and should do to create a successful web site. It is a condensation of some of the materials I have read, either in books, interest groups I now or have belonged to in the past or individually in normal conversation. One note before we continue: I will very much try to explicitly say whether I am affiliated in any way with services/companies mentioned in this article, but I might miss sometimes. Generally, if I don’t mention some connection, you can assume that I only have knowledge of their existence. In any case, any suggestions/advice offered is just my opinion. If you are interested in books, whether just reading, collecting, talking/reading about them or about the book business there are several organizations/forums I think you should be aware of: The Independent Online Booksellers Association is dedicated to promoting internet bookselling by, among several other items, maintaining and enforcing high ethical and professional standards for our member booksellers, including a Code Of Ethics. Membership is open to other than just booksellers. Their Newsletter is open to all, member or not. (We are members of the IOBA). Global Book Town Independent Booksellers is a bookshop neighborhood on the Internet. You can find their discussion forum athttp://pub47.ezboard.com/bglobalbooktownindependentbooksellers Quite a bit of the material came from discussion threads on the site. (We are members of Global Book Town). The Bibliophile Mailing List is maintained for the benefit of sellers and/or collectors of rare, out-of-print, scarce books in all subject areas. (We subscribe to the Biblio list) The BookFinder Insider is a mailing list for BookFinder.com users to discuss the site, and more broadly, the online book industry. (We subscribe to the Insider list). Of course there are many more including SIGs and forums dealing with books in general to specific authors. For example, look at http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&group=alt.books or http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&group=rec.arts.books. In the beginning, there was the name. And the name was good. But the name was taken! You need a URL name for your web site. These can be purchased at a myriad of places on the net. Before we get to where to go to register a name, realize that your first, sometimes second, third, etc. choices may be taken. There are different “kinds” of addresses, i.e. com, net, biz, etc. But, if your name is taken, don’t register a SomeName.net name just because the SomeName.com is taken. Register a name as soon as you decide you are serious about opening a business web site – maybe even before that. Do it as soon as you can if you even think you might get serious. Do you get all of the “kinds” of names, Name.com, Name.biz, Name.org, Name.net? Some like to get the main three (com, org, and net) but I think that unless you plan to become a multi-million dollar business, just get the com address. It is generally the one assumed when you say your site is, for example, WhiteUnicornBooks. At this time, you can pay anywhere from about $9 a year to $30 a year and more. What is the difference in the costs? It isn’t quality of service if all you want is the name. The business you buy the name from is just a broker. Sometimes the difference is nothing. Other times, you get some storage space and possibly some bandwidth and maybe a few other perks. Unless you plan to use the extras (like building your own site), don’t pay for the extras! If all you want is the name go to someplace like GoDaddy where you can get a name for a single year for $8.95 or for 10 years at $6.95 a year (this was in Oct, 2003). Can you get the extras from the “cheap” places? Generally, yes but you pay more for them. I presently do have a web site registered through GoDaddy but that is my only affiliation. Note that some companies that will set you up on the net will also provide a URL registration. Sometimes it is included in the setup price, sometimes you pay extra for this. Now you have a name. What do you do? DON’T ADVERTISE. DON’T REGISTER YOUR NAME AT GOOGLE, DMOZ, ETC. You should have a web site up and running for business BEFORE you register your name with any search engines. More about that later. Just park your name at the place you registered. What you should do is read. There are several sites on the web that give advice about how to run a web site and how to build web pages. A few are: http://www.dtp-aus.com/htmlstrt.html HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) Tutorials. You will need to be able to program in HTML to create your own web pages. Don’t worry, it isn’t really all that difficult and the basic design can be done for you. http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum48/71.htmThe “New To Web Development” forum on WebMasterWorld. http://www.webmasterworld.comThe home page for WebMasterWorld. Just look around for any topic of interest. This will keep you busy for a long time. You should have your site open and a going concern before you run out of topics to read. http://www.searchengineworld.com/tips/doit.htm Designing a High Search Engine Rankings Page. Dated 1977, it still has some good information. http://www.smartwebby.com/website_promotion/altavista_ranking.asp About Altavista rankings. did I mention that you should read (and read and ….) Before you can get your inventory up to a site, you must have a “computerized inventory”. How do you get one? Well, any answer to that has to include “with a lot of work”. But what inventory program do you use? Happily, almost anyone you want to use. You can generally use any spread sheet program (Excel, Quattro Pro, abs, Gnumeric, …) which will output a tab delimited ASCII file. The same is true for any database which will output a tab delimited ASCII file (Access, Filemaker Pro, FoxPro, etc.). If you use those types of programs, you have to build your own structures. Some prefer this because they have more control over what they can do. Others prefer a special purpose database program. For books there are quite a few out there including the following: Bookhound BookLog , uses UBIC System. Seems very full featured but for B&M shops. Expensive. BookMinder Booktrakker . Good program, very flexible, free trial (we currently use Booktrakker as our main database program) Homebase is provided for free by the Advanced Book Exchange (ABE) (we currently use Homebase for auxiliary entry for transfer to BookTrakker and used it in the past as our main database program). ReaderWare. Free Trial. Several of these programs have a forum for new users where advice is offered on the basic (and not so basic) use of the program. The IOBA (see link above) has several articles in their Newsletters that discuss different inventory programs. It’s finally time to open an internet book store! Here are several sites that will set you up with a store front on the web. If you really want to “roll your own” you might look at these sites to get some ideas. Do you know what cgi-bin access and SSL means? You’ll need to know if you plan to “roll your own”. You will have to contact the people holding your URL registration to have them “point at” your actual site, but that is generally explained in the setup of your site. We personally have a web site hosted by Chrislands with which we are very pleased. I’ve also “heard good things” about the following sites: http://www.bookfella.com http://www.booksellersolutions.com http://www.chrislands.com http://www.dreedle.com http://www.moostores.com http://www.qwk.net http://www.ramsaybooks.com/design/ These sites should offer enough bandwidth to operate your store. That is, the set up shop allows for searches of your inventory, ordering, allowing customers to set up a login ID, etc. with a good response time. Some have fixed fees with, possibly, different levels of service. Some have charges depending on how many books you have online (searching a larger inventory requires a larger bandwidth if you want to keep a good response time). Shopping cart integration is provided. In other words, you basically get a turnkey operation. Statistics on your website should be provided. I haven’t checked the other sites for statistics, but I think they provide some if not all that Chrislands provides. At Chrislands you can see what pages have been visited, where visitors come from, what search terms they use to reach your site, and more. Statistics are available at daily, weekly, and monthly intervals. Integrated Credit Card processing is generally an option. A further note, SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is a must for a commercial site, even if you run it as a “hobby”. The definition runs to some other computer acronyms but what it boils down to is that transmissions between you and your customer are encrypted and thus things like credit card information is protected. There are various levels of encryption, but anything of 128 bits or higher should be sufficient for at least “temporary” storage of “personal” information (remember that computer technology is improving and this may not be sufficient in the future). If the business which supplies your site offers SSL (and all of those above do), it is very likely adequate and will probably remain so. Well, you finally have an established book store on the web and all you need to do now is upload your inventory, keep it up to date, take and ship orders, and collect all of that easy money. Right? Wrong! You and umpteen million other people have businesses on the web. Many of them are booksellers, so how are your customers going to find you out of all those other booksellers? BTW: Did I mention that you should still be reading (and reading and …) about web site promotion, etc., from either some of the above sites or ones you have found on your own.] Hopefully your site has, at a minimum, a search capability and a way to order with SSL capability (see above for SSL). NOW YOU REGISTER! DMOZ, will register your site for free (maybe). Since it is a feed for many of the search engines, it is the first one you should register on. Note the criterion for listing your site. Don’t make it a blatant advertisement. Submitting your site to search engines before it’s ready is a big no-no. It won’t get indexed and it’ll either come up as a 404 (error, not found) or it’ll index the page where the domain is ‘parked’. Then, when you are ready to be indexed, the spiders from Google, AltaVista, et al, will take forever to find your site. Technically, what happens is that when a spider crawls a site, it looks at the IP address of the site. It knows the site by the IP and only refreshes it once in a very long while. If you move the site to a different server (and that is what you are doing when you move from the parked address to your new site), it can take months – like 4-5 months for the spiders to find the new location. Moving a site from one server (or a ‘parking place’) to another server is a very difficult undertaking. How about places like “ineedhits” and the like. If it’s free, why not? But we’ve found the “pay for placement” is generally not worth it. For the paid versions, they may send “traffic” and may send you lots of it. BUT, in general, they don’t send you qualified traffic. Surfers are simply “forced” onto your page (usually through a pop-up which they close before it even loads – thus the “may send”). In the olden days of the web, this was useful as there were various revenue programs out there that paid you money simply for having someone “view” the ad. These