This is the story of a minor bibliographic mystery, and how it was solved. It’s just a small story — no big reveal to be picked up by the wire services, no five-hundred-year-old royalty buried under the car park — but one that I find very satisfying in the completeness of its resolution, and for the small insight it gives to the people behind the books involved. Enamored as we are of the material objects of our collecting, they are really nothing more than physical manifestations of the human characters that wrote, produced or owned them. My interest in the people behind the object, in fact, is one of the reasons I decided to focus on collecting association copies. ABC For Book Collectors by John Carter and Nicolas Barker (Eighth Edition; Oak Knoll Press and The British Library, 2004) defines an association copy as a book that “once belonged to, or was annotated by, the author; which once belonged to someone connected with the author or someone of interest in his own right; and perhaps most interestingly, belonged to someone peculiarly associated with its contents.” In an essay in Other People’s Books: Association Copies and the Stories They Tell (The Caxton Club, 2011), Millard M. Riggs writes: “[Association copies] have long struck me as a special way to bring life and uniqueness to subjects distanced to us by time and place.” While the uniqueness of an association copy certainly appeals to the collector in us, it is also the evocation of that distant time and place that I find fascinating. The physical artifact pricks the interest and focuses the attention, and provides the motivation to conduct research. Research yields knowledge, and knowledge is the book collector and bookseller’s stock in trade. My story begins in 2003, when I bought a copy of Galaxy Reader of Science Fiction (New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1952), edited by Horace L. Gold. This is a fairly common book, but this copy contains a lengthy personal inscription by Gold, to Groff and Lucy Conklin, dated March 1, 1952. Horace L. Gold founded Galaxy Science Fiction magazine in 1950 and served as its editor for the next decade; Groff Conklin wrote a book review column for Galaxy from 1950 through 1955 and was the foremost SF anthologist of his time, with 41 collections to his credit. Groff’s wife Lucy edited his writing, and was credited as his co-editor on The Supernatural Reader (Lippincott, 1953). If there is a really cool science fiction story you remember reading from the 1940s through the 1960s, there’s a very good chance you read it in a Groff Conklin-edited anthology. Then in 2006, I bought a copy of Science Fiction Terror Tales (Gnome Press, 1955), also edited by Groff Conklin, considered to be one of the rarest of the Gnome titles. This copy also bears a long personal inscription, but this time in the opposite direction: it’s inscribed on the front endpaper by Conklin (signed as “Groff”) to H.L. Gold, dated April 9, 1955, and additionally signed in full by Conklin on the title page. The book has a terrific provenance, as I purchased it directly from Marta Randall, Gold’s daughter-in-law by his second marriage and an SF author herself. So, one book was owned by Horace L. Gold, and the other was owned by the Conklins. But what caught my attention was that both books have the identical embossed seal on the front free endpaper: two circles surrounding the stylized image of a bird. Conklin’s copy of the Galaxy Reader had passed through the hands of an unknown number of interim owners, so the seal could have been added at any point — but Gold’s copy of Science Fiction Terror Tales had been in the family’s possession until the moment I bought it. It seemed pretty obvious that the seal must have been added by either Conklin or Gold — but which one, and what was its origin? Marta Randall was not aware of the seal being used in any of Gold’s other books, and Bud Webster, author of the definitive Conklin bibliography 41 Above the Rest (and my main competition for collecting Conklin-related material) had never seen the seal before. Neither Gold nor Conklin were frequent signers, and I was never able to track down any other examples of the seal. Despite various attempts at researching the problem over the years, it remained unsolved until just a few days ago. Fittingly, the solution to the mystery began with the purchase of yet another signed Conklin title. Many years ago I set up a want on AbeBooks for signed Groff Conklin, and last week I got a hit for a signed copy of The Supernatural Reader, the anthology edited by both Conklins. The bookseller’s description stated that this copy bore an inscription, dated 1953, on the front endpaper: “To Ben and Bernarda this, our first overtly joint work! with love – Lucy and Groff.” The dealer describes it as “from the library of Ben and Bernarda Bryson Shahn, with estate label tipped in inside front cover”. I immediately bought the book. Naturally, my next step was to do a little research on Ben and Bernarda Shahn. Ben Shahn was a Lithuanian-American artist and photographer, most famous for his