are rare today. In the end, you’re better getting one person a day who is interested in “buying books” than 1000 people a day who are there just because you paid for them to be there. The key is “qualified” traffic rather than just any old traffic. Besides, Google, AltaVista, et al, will pick you up in a couple of months especially if you register with DMOZ. If you can afford it, a Yahoo listing (https://ecom.yahoo.com/dir/reference/instructions) doesn’t hurt, but it won’t kill you if you don’t have one (remember, you are getting my opinion, not everyone’s). Don’t go crazy with those submission services that promise submission to 50,000 search engines. There are really only 5-6 that matter and you can register for free at most of the sites which ineedhits and its ilk gives you for free, including Google, Yahoo, and AltaVista. Now you have a site, you have been crawled by “everyone” and your site is out there for everyone to see. BUT your site is 103,223 out of 121,376 sites. At 30 sites per page that means you are on page 3441. Not many people look through 3441 pages to find what they want! (Have you been reading?). The first thing to work on is keywords and descriptions. Go to (almost) any site, put your cursor somewhere on the page and right click. There should be a choice of View Source or something like that. Left click on it. A window will open (typically a Notepad type of window for Windows users) which will contain the HTML source of the page. Near the top, you will see a KEYWORDS section (something like meta NAME=”KEYWORDS” CONTENT=…). These “words” are part of what distinguishes your site from other sites. [You can also save this file to get some ideas about HTML coding but ask permission from the site if they have “significant” information you want to use on your own site.] It’s amazing how many searches for which your site can be made to show up top five with some tweaking of tags and keywords to meet your own needs once the site is up and running. This stuff is not restricted to the “techie”, but does take a little time and thought. Keywords help and can help a lot, but there are other things you can do to make your site more visible. I’ll briefly mention two of them (you probably already know, if you’ve been reading). The first is links. If you link to a site, say something like http://GlobalBookTown.com, that generally helps that site in their ratings. But, since you probably have a smaller rank than them, it helps them “a little”. However, if they link to you then it helps you more than “a little”. How much it helps and how much more is more than “a little” is a complicated algorithm depending on the service that does the ranking (Google has depended more on this linking than other services in the past and may still do so). If you can create reciprocal links with a lot of sites, “a little” may add up to “a lot”. Do you specialize in Science Fiction/Fantasy? Ask the SF Site (http://www.sfsite.com/depts/small01.htm). A different specialty? You probably know better than me where to look. If your site goes up in the ratings, it helps the sites you link to “a little bit more”. When their ratings go up, your ratings are helped. It isn’t quite a never-ending circle, but it can certainly help. The second item is “content”. “Content” is, in part, what you are reading right now. It is also the specials or pictures of books you offer on your web site. It is anything on your site that tends to make you different than the other guy. How about putting up an “authors page” where your customers can find out what the next book will be or where the next appearance is scheduled? BTW: Do you also have audio-books, LP’s, or book paraphernalia or ephemera to list on your site? It could add a bit of distinction if you “advertise”. Content is a page (or several pages) on your site that also help your site. I was talking about linking to sites above. Well, in Google’s eyes, each page is a site in that context. There are also some good and bad ways to lay out your site. Since each of your pages has a rank, the good ways have the Google ranking concentrated mainly in one or two pages (usually your home page) and this can push you up in the Google searches. The bad way spreads the total ranking of your pages around all of your pages. This brings down your home page rank and thus pushes you down in the Google search. But, don’t “over design” your site to the point where your customers are inconvenienced. For more details, look athttp://www.iprcom.com/papers/pagerank. BTW: We started an “ethical listing sites” page to not only add content to our site but to possibly help our customers. It was a bust. Our email to listing sites started out with “We have found that many of our customers have been deceived by inaccurate descriptions and have been unable to obtain any satisfaction from the dealer in correcting the deception. Because of this we recently thought we would put up a page of links to other sites that have a stated ‘good’ ethics policy for their booksellers AND that policy is ‘findable’ by customers of the site AND they enforce the policy.” On Insider and Bibliophile, it started out as an Ethical Book Sites thread. Maybe the post was too strong and presented the wrong message (as we considered it) to the people who read it. The purpose boiled down to, as stated in one of the original emails when we started the project, “We are trying to tell people there are sites that have ethical book dealers and are not going to rip off people just for the sake of selling a book or two. We hope it will give online customers more information about online listing places besides the 3A’s. Some are not aware of any other sites on which to find books.” Anyway, it was a bust. We had three “yes” responses and no “no” responses from the sites we contacted. As a result, we have three sites listed. But our links page still points to the page as a “help for online book buyers” link. You are finally up and running. You’ve got regular customers and more and more people are finding you. How do you keep customers once you get them? The same way you do in an open shop. Newsletters make good reminders that you exist, especially if there are some “specials” advertised. But, remember this is the web. At worse, you should only send one newsletter to a customer unless they opt-in. Add an Opt-in Tag on your site. Remember, spam can kill your shop. How about offering discounts for repeat customers? Do the same kind of things you would do in an open shop but apply it to the web. Do you have a customer who has expressed an interest in a particular subject/author? Having kept track of your customers, you can send an email to them about a new book you just got in their area of interest (again, be careful about “spamming”). How about credit card processing, is it necessary? Credit card processing can help your bottom line and, in some cases, help very much. But setting up a merchant account and signing up with a gateway service can be quite expensive. This seems to be a catch 22. Fortunately, this isn’t always true. Set up a PayPal account (http://www.paypal.com). Your customers can “email” you money into your online PayPal account using a credit card. (Other services of this type include http://www.2checkout.com, http://www.paysystems.com). Make sure you check out the service before you sign up. There are many people who do not like PayPal (see, for example, http://www.paypalwarning.com). We use PayPal as one option for CC processing and have never had any problems. The cost of the service is paid from your orders with no setup fee. The major problem with PayPal and its ilk is that your customers also must be members, although PayPal has just announced that this will be changing and buyers will no longer need to register with them to make payments. Many people don’t want to join. For these people you need “real” CC processing. For a business in the US (or at least a person with a US Social Security Number), there is ProPay http://www.propay.com. There are several minor fees associated with the account, e.g. a $0.35 fee for a “withdrawal” from your ProPay account to your checking account (note, all costs were as of Oct, 2003 and may not be exact). There is also a $35 yearly fee. The charges are somewhat larger than a regular merchant account, but don’t have the monthly statement and gateway fee. The $35 yearly fee is about the same as the setup fee for merchant account and gateway service [which you have to pay in a lump sum] if you amortize that fee over about 5 years. Thus, the difference about boils down to paying a monthly statement and gateway fee (in the neighborhood of $20 or more combined) versus a higher item cost and discount rate through ProPay. The break-even point varies depending on the number of CC sales processed but is in the neighborhood of $1000 to $2000 a month in sales. We have used both the ProPay and merchant account/gateway service. To make a long story short, if you can use ProPay, I would suggest a steady CC processing of at least $1500 a month before looking for a merchant account and gateway provider [you will probably have to put up a deposit if you need to process more than $1000 a month through ProPay]. We became “unhappy” with our merchant account and gateway provider and are back to using ProPay for the present. Also note that there are some who are very dissatisfied with ProPay. However, we have been happy with their service. Do you first list on other services or, after you have your own site, continue to list on other services? Well, I’ll skip the first part of this with just a basic comment. Listing on multi book dealer sites may be the best (and cheapest) way to find out if you really want to be a bookseller. What about the “continuing” part of it? My answer to this is a definite yes, at least until you are making “enough” from your own site. What we do is decide what is a “fair” cost for a listing service. Note: this increases if the site also does your CC processing since CC processing, in this day and age, is a regular business expense. Before we say anything else, we add another bit of our philosophy. When we do choose to add a listing site, we consider basically one thing. Will we get a “good” return for our money? This return is not always in the form of “direct” book sales, it also includes “advertising value”. For example, we know of several repeat customers at our web site who first found us through a particular listing site, but now tend to order from us direct. That site gets some credit for these sales for some length of time. Thus we could have a fixed fee or fixed fee plus commission site that seldom gives us a sale, but we remain with them. Once we chose a site to list on, we tend to stay at least one year in order to give both the site and ourselves a fair trial. In general, we find out what the cost really is to list on a site and then raise the selling price if that becomes necessary. For example, say we have “a fair return” of $0.90 on the dollar ($1.00 minus a 10% commission). If a site charged us 20% then, if I raised my price by 12.5% for that site, I would get my $0.90. If a site charges 10% or less, just list there (assuming other factors agree). It’s easy for the straight commission sites, but what about those that charge a fee or fee plus (modified) commission or just modified commission. You can assume that the site will pay for itself to start with. But actual results require some analysis – like monthly, cumulative, and trend of sales. Whoever said the book selling business was easy? Look athttp://www.pattersonliddle.com/bookstart for a list of multi-dealer listing sites. We could probably continue “forever” about specific “things to do”: Did you get/make some business cards/flyers and post then at you local library (if allowed) or other where? Did you check out http://selfpromotion.com? It’s free to try. Do you put duplicate address “labels” inside your packages just in case the outer address gets “wasted”? Are you making your store pay for everything as soon as you can? This may entail waiting a bit for some “improvements”, but the faster you are on a supporting basis (at least as far as the store is concerned), the better off you will be. I hope you have gotten an idea about the process of opening an online book store/business. Maintaining and promoting your online book store is a never ending business but it can become enjoyable to make your site just a little bit better. If you have any comments, suggestions, or “just for the hell of it” emails, visit us at http://WhiteUnicornBooks.com or drop me a line at DeWayneWhite@sbcglobal.net. Copyright © 2003 DeWayne White

I haven’t been this disappointed in a long, long time. Remember the kind of disappointment when you didn’t get the bicycle you wanted for your birthday even though your parents had talked about it and you had every reason to believe that you were getting one (not just hope)? Well, that is what I felt after my tour of the Library of Congress. My excitement started when my I contacted my state senator’s office to see if my husband and I could get a White House tour during our October visit to D.C. One of his assistants emailed me back and said he would put us on a list and get back with us later but did we want to visit the Library of Congress – he would get us on that list also if we did. Well, yes, of course we did and we got another email and a telephone call confirming our scheduled tour time – Tuesday at 1:45 p.m. – bring photo ID. So we made our tour plans around the highlight of our visit – left our relatives on the steps of the National Archives Building (they hadn’t planned ahead and made a tour reservation) and caught the 11:30 AM bus toward the Capitol Building – we didn’t want to be late. We finally found the entrance (it is NOT the one at the very top of the many marble stairs) and went up to the INFO desk with our appointment paper in our hands and were told that the public tour started at 1:30 – if we didn’t want to wait there we could do a self-guided tour. Even after explaining that the tour we were taking wasn’t a ‘public’ tour, that it (we) had made special arrangements, we were told, once again, about the public tour. We could, however, go across the street and have lunch in the LOC cafeteria while we waited the 1 hour and 45 minutes. She wasn’t buying the idea that we, or our tour, were special. So we went out of the building and found the cafeteria in the other building – going through yet another body and bag security check. Of course the guard at the cafeteria entrance made us wait for the public entrance time of 12:30. But we were in line with the rest of the scanned public for our library tour, which would last about one hour. At the end of the tour, I asked the question I guess I should have asked my senator initially: Where are the books? This is, after all, a LIBRARY TOUR! That’s right. The Library of Congress Tour does not include seeing books. Well, o.k. I got to see 2 books: The Guttenberg Bible and The Manse Bible. Awesome, yes, but I could have walked up the steps with my relatives and viewed them just as we did the Declaration of Independence – no appointment, no calls from the senator’s office, just go look at an amazing piece of history. The handouts I read after the tour say that the stacks are closed. I suppose that means something to a librarian–to me it meant that I couldn’t check something out, couldn’t pull something off the shelf and handle it. I didn’t really expect to handle the books but I expected to be able to look at the books on a tour of the library. According to the brochures, the LOC collection “comprise the world’s most comprehensive record of human creativity and knowledge, …has 500 miles of shelves holding 28 million cataloged books in 460 languages, maps, films, etc. The LOC has over 4,000 employees and uses volunteers to lead the tours that highlight the historical and architectural aspects of the building. Special displays are presented periodically with the Lewis & Clark Exhibit on display in October. The main goal of the LOC is “…to make knowledge and creativity available to the U.S. Congress on a continuing basis…”and the staff fills approximately 500,000 congressional requests for information annually. With a free library card, you can search the card or computer catalogue and have books retrieved for your study. If you wish to access information on line, go to http://www.loc.gov. My digital camera’s memory stick was filled up so I wasn’t even able to take photos of the beautiful building. I did pick up a brochure and therefore know the answers to the 25 Questions Most Frequently Asked by Visitors, in addition to knowing that the Greek Goddess Minerva watches over the interior of the building. She represents Civilization – protects us from war and according to the docent, she has been very successful – there has never been a war in the LOC. If you would like to see some rare books while in D.C., try one of the Smithsonian’s museums. They have some on display at the various exhibits in addition to their 20 individual libraries – open by appointment – no congressional interface needed. The Washington National Cathedral’s Bookstore also sells old (rare?) Bibles. I don’t know what the Bureau of Engraving and Printing has available. My senator’s office told me that tour was also unavailable – but, of course, it was too late for us when we found out that it is open to the public. We never told our relatives that they could have joined us at the LOC – they still think we’re special! Copyright 2004 Madlyn Blom Madlyn Blom Center Aisle Books Madlyn@CenterAisleBooks.Com

Written by: Stan Gorski Special Collections Librarian Paul J Gutman Library Philadelphia University, Philadelphia, PA Edited By: Ken Fermoyle While many reference books are still printed on paper, digital products are omnipresent in today’s reference libraries. Many serial/journal/magazine indexes are now available either as CDs or web-based databases. Most libraries choose web-based versions of indexes due to the currency of the information, convenience to patrons, and no need for physical control of back files of CDs. However, many reference tools are produced in a stand-alone CD format. For example, the Sweets architectural catalog set, published by McGraw Hill, is available as a CD. Accessible Archives Inc. (Malvern, PA) publishes a number of historical newspaper indexes only in CD format. Increasingly, a large number of academic books are packaged with CDs. All of Plunkett’s business texts include CDs, which include all the table and graph statistics from the text. This allows for further manipulation by the reader. A number of magazines also produce CDs for special issues or articles. For example, Communication Arts presents its “best of the year” media projects on a CD included with the magazine and Émigré has included music CDs with its magazine. In fact, some magazines are including articles or images on CDs with each issue. A good example is VilleGiardini, an Italian architectural magazine. Except for the web-based journal indexes, all these products have been meet with varying degrees of acceptance. In this environment, I should not have been surprised when a local auction decided to make available the catalog for its rare book sale in a CD format. Samuel T. Freeman & Co. (1808 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19103) is the major auction house in Philadelphia for antiques, paintings and various collectables. A descriptive book catalog is made available for each of the four rare book sales held a year. The lots in each of these auctions may range from $20 to $10,000 and occasionally higher. Freeman’s does charge a buyer’s commission of 17.5%. So this past spring, subscribers to Freeman’s book auction catalog series received both a CD version and a printed copy of the catalog. The CD version included the same descriptions included in the printed catalog. The contents of the CD catalog were arranged exactly like the printed catalog. However, there was a controlled subject index that allowed the viewer to “jump” to specific subjects. Along with the CD, was a small pamphlet (about 30 pages), which included instructions, general auction information, and subscription order blank and sample entries with small color images. This pamphlet also included a more extensive index with appropriate lot numbers. Of course, the appropriateness of the various index terms is always a subjective decision. Depending on one’s collecting interests, it is always possible to argue that the subject indexing could be more extensive or specific. In an ideal universe, you would be able to search for any word used in the title of an item, its description, and/or even subjects associated with the item. Of course, then there would be complaints on the number of false hits. Also this degree of subject indexing would probably be cost prohibitive. The most obvious benefit of this format is the inclusion of more color images. Since it is less cumbersome and time consuming to transfer images directly from a digital camera to CD, the overall cost of production is much lower. And since color does not add to the cost, this allows for the inclusion of a greater number of color photos. The individual cost of the CD to the auction viewer was $15, which was cheaper than the cost of the printed catalog for the sale. While Freeman’s printed catalogs in the past may have included a few color images with about 20 black and white photographs, with the CD it was possible to present over 250 color images (585 lots in the sale). In fact, in sections devoted to autographs, maps, bindings, books with plates, it was possible to show an image of each lot described in that group. One minor problem was the small size of the images and that it was not possible to enlarge their size for closer inspection. This format does raise the possibility of a cumulative file of auction catalogs and/or images of items sold. It would be possible to include all the catalogs for each year on a separate CD with a cumulative index. This product would be useful for pricing or identification. It would especially be helpful in showing the physical condition of the items sold. It would be more understandable to the book viewer why certain titles or items commanded their auction price with an image of the item available. I had hoped that an updated CD with auction results would be made available after the sale. Understandably, considering postage and other costs, Freeman’s did not follow this path but made the auction results available through their website (www.freemansauction.com). I enjoyed viewing the CD and appreciated the large number of color images. However, in conversation with David Bloom (Freeman’s VP for books, prints & manuscripts), he stated that the response was mainly negative regarding the CD catalog and that the majority of collectors and dealers preferred a printed catalog to the CD. Their next book auction will be sold by using the traditional method of a printed catalog.