works of social realism under the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the Farm Security Administration during the Depression. Bernarda was a photojournalist and artist, and with her husband produced a set of 13 murals inspired by Walt Whitman’s poem “I See America Working,” which were installed at the Bronx Central Annex of the United States Post Office. Most relevant to the solution of my mystery, however, was a cache of material in the Shahn papers in the Smithsonian Archives of American Art. Folder 3 in Box 6, labeled “Conklin, Groff and Lucy,” contains several letters the Shahns received from the Conklins, documenting their close friendship over many years. These letters have been scanned, and are available to view online here. To my great delight, in the upper left-hand corner of one of these letters — a typed letter from Conklin to Shahn and dated April 12, 1947 — is the very same seal that had been puzzling me all this time. Better still, Conklin actually writes about it in the letter: “The seal impressed on the top of the front page of this letter is something I’ve had around the house for some time. It’s a kind of Conklin colophon; the bird design is the same as my Japanese ring. How do you like it?” So after only ten years, a minor bibliographic mystery is solved, almost by accident. This story illustrates the sometimes perverse nature of bibliographic research: a problem can stump you for years before Chance intervenes and throws a clue your way, and then within minutes, the full solution is neatly served up tied in a bow. I don’t know if anyone other than Bud Webster and I will care about this revelation, but I find it extremely gratifying. Beyond the satisfaction of nailing down a bibliographic point, I am pleased with having found the cache of scanned letters from Groff and Lucy Conklin. Perhaps there’s a bit of a voyeuristic thrill involved, since these were originally written as personal communications between friends. But the intimacy of the writing, including a very long letter written by Groff a while after Lucy’s death, reveal aspects of his character never even hinted at in his published writings. Bud Webster once described Conklin to me as “an unassuming man”, and it is quite likely that Conklin never thought that anyone would be interested in anything beyond reading the stories he gathered for his anthologies. But the letters I found hint at an interesting character, someone I would like to know better. And so the research continues. Timothy Doyle Bayside Books of Maryland, IOBA 6285 Oakland Mills Rd\ Sykesville, Maryland

1. How I Got Going. Let me begin with a confession that will surprise no one: like many booksellers, I have a strong collecting streak. I am first and foremost a voracious (even compulsive) reader, and I have always liked owning the books I read, so for as long as I can remember I’ve been a book accumulator. It was the Internet that set me on the path to full-time bookselling, but it also changed me from an accumulator to a collector (although I still do plenty of accumulating). As a bookseller, I can’t collect everything — if I did I would never sell anything — so even though I’m susceptible to a lot of collecting temptations, for the most part I manage to resist them. Although they fascinate me, and their scarcity presents an appealing challenge, I am not going to build up a collection of first-person accounts of the westward voyage to California in the mid-19th century. And although many of them are very lovely, I am not going to go on a quest to obtain all the different editions of Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market. Because I don’t resist every such temptation, however, I am now the proud owner of “The World’s Best Collection” of books by one of my favorite juvenile authors — developed over a mere dozen years, primarily through the use of the Internet, and (most significantly for a perennially cash-strapped bookseller) at a comparatively low cost. (“Comparatively” is the important word here: another bookseller, who has what is probably The World’s Second Best collection of this author’s books, had a good laugh when he found out how recently I started, and commented that I must have paid real money for the books. And I did, sometimes.) (Just a quick note here: this essay is not meant to be about collecting any particular author, so to generalize my own experience I’ll refer to “my” author as Mrs. Freeman — which happens to have been her real name, but not the one she wrote under.) My collection had an innocuous beginning, and an insidious growth. In the spring of 2001, we stopped at a library in a small remote Northern California town; there, on a shelf of books for sale, I spotted a book by Mrs. Freeman, and quickly bought it, with little more in mind than the fun of re-reading an old favorite. When I discovered the book was missing a couple of leaves, I went online looking for a better copy, and was surprised to discover that there was only one listed — for $150. So I shrugged and moved on; after all, a few missing pages can be easily