IOBA: Alibris recently launched a new pricing service for online booksellers that has caused quite a stir. What is the service and why are you doing this? Weatherford: The Alibris Pricing Service is the beginning of a revolution in used bookselling. For the past four centuries, booksellers set the price of their book based on their personal knowledge and on conditions in their local market. In some cases, we charged almost whatever we wanted. The Internet is creating a real market for used books – and in real markets, the laws of supply and demand set prices. Our pricing service simply lets booksellers apply current market information to their prices. As a result, their sales go up – a lot. That is good for them, good for book buyers, and good for Alibris. IOBA: Many booksellers are concerned that this will simply accelerate the “race to the bottom” with online prices. Weatherford: At Alibris, we have had a running joke about the book Bridges of Madison County – the best-selling fiction book in1995. Alibris, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and ABE all have thousands of copies for sale. You can get them for a penny on Amazon – and you can get a new copy for nine cents! Obviously nobody makes any money selling this book, unless you charge sellers a listing fee, which Alibris doesn’t. What should sellers do? Simple – STOP LISTING THIS BOOK! The Internet has a lifetime supply, thank you very much. When supply overwhelms demand, prices collapse – in books, just like in anything else. Falling prices are a concern – a big concern – for all online booksellers. But prices are just information from the market – and if the market is telling you that it already has too many copies of a certain book, we think that booksellers need to know this, even if it is bad news. Any bookseller who pretends they can charge above-market prices or pretends that we are still living in the good old days when anybody could charge almost anything for any book is a bookseller with a hobby, not a business. IOBA: But isn’t Alibris concerned that book prices are falling – and in some cases, collapsing? Weatherford: You bet we are concerned. Heck, we are the only service left that doesn’t charge a listing fee, so if prices fall, our income falls with it. But the weatherman does not create the weather: We report current market conditions to our booksellers whether we like what we see or not. IOBA: But doesn’t a pricing service like this amount to price fixing? Weatherford: The previous question about falling prices presumed that we are causing prices to fall – and we aren’t doing that. This question suggests that we are somehow holding prices up artificially – and we aren’t doing that either. Believe me, if there were a legal way for Alibris to fix prices, we would be more than happy to do it. But Alibris does not set prices – and neither does any one bookseller. Prices are the result of supply and demand. In the old days, customers did not have a lot of choices, so booksellers could charge more. Online, they have a lot of choices, so prices fall if there are more books than customers. Our service simply helps booksellers keep up with all of this – which is impossible to do without technology. Some sellers compare it to the Kelly Blue Book, which tells you how much your used car is worth. IOBA: How are booksellers going to survive if the market keeps shrinking like this? Weatherford: The market isn’t shrinking – it’s exploding. Used books are by far the fastest growing and most profitable part of the book business. Sellers who are pricing books accurately are enjoying the results of this growth. Sellers who insist on doing it the old way will see their sales continue to fall. So far, the Alibris Pricing Service is the best way for a seller to keep up with market changes. Personally, I would hate to be a bookseller without this service competing with sellers who use it. IOBA: We hear from sellers that your service doesn’t help re-price every book – usually only more common books. Why is that? Weatherford: It’s true that the Alibris Pricing Service really is oriented mainly around common books – but that’s more than 80% of the demand out there, so it tackles the vast majority of the market. Three things need to be true before we can provide you with a market-based price. First, your book needs to be in our catalog. Our catalog is enormous and global – but it doesn’t have pamphlets from the 1930s and other obscure items. Second, we need to be able to recognize your book. This means we need to be able to match your record to the catalog. If you have entered the information carefully or if the book has an ISBN, there is a good chance we will recognize it. If your record has typos, then our systems may not recognize it. Our systems accurately recognize about 75% of the records we get, which is outstanding compared with any other bookseller. Third, we need to have market information about the item. We may recognize it but not know about any sales or other items like it for sale, or the seller may have indicated that the item is collectible (signed, for example). In these cases, we do not make recommendations because the bookseller knows as much or more about the item as we do. Statistically, we are able to recommend a price most of the time – and our recommendation is based on recent selling prices and recent sales. IOBA: The market prices in the pricing service do not seem to account for books that are collectible either as first editions or as signed copies. Why not? Weatherford: Because we are not smart enough to do that. Pricing collectible books is still more art than science. The reputation of the seller matters a lot – established sellers can charge more for the same book in the same condition. I would be very cautious of anybody who claimed they could automate the pricing of collectible books. IOBA: Also, your service does not vary the market price according to the condition of the book. Why not? Weatherford: One of our next enhancements will help on this front – allowing sellers to create “filters” for condition, binding and other elements. But more importantly, condition doesn’t matter to most customers if the book is in very good or better condition. As John Adams famously said, “facts are stubborn things”. We know who buys books online – and it is overwhelmingly readers, not collectors. We know which copy they pick – usually the lowest priced one that is not torn, broken, or marked up. If you have a book that is in mint condition and you want to charge more for it, go right ahead – but there is no factual basis for our service recommending a higher price. By the way, at least one bookselling pioneer figured this out ten years before the rest of us. Michael Powell has a million books for sale and none of them have condition descriptions. As best we can tell, it hasn’t hurt his sales much. IOBA: Are you saying that if I am an antiquarian or specialized bookseller your service won’t work for me? Weatherford: It won’t help with your antiquarian or highly specialized books – your expertise will be more accurate than our market data. But most antiquarian or specialized booksellers acquire enormous amounts of out-of-field material or simply common used books. Smart sellers liquidate this material at prices that pay for the entire collection. Our service is excellent for this task, which is something many antiquarian sellers are grateful for. IOBA: Dick, you used to own a well-respected store in Seattle. Would you have used a service like this? Weatherford: I would have killed for this service. Pricing a book sometimes took longer than cataloging it. And we never had the time to re-price books – it simply took too long, so we never bothered with it. Think about it this way: I could easily go back and re-price books I have that were cataloged years ago and never sold – without having to check them one at a time. By the way, this tool is designed for online pricing. If you run a store in a major metropolitan area, like I did, you can and should charge higher prices in the store. Customers do not pay shipping and they get the convenience, shopping pleasure, and expertise that only a good bookstore can offer. These things cost money, and a bookseller should price accordingly. IOBA: Are many sellers using the service? If so, are they selling more books? Weatherford: We are astonished at the response this service has received, and our early indication is that our sellers are very happy with the results. Most of them figured that old listings were dead stock. Using this service, they are repricing and selling these books. Many feel like it is found money – and some have told us that they paid for the service with sales increases the day after they used it. IOBA: Speaking of which, how much do you charge for the service? Weatherford: It’s a six month subscription based on a monthly fee that ranges from $9.95-$49.95 depending on how many books you have. We deduct it from our payments to you. Sellers who want to learn more or sign up can do so at http://sellers.alibris.com. IOBA: Can you tell me how many of my books are over- and under-priced before I sign up for the service? Weatherford: Yes – and this will also give you a sense of how many of your books we can help you to re-price. Just go to the seller hub at http://sellers.alibris.com and select “Pricing Analysis Report” from the Account Management menu. IOBA: What kind of feedback have you received about the service from sellers and what changes are you planning to make as a result? Weatherford: As noted earlier, we’re planning to add new features designed to enhance how sellers can search on their inventory. Also, a small number of our price recommendations turn out to be dumb. This is a minor problem, but occasionally it makes sellers think that we are silly. Turns out that if one or two people are charging $300 for a book that most folks charge $50 for, our system doesn’t yet adjust for this very well. It’s a small problem that affects relatively few books – and we can fix it, but it is the kind of thing you discover when hundreds of sellers use a tool that you don’t pick up when a couple dozen sellers are helping test it. Sellers should expect that we will regularly add new capabilities to the Pricing Service as we go forward – and look for continued integration into other Alibris services in 2004.

Q. Who knows where I can find a list of the countries that DO NOT accept global priority mail? I’m getting quite a few international orders these days and it’s always a moment of truth at the counter when I find out the tab is not $7 or $9 but $20 and up. I know from bitter experience there is no global priority to Italy, but what are the other countries? Susan Halas Prints Pacific A. This chart names all the countries that accept GPM: http://pe.usps.gov/text/pub51/51cl.html George Cross Q. Can anyone recommend a book-safe pesticide for silverfish? My main problem is that they are finding a nice, comfortable lifestyle inside of boxes of books. Periodic vacuuming is not a good option. Doug McClure A. Here are a few suggestions. All of these are repellents, not true insecticides. 1. Menthol crystals — best to keep these in a small container such as a cotton-plugged tube. I have never observed any damage or color change in bindings or djs exposed to menthol crystals, but you never know….. 2. Eucalyptus leaves/branches. Just menthol in a natural form. Be sure the plant materials are thoroughly dry before placing near the books. Again, dried, crushed leaves in a cotton-plugged tube might be safest. 3. Depending on where you are located and whether you can obtain them, fruits of the Bois d’Arc tree (Osage orange, Maclura pomifera) also repel silverfish and many other insect pests. I do not know what the active ingredient is here, and obviously more care should be taken to avoid contact between the books and the plant materials. C.O.Patterson A. As an entomologist and IPM specialist for museums the past 25 years, I have found that boric acid is not very effective against silverfish. In fact, cellulosic insulation for buildings (ground up paper treated with borates for fire retardancy) does not deter silverfish at all. They feast on it. Another dust, such as Drione (finely divided silica gel plus pyrethrum) would be a much better choice. Even straight silica gel pesticidal dust would work quite well. Both are basically desiccants with sharp particles that scrape the wax off the cuticle of the insects and dehydrate the pests. Such dusts should be applied to pipe chases, voids in walls where pipes emerge, and cracks and crevices where the pests hide during the daytime. If conventional, residual sprays are to be used, an encapsulated or wettable powder formulation would work best. These should be applied as perimeter sprays to the baseboards under which silverfish hide. They can also be directed into cracks and crevices and pipe voids. Actually glueboards (also known as sticky boards or capture traps) work well against silverfish. They are a non-toxic approach which stay in place for long periods of time intercepting silverfish while the nocturnal pests roam about the space. Also, I noted a response from someone on the Internet about sensitivity and allergies to pyrethrum. When dusting for silverfish, you place a light amount of the dust as a coating in voids and pipe chases, never in the open. For instance, the 4″ void beneath cabinetry, shelving, or natural history ranges would be a logical place to put Drione dust. Pipe chases are often inhabited by silverfish and would be another logical place to blow in Drione dust with a bulb duster. If Drione is used in a sane manner, no one will ever come into contact with it. Besides, after application, the pyrethrum eventually breaks down and disappears, leaving the finely divided silica gel in place for intercepting crawling insects. Not bad for carpet beetle larvae either. Thomas A. Parker, PhD Pest Control Services, Inc. 14 East Stratford Avenue Lansdowne, PA 19050 610-284-6249 610-284-4494 FAX www.termitesonly.com – website Editor’s Note – Joyce Godsey’s Book Deodorizer, http://www.bookdeodorizer.com, may work as well. I understand she is testing it for silverfish, etc., as we speak. Q. This is probably a silly question…but why on older books are some of the pages “uncut”? I purchased a set of nice Dickens off of PBA. I was hoping to read them, But no! Every other page is uncut and obviously unread. I find this annoying as I can also presume if one carefully cuts the pages, the so called collector value drops faster than the Dotcom bust. I would appreciate some insight on this. Forgive me if it has been discussed before as I must have missed it. John Scott Porterfield A. Publishers deliberately issued books with pages uncut, in their original boards, so that owners could take them to a binder of their choice who would then have the maximum width of possible margin available, i..e., the binder would then trim the book (thus “opening” the pages) to whatever width was suitable for the binding style. Michael Cole York Also: A. I’ve been told that a plastic card, like a credit card or membership card (which would be thinner than a credit card) works well. Suzanne Boomer’s Books And along the same lines: A. A nice stiff playing card works well; I have noticed little difference in the efficacy of a face card as opposed to those of lower value. David Holloway More information: A. This is probably a bit pedantic, but I believe the correct term is unopened, not uncut. According to The Book Collector’s Fact Book by Margaret Haller, “An unopened book is one which has not as yet had any closed leaves slit open with a sharp instrument such as a paper knife or letter opener, so that the pages might be read. An uncut book, on the other hand, is one which has not been trimmed at the bindery.” Editor’s note: According to John Holden’s The Bookman’s Glossary: “Uncut edges – Leaves untrimmed by machinery. Not to be confused with ‘unopened’. Unopened – A book with folded edges that have not been sliced open by hand, as with a paper cutter. Not to be confused with ‘uncut edges’.” Michael S. Greenbaum Q. I am planning to ship a number of books from three different locations back to my home base. Each shipment will contain 300-600 or more books. The last time I did this, I carted them around in my Taurus station wagon and finished up with lots of car damage due to the weight. I have also pulled a U-Haul trailer, but with the amount of time I’ll be away it would be a costly solution. In the past I have sent small boxes of books (read about 30-40 books) via USPS using Media Mail. This was a fairly good way to ship. But slightly costly. UPS is apparently more expensive. Does anyone have any good suggestions about shipping methods for boxes of books. And, for that matter, any good ideas for packing such boxes so the books arrive in reading condition and not as saw dust. All suggestions greatly appreciated. Michael Schneps A. Many booksellers I know won’t buy large quantities of books because they don’t want to deal with moving them. Here are a few ideas we’ve used over the years, updated quickly with a few phone numbers and companies we’ve used. I’m not endorsing these companies – check for the best rates, and as always ask around locally to find recommendations and best fits for your situation. 1) Move them yourself. Rent a panel truck to minimize the wear on your own vehicles. You can rent by the week or month at more favorable rates. We’ve used Rent-A-Wreck in the past – cheap rates and working but unattractive (beatup) trucks and cars. Their website is at http://www.rentawreck.com, 1-800-944-7501. Although it’s been a while since we’ve used them, they were no-frills trucks, very little amenities, but lots of space. Many of the major car rental companies (Enterprise, Avis, Hertz, etc) also rent panel trucks that are inexpensive. You can ask if they have any beatup vans for rent at a discount. If you need working AC make sure you ask for it – many of these cheapies don’t have it. 2) Send packages via bus. Many bus lines will allow you to send packages economically via their existing bus routes – they’re going there anyway, why not make some money moving your books? Don’t expect pristine handling, but you can often ship terminal to terminal avoiding the industrial parks of most commercial shippers. For large quantities this isn’t the best choice. We’ve used Greyhound, website at: http://www.greyhound.com. Their service, Greyhound Package Express (GPX) is “an economical way to deliver packages, especially those within a 300-mile radius. Counter-to-counter services is available from most Greyhound terminals and door-to-door service is available in selected areas.” Call them at 800-739-5020 for more information. 3) Send packages via UPS. UPS has a standard rate for shipping packages which you can get at any drop-off center. Anyone with daily UPS pickup service can also get what is called their “hundredweight” service, which is a service designed for less than 1000 pounds at substantial discounts over their normal shipping rates. It is a bulk service. If you aren’t a daily pickup customer, find a local business who is and piggy-back on their service to get the reduced rates – many businesspeople will help out, and if not, throw in dinner for 2 at a local restaurant of their choice. Their site is at http://www.ups.com. This service is not well publicized, why I don’t know. Check the rates though against normal UPS rates – once they quoted a price higher with hundredweight than a normal shipping program. Current url is at: http://www.ups.com/content/us/en/resources/select/sending/options/hundredweight.html 4) Lastly, try a commercial freight company. The ABA (American Bookseller’s Association) has bulk purchasing arrangements with various companies to help with shipping large quantities of books. They used to use Freight Management Systems (we had good luck with them, 865-922-7491 for free estimates), but their website now notes a program with Fedex Ground and also PartnerShip (1-800-599-2902, ext. 2462). There are various membership requirements, credit forms, etc but it is worth it if you ship large quantities, even one time. Check ABA’s website programs: http://www.bookweb.org/join/affinity/ We’ve done this 3 times with large lots of books purchased cross country. You can also talk to moving companies, who often have “end of truck” rates where they will fill up a truck going somewhere with your books. Lastly, if you have friends in the local trucker’s community check with them – sometimes a trucker can’t find a load for a return trip and will take your load to lose less money on the return trip – this method is catch-as-catch-can and I’d make sure I was working with reputable folks. When packing books for these services, the same rules apply as sending regular books through the mail – most of these bulk services just treat your boxes as heavy stuff, not precious books. Pack books flat (not spine up or you’ll break the bindings), spines toward each other, bubble wrap, and at LEAST an inch of packaging between the books and the edge of the box, or every bump to the box will translate to damaged books and lost revenue for you. Then, put glassine tape around the box in all three dimenisions so if the seams happen to burst at least the box stays together. More smaller boxes are better than fewer larger boxes, just because the shock of movement or dropping of the package translates first to the box and then to the books. Insist on this packaging style if you aren’t packaging the boxes – I once had 20 boxes sent with no padding at all, save a single sheet of bubble wrap on the top of the box – lots of broken bindings. Pay for it if you have to – you’ll end up with lots of usable bubblewrap later for reuse. If you have the time and ability to do it, package the books, and then place them on a pallet and shrinkwrap it. You’ll need a loading dock to get them on and off the truck in that case. You can drop off books at the local freight office, and they can often shrinkwrap the books on a pallet for you. This saves you pickup charges, and saves work for the trucking