skipped. A month later, we were in Texas. In an antique shop, I ran across a copy of what had always been, since I was young, my favorite book by Mrs. Freeman. Everything was wrong with this book — it was battered and worn, and the price was outrageous — but sentiment carried the day, and of course I bought it anyway. The third book in my not-yet collection also came into my hands during that same trip. In a small East Texas town, there is (or was) a bookseller who had a “store” in a trailer parked in his front yard. The books were all double-shelved, bags and boxes were crammed in everywhere, and every book was just $3. It was the kind of place you just know is filled with treasures — but the books were dusty and disordered, the day was miserably hot, the trailer wasn’t air-conditioned, and we were running late. All I could reasonably do was pick a bag at random to go through — and the second book in that bag was by Freeman! So there was a treasure, and for $3 I made it mine. 2. A Collection (and a Collector) is Born. All I had at this point was my three serendipitous finds, but what happened next turned them into the beginnings of a collection: I got curious to know more about Mrs. Freeman herself, and did an Internet search, and came up with little more than information on a few copyright renewals. (Remember, this was 2001: Google was in its infancy, WorldCat was available only to libraries, AbeBooks was only 5 years old (and still called the Advanced Book Exchange), Amazon was even newer.) So I decided it would be a good idea to improve the state of available information on Mrs. Freeman by compiling a simple checklist of her books and posting it on our website. But even that simple project wasn’t that easy: not even the Library of Congress had all of her books listed. I really needed to know more, and the only logical way I could think of to learn more about her book was to buy more of them. So I began both acquiring whatever copies I could afford and capturing information on other copies. I put up permanent want matches online, bought selected copies through the regular multi-dealer listing sites, and even found a few titles in open bookstores in various places across the country. But the best hunting ground proved to be eBay, then still in what we now think of as its “golden age,” through which the contents of America’s attics, closets and basements were flowing onto the Internet. At any given moment, there were at least three and often as many as ten auctions running for Freeman’s books. I soon overcame my aversion to “sniping,” and although I probably lost more auctions than I won (being usually cash-strapped and thus cost-conscious), I won enough, and my collection — because it was clearly that, by now — continued to grow. My “checklist” idea began to take form as an annotated checklist, and it was about this time that I made what seemed, at first, like a mistake. Although my collection was far from complete, I pitched an article on Mrs. Freeman to Firsts magazine. Somewhat to my surprise, they accepted it, and suddenly the pressure to deliver the goods was on — made more intense when a last minute cancellation of another piece moved mine to an earlier issue than originally planned, and left me scrambling to meet the deadline. I managed somehow to get it together, and you can guess what happened after the article (with checklist) was published in December 2002: the prices of Mrs. Freeman’s books went up — in some cases, by a lot. And I wondered at that moment: have I just done the dumbest thing imaginable, by letting the whole world in on my hitherto under-the-radar collection and thereby sharply reducing my chances for future “bargain” acquisitions? But this happened, too: we also posted a slightly revised version of the article on our website, and that is when the power of the Internet really made itself felt. Booksellers now began to get in touch, to offer an occasional “special” copy of one of Freeman’s books; a volunteer for a Friends group in New England offered me a very nice copy of one of the scarcest titles; a woman who had inherited her uncle’s collection contacted me, and when I made an offer her response was “Really? That much? These are just old kids’ books!” Then I received this email: “I found your website … in a Google search. I have an old collection of Mrs. Freeman’s books, about twenty-five or thirty of them, that I would like to have find a good home. … They were given to my family by my aunt. I believe her mother was Mr. Freeman’s sister, so many of the volumes are inscribed to members of that family. There are too many volumes to enumerate, but if there are any you are particularly interested in, I can let you know….” Was I interested?!? I wanted them all! By then, it was obvious that far from being a mistake to let the whole world in on my collecting “secret,” the Firsts article and its Internet incarnation had made me a “go-to” person for all things related to Mrs. Freeman, and had connected me with fans and collectors all over the country. The ultimate result was the considerable enlargement