company, which they appreciate. It also means the books won’t shift in shipment, and receive minimal handling. If you don’t have a loading dock on the receiving end, $20 and a smile to the trucker will usually get some understanding getting them off the pallet and into the garage. Make sure when asking for quotes on prices that you note if dropoff/pickup is in a residential area – these trucks are often quite large and it affects the pricing as well. When working with the freight companies, remember that they are used to working with well-equipped back docks at manufacturing companies – be sure to check before showing up with a bunch of boxes and expecting them to shrinkwrap for you. When all else fails, smile and look flustered. Most people are human and will help out the poor, confused, courteous bookseller. grin 🙂 Hope this helps somewhat. If anyone has more ideas I’d love to hear about them. Sincerely, John Kuenzig, Bookseller Thanks to all our contributors, especially John with his in-depth report. And, as usual, special thanks to Lynn and the Bibliophile List. Please send your book questions to: Booksone@comcast.net and we will try to have them answered for you. Jean S. McKenna – Books (Editor Q & A) Chairman Education Committee. And, an unanswered question that perhaps one of you can help with! Hi all, I hope someone can help me with this strange case. I sold a large lot of beautiful Japanese quilting magazines on eBay. They went off to the purchaser in two boxes, both of which arrived on the same day. One box contained the Japanese magazines; the other contained a large lot of second world war magazines. I have never had any second world war magazines so this was not a case of my having mixed up mailing labels or some such. The only thing I can figure is that the box was opened at customs and the contents switched (inadvertently, I hope) with those of another box being opened nearby. Needless to say, the purchaser is keen to have the magazines she paid for and I am keen not to have to refund her money. She has send me pics of the box and contents and it is definitely my box and wrappings but NOT my contents. I thought perhaps I might locate the buyer of the war magazines in the eBay finished auctions listings but have not yet found a comparable sale. Now, I’m asking for your help and your wisdom. Have you ever heard of such a thing and, if so, what do you suggest I do next? And, have any of you recently sold a batch of magazines including History of the Second World War (Marshall Cavendish) and The Battle Staff – Smart Book. I figure if I can find that sale, I will find the missing Japanese magazines. With fingers crossed, I am Frances Curry Only the Best Books fxcurry@sympatico.ca  www.onlythebest.ca

According to Holroyd over 40,000 paperbacks are listed, most published before 1970. The book is easy to use, indexed by publisher, author, and some of the better-known cover artists. Author pseudonyms are listed throughout. The oversize soft cover book, an impressive 800 pages long, includes 1000 cover scans. The print is a little small, but that’s probably an elderly quibble considering the book’s overall usefulness and completeness. The author, an experienced and long-time bookseller in Rochester, NY, specializes in science fiction, fantasy, and vintage paperbacks. The price guide took Holroyd five years to complete and he plans an update in two or three years. Holroyd published the book himself and copies are available by contacting him at gholroyd@rochester.rr.com. Dealer terms are available. Copies are also available at a number of independent bookstores. Holroyd, Graham & Jon Warren (intro by Richard Lupoff). Paperback Prices and Checklist. Rochester: Graham Holroyd, 2003. Soft cover. 8 1/2 X 11. $29.95 By: Martha Kelly Gutenberg Books mkelly03@rochester.rr.com

“Book Miser” is a trade name that I purchased in 1993, when I entered the business. In addition to paying for inventory, a lease and furnishings, a significant amount of money was paid for the intangibles-the trade name and “goodwill,” principally. It didn’t take six months for me to learn that there was no goodwill (rather a fair amount of ill-will) connected with the business, and that the customer lists and ongoing training promised in my purchase contract would never materialize. Thus, I had paid some thousands of dollars for the right to use the name. A year later, Interloc was born, and I joined the nascent ranks of online booksellers, using my trade name. Some time shortly thereafter, I registered the domain name “Bookmiser.com.” Nearly a decade later, the name identifies me as a user on Alibris and eBay, and as a member of the Washington Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association. My email address incorporates the name, albeit truncated to the allowable maximum 8 characters. I am associated with the name in several activities outside the world of bookselling. And, until recently, I maintained a web site under the domain name Bookmiser.com. But no more. This past summer, we spent the month of August camping in Maine, with no internet connection. Upon my return, I realized that my web site could not be accessed. Checking with the web hosting service, I found all the files, and was able to bring each of them up directly, but the links from one file to another did not work. A phone call to my ISP revealed that I was no longer listed as the owner of this domain. In fact, the name would not come up at all on a who-is search. Thus, a phone call to Network Solutions was in order. After waiting the customary three-quarters of an hour on hold, I finally reached a live individual. This person helpfully informed me that the domain name had expired, and was now in a sort of cyber-limbo known as the Redemption Period. To bail out the name would cost $150, and if this were not done by a particular deadline, the name would be made publicly available. Since this conversation took place on September 4, and the redemption period expired at the end of the month, it was obvious that the thrifty thing to do would be wait until the first of October, and re-register the name, paying only the $30 or so it would cost then. After all, how much competition could there be for the name “Book Miser?” As it happened, the first week of October slipped past without my attending to the renewal, and to my horror, I discovered another web site using my old domain name. Worse, they’ve put up a site that is a portal leading to a number of book-search services, in addition to non book-related links. Still worse, there are dead links, much of the rest of the site is incomprehensible and the site incorporates an “exit” function that opens a new window when you try to leave via the back-button. Worst of all, the new owners posted a copyright notice dated 2002. I sent an e-mail to the new domain owner, asking that the copyright date be corrected, to remove any inference that I am responsible in any way for the current site. I’ve also informed the owners that I continue to use the trade name. Weeks later, there was no response, although at last check, the copyright notice is gone altogether. By all appearances, the new dot-com using my trade name is one of many identical sites parked on domain names that someone might find by accident. It’s a peculiar way of seeking business, a bit like catching fish with dynamite, in my view. The contact information for the new domain owner is murky, leading only to a couple of company names, rather than individual people. But the most galling part is that this interloper was able to register the name on September 18, during the period it was allegedly unavailable! Now, the plot thickens. Checking my files, I learned that Network Solutions never made contact with me about the expired registration. As it happened, the email address they had on file is one that I abandoned a year or more ago. But my mailing address and phone number were valid, and the site itself contained a mail-to link to my current email. An experiment revealed that email sent to the old address resulted in a “bounced mail” message. Under such circumstances, one would think the registrar would have tried some alternate means of reaching me, but there were no phone calls, no emails from the web site, and certainly no postal communication. Surely, I thought, this oversight could be corrected. A colleague in the Washington Antiquarian Booksellers Association suggested that there were remedies available. A page calledwww.internic.com/faqs/udrp.html reveals that a process called the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) defines how disputes over domain-name registrations are resolved. This policy includes a procedure described as, “a mandatory, non-binding, low-cost administrative procedure to resolve a certain set of claims – namely, claims of abusive, bad faith registration.” Now, that’s pretty murky. If the procedure is mandatory, how can it be non-binding? A few paragraphs later, “domain-name disputes must generally be resolved in the same way as any other conventional dispute: by mutual agreement, court action, or voluntary arbitration. Moreover, without a court order or consent of the registrant, a registrar will not cancel, suspend, or transfer a domain name.” Since the new registrant has not responded to a polite email, that leaves arbitration or a lawsuit. The latter being out of the question, it was time to explore the arbitration process. Three “approved dispute resolution service providers” exist (incidentally, don’t you just love this teetering stack of modifiers?) You can request review by either a single arbiter, or by a three-person panel. Of course, the fees for the three-person review are higher. The very least you would spend to initiate a review under this “low-cost” process would be $1,150. If the other party in the dispute wishes, your request for a single-person review will be shifted to a three-person panel, in which case the fees run as high as $4,500. As a bonus, you, the original complainant, get to pay half of the increased fee. Topping things off, the process can be expected to take several months. All this for non-binding arbitration-an expensive crap-shoot. Being Nobody’s Fool, I gave up and registered a new domain name: Bookmiser.US. As a precaution, I am putting META-tag keywords on each page, using “Bookmiser.com” as one of the keywords. Here are a few things you might do to avoid what happened to me: Make it your top priority to review your domain information. Not tomorrow, NOW. Go to Register.com and select a “WHOIS Lookup.” This will result in a page of information about your domain name. Check it carefully, and make any corrections needed. Make a copy of this page and store it where it can be easily retrieved. Mark your calendar with the expiration date of the domain name. Better still, give yourself a heads-up about six weeks ahead of the actual date. Mark your calendar with a reminder to check your WHOIS information at intervals of no more than six months. Be certain to correct the domain name record any time your email or postal address changes. Make a point of visiting your web site periodically, using several different browsers if possible. It’s all too easy to send files to the server by FTP and assume they will never become corrupted. Using different browsers will help you spot anything you missed in your page design that might affect the way customers see the page. Trade name encroachment: Does It Matter? When, as children, we played at being business-men, the name on the enterprise defined the enterprise itself. Often, the choice of a trade name is the very first step in forming a business. A trade name might reflect pride of family, the nature of the business, or some lofty aspiration (Acme, for example). This holds less true today than a generation ago; the