and enhancement of my collection — not just with gems like these inscribed association copies, but also French and Norwegian editions, magazine appearances of Freeman’s work, etc. And my checklist was now taking on the proportions of a true bibliography. One of the joys associated with building any such collection is finding that rare or extra-special item, something that’s considered even by specialists to be “impossible” to find. In Freeman’s case, there was one book, from 1919, that was never included in any of the lists of her published titles that appeared at the front of her other books. Her biographer even wondered if it really existed, but through WorldCat, I learned that there were at least two copies: one held by the Library of Congress, the other by the New York Public Library. Naturally, the next time I had a chance to visit New York City, I rushed to the main library, had my photo taken to get a library card, put in my request, and the book was brought to me from the stacks. It was only 80 pages long, had been issued in plain brown paper wrappers, and the library had bound it with two other unrelated titles from the same era. Not the best way to treat a rare book, but then they didn’t know how rare it was. I photocopied the title page and table of contents for my bibliography and left. But a thought soon began gnawing at me: it was only 80 pages, why hadn’t I copied the whole thing? I had a couple of free hours a few days later, just before my flight home, so I went back to the library, requested the book again, and waited. And waited. Eventually the librarian called me over and said that they couldn’t find the book! I explained the situation and they dispatched more searchers, to no avail: it appeared that one of the only two known library copies had been lost (and who knew if the other copy had been lost also). I was in despair, but fortunately it wasn’t permanent: several months later the book had once again been properly shelved at the library and I was able to obtain a photocopy of the entire thing. Not an original, of course, but better than nothing. A few years later, I received an email from someone who had “acquired a copy” of this very same rarity, and was interested in selling it. Emails were exchanged; I made an offer; it wasn’t accepted. A few more emails passed over the next year or so, but the owner still wasn’t sure what she wanted to do with it. More time passed, during which I broke my ankle very badly. The day I returned home from the hospital, I was lying on the couch feeling very sorry for myself when a package came in the mail. Mildly puzzled, since I wasn’t expecting anything, I opened it to find a book, nicely wrapped in colored tissue paper. Inside the tissue was THE book, and with it a card which said simply “this belongs to you.” So it was that a gift from a complete stranger, a gift that couldn’t have possibly appeared at a better time, made my collection indisputably “The World’s Best.” Does that mean it’s finished, though? Not at all — although there’s no question that it’s gotten more difficult to find quality material in recent times. There are twice as many copies of Freeman’s books listed on sites like AbeBooks than there used to be, but few bargains — and still no copies anywhere online of the scarcer titles. Good buys do still turn up, however, and I continue to tweak and monitor my want matches on AbeBooks and Biblio. The collection is still not finished, and probably never will be. 3. The Internet and the Collector. Putting together a collection like I’ve just described in pre-internet days would have been almost impossible. The owner of The World’s Second Best Collection of Mrs. Freeman’s work is a children’s book specialist who has been collecting these books for over 40 years. Although the Internet is a powerful tool, however, it doesn’t eliminate the need for one of those good old-fashioned virtues: patience. (About the only way you can be a successful collector without a good measure of patience is to have an even bigger measure of cash — and if you happen to be blessed with that, you can probably ignore a lot of the rest of this article, which is pitched to the more realistic financial situation of people like me.) The Internet has changed a lot over the dozen years I’ve been building my Freeman collection. The attics seem to have been mostly emptied and dealers listing books at fixed prices now dominate eBay. There used to be four or five interesting auctions of these books every week; now months can go without any. The Americana Exchange website recently ran a very interesting article called “A Hard Sell” by Bruce McKinney, in which he wrote about the difficulties of disposing of a collection of books by Joyce Carol Oates. There was one sentence in the article that really struck me. After commenting that a search on AbeBooks turned up over 22,000 items by Oates, McKinney said: “Her next great collection is already loaded on AbeBooks and waiting to be assembled.” Well, sort of. A good collection can be assembled with relative ease, especially if money is no