latest crop of trade names may be distinguished by the way they provide no clue to the nature of the business (e.g., eBay, Verizon, Agoura). A former employer of mine opined that a business name ought to reflect the location and nature of the business. Thus, his shop carried not his personal name (which had an excellent reputation), but was called “Towson Foreign Car Service.” He figured, correctly, that his old customers would be motivated to find him, and that the name ought to attract new customers. My thinking about naming a book business is that the first word of the trade name ought to be “book,” thus leading by the hand those who would turn to the alphabetical section of the telephone directory, rather than to our expensive classified advertising. Still others believe the name ought to position the business at the very beginning or tail end of an alphabetical list. Thus, the Baltimore telephone directory reads alphabetically from AAAA Action Bail Bonds to Zyzyx. When writing about the names and their misappropriation, the temptation is almost overwhelming to quote Romeo (“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet”) or Othello (“Who steals my purse steals trash…but he who filches from me my good name robs me of that which not enriches him, and makes me poor indeed.”) Although these quotations have become cliches, they illustrate the visceral attachment of a person to his name. For some time now, encroachment on trade names has been an ugly fact of life. Stories abound about the crushing of the innocent by some juggernaut, the sad fate of a dissenting family member, or a decision made in haste and regretted at leisure. The number of tales about the Disney and McDonald’s companies crushing some innocent local business has reached the proportions of Urban Legend. One especially outrageous instance happened here in Baltimore a few years ago, when a restaurateur was deprived of the use of her personal name by an electronics company. Sony Motoyama, a Filipino, had for several years run a successful eatery under the name Sony’s. When an overreaching staff lawyer at the electronics company got wind of this, the restaurant was forced to change its name, despite the fact that Baltimore’s Sony in no way competes with the multi-national corporation. Motoyama faced a choice between spending precious assets to defend a claim to her own name, or moving forward in the hope that her reputation would follow her, whatever might be inscribed on the door. If you peruse the labels on wines produced by the Bully Hill Vineyard, you’ll discover that the proprietor has been forbidden by the courts from using his own name. The vintner is Walter Taylor, a member of the New York wine-making family which sold its identity to a large corporation. As the dissenting member of the family (the only one who wished to continue to pursue the family business), Walter got the short end of the stick. In the motorcycle industry, Craig Vetter became known as the designer and maker of fiberglass “fairings,” those bits of bodywork that shield a motorcyclist from the elements. In a spectacular bit of hasty judgment, Vetter sold his trade name to a former employee, figuring to retire. A year later, when retirement proved not to be the bed of roses he’d expected, Vetter discovered that he was not only unable to trade upon his considerable reputation, but that if he re-entered the cycle accessory business in any way, he might find himself in breach of his contract of sale. And perhaps one of the most spectacular trade name cases involved not a name, but handwriting. Chris Coyle, an enterprising independent real estate broker, made quite a splash in the market in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. Enough so that after around five years in business, he received a lucrative buyout offer from one of the large regional firms. Coyle’s trademark was his signature, which appeared on all his signs and literature. The buyout included a non-competition clause, which forbade Coyle from again using his name in the business in Maryland. After less than two years, Coyle grew bored with retirement and decided to open a new brokerage in the same area. Since he couldn’t use his personal name, he dubbed the enterprise “Champion Realty,” and adopted the trademark comprising the company name, in his easily recognizable script. The paint was hardly dry on the signs before he was sued by the company that had bought him out, claiming trademark infringement, merely because the handwriting was recognizable. Coyle pressed his case and won, but at considerable expense. In the old-book business, profitability is uncertain in the best of times, and does not permit prolonged and expensive legal battles over trade names. Often, someone borrows a trade name unconsciously, just because it sounds so darned good. A couple of years back, I discovered someone using “Book Miser” on Half.com. Predictably, the company would do nothing to mediate, and my frustration spilled over into a discussion thread online. A week or so later, Terry Laing revealed her identity as the interloper. She’d been reading the discussion with great interest, and to her horror, realized she was at the center of it! We sorted things out and have become fast friends, learning that we live only an hour’s drive from each other. Terry is active in WABA, doing business under the name Books and Spirit. Shirley Bryant reports that she had discovered someone else doing business as “Authors and Artists.” Fortunately, that person agreed to change his ABE and Alibris information to eliminate possible confusion. But we’re not always that lucky. Trademark protection is not guaranteed, even by registering the trademark. You must affirmatively defend your trademark against all encroachments, in the hope that when The Big One comes along, you’ll succeed. For Disney, Sony and McDonald’s, it’s a relatively small matter to assign a staff attorney to attend to trademark problems. We booksellers don’t have that luxury. In the long run, perhaps it’s easiest to use your own name as your trade name. While the Vetter and Taylor cases show the downside of this, in practice very few booksellers manage to sell their business name. Some of our most venerable booksellers have traded under their own names. Especially online, brand-names don’t seem to matter, and developing a brand-name identity in the babble of the Internet seems an exercise in frustration. The key to business longevity has always been repeat customers, and I don’t think that is about to change. We are creatures of habit. Our energies are best devoted to a personal relationship with each customer that makes it easy for them to develop the habit of returning to us for another purchase. Stan Modjesky bookmisr@valinet.com

BookWriter Professional is a new application created by Tom Sawyer, co-founder of Interloc and Alibris, serving as Chief Software Engineer from 1993-2001. His past creations include BookMaster, Record Manager, BookMate, Book Prices Realized, and the UIEE data exchange format. Last year, Tom produced the unique BookWriter Web composer, which effectively positions bookseller’s books in search engines. This exclusive IOBA article offers the first public disclosure of BookWriter Professional, the next step in the BookWriter series. Tom, what’s the motivation behind BookWriter Professional? I really enjoy producing software that’s actually useful, and I especially enjoy seeing booksellers make productive use of it. The last few years have offered a glimpse of what’s possible, but the technical learning curve is getting longer for many booksellers. Often, they spend more time pointing and clicking than actually doing book work. That’s a shame because computers are supposed to be tools, not an end unto themselves. BwPro is a program I’ve been wanting to produce for a long time. I believe it takes the bookseller to the next level of productivity. It is a complete bookselling environment, and it manipulates data in ways that are currently very difficult to accomplish, particularly in a single program. Is BwPro consistent with your previous software? In some ways it is. It was a big surprise for me to learn how many booksellers are still using BookMaster and Record Manager. Apparently, I did something right. The old software still gets many jobs done satisfactorily, with minimal effort. But those programs are more than a decade old and they’re very much out of date. I tried to code BwPro to carry the same philosophy forward into the Windows and Internet realms. A key design objective was to make BwPro so that a non-technical bookseller could do things with a minimum of trial-and-error. The result is that BwPro has a short learning curve. Most dealers who’ve tried it so far have jumped right in without having to read a manual. It’s as intuitive as I could make it. Isn’t user-friendliness an objective in all software design? Perhaps, but in my humble opinion it seldom actually happens. It seems like this should be an easy thing for a software designer to do, but it’s deceptively difficult. I think it’s similar to being a good writer — it’s easy to read and enjoy a finished product and fail to see the amount of work the author put into it. Few books can be enjoyed by young and old alike, be appreciated by both new and veteran readers, satisfy both the publishers and the readers, and yet stand up to the kind of intense scrutiny that accompanies a major work. Good software is like that. It is REALLY hard to make a program universally workable while keeping complexity low and adaptability high. After nearly 20 years of doing this, I’m still learning and still don’t consider myself to be an expert. It takes a long time to do a good job. Every little thing requires constant back-and-forth testing and tweaking to make it right. One minor detail can take all day to resolve. That’s one reason it’s taken so long to finish. What are the program’s basic features? Like BookMaster and Record Manager, BwPro focuses on specific core aspects of bookselling. Inventory, Contacts, Wants, Uploading, Importing, Exporting, Composition, and Invoicing/Accounting are all core capabilities. The program also provides Internet-based features such as email, FTP, and the ability to look up specific books in Internet venues. What features does BwPro provide and how are they presented? To a great extent, the same factors that were important a decade ago are still important today: Easy, rapid and intuitive data entry is a big one, and BwPro provides a wealth of features to accomplish that. A good data entry system addresses both contemporary and antiquarian books, and I think BwPro does this well. Booksellers also need to easily manage contacts and wants, upload records to multiple locations, import and export information quickly and easily, to professionally compose information in ways that will help sell books, and manage accounting information. BwPro addresses these things in a single package and tries to group their functionality logically, according to the real-world needs of the booksellers who make use of it. I’ve put things where I hope people will expect to find them, and provided capabilities that I hope will help booksellers become more productive. Can you offer some examples of real-world needs BwPro addresses? Sure. For instance, the Inventory Record dialogue provides the user with everything needed to quickly enter and edit records, but it also provides extensive image association controls. You can associate both on-line and off-line images, even combine them in a single record, and BwPro handles them seamlessly (see image). You can also see an instant preview of what a book record will look like when it is composed. For those who do their book image scans in batches, BwPro will gather all images in a particular directory and