object; a great collection, however, will take more time and effort. The Internet gives, by making it easier than ever to develop a collection, but it also takes away, by devaluing many items in that collection. Not only is online pricing sometimes irrational (or truly insane), but the ‘net can also create a false sense of either scarcity or abundance. For instance, ten copies of a given book online can seem, from one perspective, like quite a few — but when you consider that there are perhaps 10,000 “real” booksellers online, that translates to visiting a thousand bookstores in the real world to find a single copy. And when there are no copies of a book online, it can be a trap to assume that it’s truly “rare,” especially when that assumption leads a seller to put an absurdly high pricetag on something, based on nothing more than the idea that it’s “the only copy in the world!” (The topic of Internet pricing of used and rare books, and the forces that drive it, is best left for another occasion.) 4. Doing It Yourself. Let’s say you’d like to have a “World’s Best Collection” of your own. Like with most endeavors, there’s no single “right” way to go about it. Although I’ve only set out to create a complete collection (including later printings, book club and reprint editions, magazine appearances and more) a couple of times, based on those experiences I’ve compiled the following list of guidelines and general principles, which includes some specific suggestions for using the Internet to pursue such a project: 1. Pick something you really love: an author, a subject area or genre, an era, a series, a publisher, an illustrator — the possibilities are endless. Chances are very good, if you’re anything like me, that you’ll already have at least a few related books on your shelves, and that you’ll have read them. These books, and the existing knowledge you’ve gotten from them, are more than enough of a foundation on which to begin building a collection. (And as you gather more, try to read them, too. The more you know about your chosen topic, the better collector you’ll be.) Remember, the most important driving force for the assembly of any collection isn’t money — it’s passion. And if you lose interest in the topic, it’s okay to move on to another one; in fact, if that happens, you probably should. 2. Define what you want to collect related to your chosen subject. First editions only, or also variants (later printings, paperbacks, book club editions, etc.)? Books only, or also magazines and/or related ephemera? Here, too, there are many options. My suggestion is to be realistic at the beginning, but try to stay open to other possibilities, and see where your collection takes you. 3. Do some research. The Internet has made this amazingly easy, but you might still find that you need some books: reference books about your subject, related biographies or histories, or critical works. Bibliographies are especially crucial resources — not just formal bibliographies, but also those included in the back of most nonfiction works. 4. Use your research to build a list of desired acquisitions; then run a quick online search for the titles referenced. For the common and cheap books, buy a copy (or two) of anything that meets your criteria; there is a certain satisfaction that comes with filling up a shelf or two, and you can work on quality later. For the more uncommon items — which you might not find listed online at all — create “wants” (see below). And be patient. 5. Take advantage of all the various “wants” you can create online: AbeBooks, Alibris, Biblio and viaLibri all have this option, and eBay allows you to save searches, which helps to take the tedium out of looking for the same things again and again. You will inevitably get a lot of false hits from both want matches and eBay searches, and you’ll get used to seeing the “same old same old” items time after time, but there’s value in that, too: you will quickly learn to recognize the more common items in your field, and this will enhance your ability to spot the truly uncommon things when they show up, and to act quickly to acquire them. You’ll also develop your own “tricks” to reduce your useless want matches and improve your search results. (Examples: on AbeBooks, check the “not print on demand” box; if you’re focused on an author, be sure to perform occasional searches (or even enter separate wants) for common misspellings of his or her name.) Scanning through dozens of want-match emails can be tedious (be prepared to use your “delete” key at lot), but it’s also important to try and keep up with them, because when a truly scarce and desirable item is listed, especially at a bargain price, it will often be snapped up right away. Remember that you probably aren’t the only person receiving a want-match email on it! 6. Don’t overlook the power of keyword searches, which can lead you to things you didn’t know existed, or hadn’t thought to look for. The more such “offbeat” things your collection contains, the more interesting it will be. If you’re basing your collection on a specific, recognized bibliography, one of the most exciting things is to discover a book that the “authorities” overlooked: the most exciting words for any mystery fiction collector, for instance, are “not in Hubin.” 7. Get the word out about your collection. Let dealers know of your interest; post on blogs, Facebook and elsewhere; find Internet sites for those with similar interests; join your local book-collecting group, if there is one. If you don’t already have a website, set up a simple one talking about your interests. The Internet is truly fantastic for this kind of thing, and you shouldn’t underestimate the value of the contacts you will make there. A couple more examples from my Mrs. Freeman collecting: a historical society in New Jersey sent me copies of a fanzine that included the only significant biographical information on the author; and I once received a phone call from a woman who shared with me her fond memories of a long-ago 6th-grade class trip to visit Mrs. Freeman herself. You’ll have to be patient, but getting the word out on the ‘net will almost invariably yield fruit. 8. Don’t even think about the “investment value” of your collection. Regardless of what the resale value might ultimately turn out to be, if you are collecting something that you find interesting, you will be rewarded many times over the value of the money you actually spent. 9. Don’t forget the “real world” of bookstores, book fairs, library sales, or anywhere else books might be found. With tens of thousands of online sellers of all sizes listing millions of books, it’s easy to forget that there are still untold millions of books that are not listed online. These can only be found the old-fashioned way: by going out and looking for them. * * * “Mrs. Freeman,” by the way, published her many books — the books that now populate The World’s Best Collection of her work — under the name of Augusta Hueill Seaman. While she might not be well known today, in her time (1913 to 1949) she was both popular and influential. She was the first American to write mysteries for young girls, and no less a figure in that field than Mildred Wirt Benson, the original author of the Nancy Drew series, once mentioned in an interview how as a young girl she had eagerly awaited Seaman’s serialized mysteries in the St. Nicholas magazine. Librarians also loved her books, and included her on their list of the most popular authors of the 1930s. And having more or less completed my Seaman collection, I have moved on, and am currently working on two other author collections. Although I’m not quite ready to divulge their names, I can give you a few hints: they are both women, they both wrote mostly around the early to middle 20th century, and while neither has been quite as forgotten as Seaman, you might still say “who?” if you heard their names. So why, after extolling the virtues of sharing one’s collecting quests with the world via the Internet, am I suddenly turning a bit cagey? It’s because I also recognize, as you should, that there’s a delicate balance at play here — between the advantages that come from being quiet about a collection in the early stages of building it, and the benefits to be had from going public at the appropriate time. Without meaning to sound too calculating about it, let’s just say that by the time I’m ready to reveal the identities of my two most recent collecting interests, most of the “bargain” copies of their books will already be safely at rest, on my shelves. Christine Volk & Shep Iiams, Booksellers Bookfever.com P.O. Box 696, Ione CA 95640 #collecting

Table of Contents How to Buy Books Online So You Want to Be a Bookseller: Ten Questions…Some Answers The Story of IOBA’s New Logo Pistil Books Online, Seattle WA Interview With A Collector: Jerry Morris Bibliography Week Bookstores: Three Continents, Eight Countries, A Travel Journal – Part II My First Book Fair: A San Francisco Fairy Tale

You’ve been an avid collector for some time. at what point did you realize that you were a collector, and not just an accumulator or reader? I have been an avid reader all my life. I became a collector in the late 1980s on my last tour before retiring from the U. S. Air Force. In England, I started collecting dictionaries and quotation books, and then I was accumulating almost everything else except science fiction. Slowly but surely, as my book collecting interests developed, many of the accumulations became collections. What are your major areas of collecting? My major areas of collecting are books about books, association copies, Samuel Johnson, Mary Hyde, and early editions of William Strunk’s Elements of Style. But I don’t ignore my other collections. I am always looking for interesting books on NYC and outhouses. Yes, outhouses. I know that one of your collecting areas is association copies. in fact, you are a contributing author to the recently published other people’s books: Association Copies and the Stories They Tell (Chicago: The Caxton Club. 2011), which was reviewed in the last issue of the Standard. It seems that different collectors have