automatically associate the images with records after the fact, based on the naming convention used. Anyone who’s ever done this manually knows what a huge timesaver this can be. BwPro can also perform the same operation on a database-wide level, for all records. A bookseller can sit down and scan images for 100 books, then go into BwPro and tell the program to associate all of the images with their corresponding records automatically, in one shot. It even retains the image sequencing specified according to the name suffix used (a, b, c, etc). Another need is extracting ISBN codes from existing descriptions. Many booksellers have their ISBN data embedded in Comments or some other field. BwPro can scan database records, extract validated ISBN codes, and populate a dedicated ISBN field with the data. This in itself can save a bookseller hundreds of hours of hand-editing. There are lots of little conveniences. For instance, you can get instant pricing data for any book. You can instantly look up any Zip Code, City or County, even display a map of it. You can load and save Hit Lists to create instant catalogs. There are lots of little goodies like this. Most of these features came about as a direct result of booksellers telling me: “Boy, it sure would be great if your program did such and such.” I’ve tried to accommodate these suggestions wherever possible. What other problems does BwPro solve for booksellers? Another big problem for many booksellers today is record format conversion. Frequently, they must convert UIEE to tab-delimited, or vice versa, or import data into a spreadsheet, or into an XML template, or export data in some way to meet the requirements of a particular web site or selling venue. More often than not, this results in data loss, or formatting problems, or incomplete records — the list of aggravations is long. It’s amazing how many hoops booksellers are forced to jump through to meet the requirements of different companies. BwPro takes a much more down-to-earth approach to this, by providing many different ways to manipulate records. You can set up separate export templates for different sites, and even compose a set of different files and upload each one to a different location, in sequence. There is also a group of stand-alone utilities that do things like convert a UIEE file into a tab-delimited file, read HomeBase database records, read ABE’s tagged data upload format, convert old BookMate PRV files into other formats, export to Excel .csv format, etc. BookWriter Pro basically allows booksellers to do what they want with their data, instead of jumping through hoops or being restricted to what a company will allow — without having to be a technician or read an instruction manual to figure out how to do it. Is BwPro compatible with existing BookMaster, Record Manager and BookMate databases? Yes, existing records can be directly read and users can continue to use their old software if they so choose. But there are a lot of new fields and obviously the old software doesn’t know anything about these. Downward compatibility has its limits. Walking the line between proprietary and generic design is a difficult balancing act. You have to provide a wide range of possibilities, but you have to do it within a recognizable framework. I think my predecessor applications were successful because they did this. I’ve tried hard to make BwPro do the same thing. What other capabilities have you included? Quite a few. There’s comprehensive global editing, price adjustment features, invoicing and purchase orders, and a lot of the favorite features of my predecessor software, such as Hit Lists, data entry menus, and an on-screen composer for producing catalogs, quotes, and similar documents. I’m still finalizing the complete feature set. How does BookWriter Pro help booksellers sell more books? Aside from serving as an excellent rapid data entry and sales management system, if I had to pick one thing it would be the program’s ability to perform rapid and complex manipulation and composition of book data. This serves both dependent sellers who upload records to listing services, and independent sellers who market their books directly to their own customers. Making data compatible with Internet-based requirements is a key design objective. Do you feel today’s bookseller is faced with more obstacles than in the past? I think there are more challenges and that few booksellers are well-equipped to address them. Most bookseller’s fundamental business requirements have really not changed in the past decade. What has changed is the extent to which information must be manipulated to suit different applications, and the compressed timeframe in which this must happen to take advantage of different revenue sources. These days, a successful bookseller’s list of requirements almost universally includes Internet sales venues and email. Yet, there is really very little available to help them take advantage of these venues directly. This is surprising to me — these are not trivial issues! Most companies seem to either take a one-size-fits-all approach to their software, or they focus on a particular aspect of the business and ignore others. I’ve looked at quite a bit of 3rd-party software in the past year, and there are some very good programs out there. But few programs I’ve seen address these issues in ways that are intuitively obvious. They often seem to be logical extensions of a particular business, focusing and relying upon a specific methodology. Seller Engine is a good example of this, in that the program itself is an excellent piece of software, but it relies almost exclusively upon Amazon.com to provide intrinsic value to its users. So, the short answer to your question is: BwPro makes it possible for a bookseller to overcome more obstacles by making the broadest possible use of their records, with the least amount of effort, in an understandable and comfortable environment. That’s a mouthful, but that’s how I see it. What do you foresee in the near future for booksellers? Today, it’s frankly a mess out there. If a bookseller wants to sell books simultaneously on Alibris, ABE, Amazon, eBay, and on their own web site, they must be very technically savvy, or they must utilize a distribution service like Chuck Vilnis’ excellent BookRouter system, or they must use multiple applications to do it — applications that usually don’t interact with one another very well, if at all. There’s a lot of frustration out there, and it’s no surprise. I get calls from dealers all the time wanting help doing one thing or another, and it’s usually something that should be simple for them to do, but it isn’t because their software didn’t provide any way to do it. So, BwPro tries to make it easy for sellers to get as much work done in one place as possible, without having to jump from one program to another. I think future bookselling applications are going to have to address this if their creators expect merchants to use them. The “Service-Us” approach for client software is not a sustainable model, and companies who continue this approach in their designs will not survive the long haul, even if their programs are free. In my humble opinion, BwPro positions a bookseller nicely for the next round of business and technological development. Those sellers who can quickly and easily manipulate their data in different ways are going to have distinct business advantages over those who cannot. In particular, the ability to manage the volume of information associated with collectible books on a field-oriented basis will become increasingly important as existing venues expand their infrastructures and data-handling capabilities. Ebay is a good example of this. What does the software cost? BookWriter Professional sells for $129.95. The setup has not yet been finalized, but I am accepting advance orders as I’ve had many inquiries and I need to cut down on my email volume somehow. Current BookWriter Web users will have their entire BwWeb purchase price applied to their BwPro purchase, and any new users who place an order prior to rollout will receive the BookWriter Web software as part of the package. Given the current state of development, I expect to have BwPro ready to launch in 30 days or less. Tom, thanks again for an interesting interview. Where can dealers go to find more information? You’re most welcome, I appreciate the opportunity to speak with you again! Additional information about the software can be found athttp://www.bookwritersoftware.com/bwpro/bwpro.htm. #services #Software

This show just keeps getting better and bigger. I’ve been exhibiting here for the past four years, and sporadically attending for a little longer than that, and it’s become one of my favorite bookselling and collecting venues. Not because it’s the most lucrative – but it is often far and away the most interesting. Impresario Gary Lovisi managed again to keep things lively on two fronts – the 35 dealers ranged from relative newcomers to longtime paperback specialists like Chris Eckhoff (who’s forgotten more about adult paperbacks than I ever hope to find out, and has authored a useful checklist on the subject), and the guests’ table was a great mix of authors and illustrators. Between checking out all the gems on the tables and garnering signatures from the guests, attendees were packed in throughout the day. The show drew collectors from far and wide (we noticed, for example, Tom Lesser, who produces the Paperback Collectors Show and Sale in Los Angeles, making the rounds). This year’s featured guests were Ann Bannon, who wrote a number of groundbreaking lesbian novels for Gold Medal, and Julie Ellis, who (as Joan Ellis and Linda Michaels) wrote over 100 softcore novels for Midwood in the 1960s. They were joined by authors Julius Fast, Ron Goulart, Barry Malzberg, Walter Wager, Dan Sontup, John Norman, Howard Schoenfeld and Morris Hershman, and cover artists Robert Maguire and Mitchell Hooks. Now that’s a line-up. (Marijane Meaker — aka Vin Packer, Ann Aldrich and M.E. Kerr — was also slated to attend, but unfortunately had to cancel for personal reasons.) Partly as a tribute to the female guests, Lovisi also made available the long-running show’s first souvenir T-shirt, which featured the imaginary cover of Book Show Girl (“Men bought her books at their peril!”). I bought two; one as a back-up in case the need for emergency biblio-apparel comes up. (There are still a few available from Lovisi; check out his Gryphon Books website. Because of the smaller size of the books, and because the vivid cover art is such a factor in the appeal of paperback collecting, it’s easy to burn out early with eye-fatigue at this show. I’ve found it best to take a lot of time, alternating short shopping expeditions to a few dealer tables with visits to the authors and artists with whatever handful of their books I’ve been able to accumulate. Lovisi’s guests seem always to be ready to sign whatever’s at hand and to take the time to talk about their work (although my pet peeve is the semi-civilized collector who invariably hauls up two shopping bags of 50 books, assuming the author will sign them all). This show is particularly welcome when I’m hunting up specific titles, especially given the vagaries of Internet-dealer grading, and the heightened importance of condition in paperback collecting. There’s nothing like actually handling the goods. This year, I’ve been trying to assemble a “Kerouac in paperback” collection, and managed to get quite decent copies of both the first U.S. and first U.K. paperback printings of On the Road. To have a show that allows one-stop shopping like that is a treasure indeed. The next Expo is sheduled on Oct. 3, 2004, again at the Holiday in on West 57th Street in Manhattan. See you there! Bob Riedel Printmat@aol.com