different definitions of what makes an association copy. What is your definition? In the simplest terms, I define an association copy as a book that once belonged to a famous person. My Sentimental Library Collection is a collection of books formerly owned by authors whose books I collect or formerly owned by other famous people. The essay I wrote for Other People’s Books…”Hither-unpublished Obiter Dicta” was based on another kind of association as well: the subject matter of a book formerly owned by Augustine Birrell (1850-1933), an English essayist and politician. Birrell was the irish Secretary who was sacked after the Easter Rising in Ireland in 1916. He wrote his opinions on revolution, freedom and other related topics in the margins and endpapers of his copy of Lectures on the French Revolution by Lord Acton, London, 1910. How do you find the books that make it into your sentimental library collection? Is it all serendipitous, or do you actively seek certain books? I actively seek association copies online and at bookstores and book fairs. Sometimes, though, an association copy will literally fall in my lap. I’ve written about some of my association copies in my blogs, particularly in http://mysentimentallibrary.blogspot.com. As you may know, IOBA stands for Independent Online Booksellers Association, so a large portion of the audience for this article will be book sellers. Can you offer any advice for the online seller as far as listing books that you would find of interest? How can we help you find our wares? At this time, there are no IOBA booksellers who list association copies as one of their specialties. That means I have to search the IOBA listings for association copies. The easiest way to attract my attention to an association copy you want me to buy is to use one of two phrases: “formerly owned by…”, or “from the library of….” I’ve also found numerous association copies by searching for “bookplate of, his bookplate, her bookplate, from the private library of, and previously owned by.” The most recent association copy I acquired on another site was identified with the phrase,” Bibliographer Jacob Blanck’s blind-stamp on ffep.” I almost missed that one! What do you look for in a bookseller? what are the cues and practices that make you comfortable doing business with someone you haven’t met personally? I judge a bookseller by the quality of her listing. She needs to list the book in such a professional manner that I will want to buy her copy of the book. Do you have any favorite booksellers? If so, what kind of stock or service has moved them to the top of your list? I’ve had numerous favorite booksellers. They become favorite booksellers primarily for having books available that I’m currently looking for. For online dealers, I like to see a personal note of thanks on the invoice or even an informal email saying the book was shipped. It is their listings that I will search first for future buys. Do you recall having done business with any of our members? I recognize a number of booksellers in the IOBA Member Directory and have done business with several of them either directly or through Abebooks — but never through IOBA. In fact, I didn’t open an IOBA buyer’s account until this past September. My first experience ordering a book via IOBA was quite pleasant, which begs the question: Why did I wait so long? Maybe a little publicity will help. On my biblio-connecting blog (biblio-connecting.blogspot.com) a running diary of connecting with people in the book world, I will write about my first experience with IOBA: buying a copy of Agnes Repplier’s Books and Men from Doug Clausen of Clausen Books in Colorado. And whose stock will I search first for association copies? Doug Clausen’s. #collectors

With IOBA well into its second decade, it seemed a good time to take a look at our logo and make sure it truly represented who we were and how we wanted to be perceived. The first question, of course, was did we even need a new logo? Because they are such powerful representations of their organizations, logos should not be changed lightly. The IOBA Public Relations committee began with a survey of the membership to determine the general usage practices and perceptions about our logo. We discovered that 57% of respondents displayed our logo on their website, and of those who did not, the overwhelming majority simply hadn’t gotten around to it or didn’t know where to get an image. But there were a small percentage that simply didn’t like it. We also asked where else booksellers would consider using our logo, and found that there were many “paper” applications such as bookmarks, flyers, invoices and business cards that members would consider placing the logo on. This anticipated usage impacted design considerations as we got farther into the process. Finally, we asked survey respondents to rank their preference of the following four options: 1) Keep the cat and IOBA letter logo as it is 2) Remove the cat and use just the IOBA letters as logo 3) Have two logo formats available for use (cat and letters combo, and letters only) 4) Design a new logo. The first choice selections of respondents broke 51% for some sort of change against 49% for no change. With such a close margin, we might have decided to abandon the search for a new logo except for one thing. Simple web searches revealed that the cat image that played such a big part in our first logo was not unique to IOBA. For example: A library: http://www.zazzle.com/cat_on_books_regular_business_card-240033988873469392 A bookplate: http://www.kaboodle.com/reviews/set-of-12-cat-on-books-bookplates A refrigerator magnet: http://www.zazzle.com/cat_on_books_magnet-147718845098314787 Given that our logo used three books while some of the other images had five, it appears that we used a modification of an existing image for our first logo. There was some indication that the cat image may have been designed in the 50’s or 60’s and may have belonged to the Antioch Book Company, however neither the Board nor the members of the IOBA Discuss list could completely confirm that. With the copyright status in doubt, the Board decided that a possibly fruitless effort to acquire the rights to the image did not justify the difficulty and expense, and even if the rights to the image were acquired, its cat image would still not be unique to IOBA. Wanting IOBA to have unquestionable ownership of its own logo, the Board instructed the Public Relations committee to pursue a redesign. We therefore moved ahead with designing a new logo image to present to the board. We had both physical and philosophical considerations. As to physical characteristics, we were looking for a clean design that would be attractive on both screen and paper. It had to look as good in black and white as it did in color, and it needed to “reverse” (be able to be displayed as white on a dark background) so that members could use it on a variety of website background colors. It also needed to be clean and uncomplicated so it would look good even when reproduced on smaller laser or inkjet printers. We stayed away from embellishments like drop shadows and hairline design elements due to the difficulty of accurately reproducing them in the variety of circumstances we projected the members would use. Finally, it had to “scale.” Many members in our survey indicated that they would consider using it on business cards and bookmarks, so the logo needed to be clear and legible even in a small size. Philosophically, we wanted the logo to represent all parts of our organization and mission. We decided early on to include a globe to represent the “international” nature of IOBA, but the globe itself went through several iterations. We considered and rejected longitude and latitude lines because they just became blurry at smaller sizes. Our first attempt tried to capture both Europe and the American continents, but we found that the Atlantic Ocean took up so much of the image that it was no longer easily recognizable as a globe, so we compromised on the current view, which includes North and South America, a bit of Africa, and a hint of Europe. We also decided relatively early in the process that we should attempt to retain the Castellar font for the IOBA portion of the logo. We liked the idea of a tie-in to our first logo design. In the end, the board opted for the color green for the same reason. Several suggestions on the survey indicated that members felt it was important to spell out “Independent Online Booksellers Association.” That choice represented challenges in legibility at smaller sizes, but using a serif font and keeping the name in lower case helped readability when the image was shrunk. In all, we reviewed, discussed, and tweaked over 40 versions and variants of the new logo before making our final recommendations to the board. And in September, 2011, just nine months from when we sent out the first survey, the board approved the new logo. IOBA members who wish to download the logo can get a copy in the members section of the IOBA website. Follow the link for IOBA logos. HTML text is provided for embedding the logo on member websites. We’d  also like to thank the PR committee members who worked on this project: Karin Bergsagel (ex-officio), Cathy Graham (chair), Sharon Heimann, Joe Orlando, Alice Voith, Chris Volk, and Justin Woolley.

IOBA members may not be aware of a bookish ‘event’ held in NYC every January… Bibliography Week. It’s a (loose) gathering of collectors, booksellers, and librarians who come to New York the last full week of January to participate in bookish-oriented activities, including the annual meetings for the Grolier Club, the Bibliographical Society of America, and the American Printing History Association. A more complete description of this year’s activities can be found here: http://www.grolierclub.org/default.aspx?p=DynamicModule&pageid=289376 [Editor’s note: the structure of the Grolier’s website makes linking to individual pages tricky. This link sometimes works and sometimes does not. Googling “Bibliography Week” should lead you to the right information as well.] As you see from perusing the link verbiage, lectures, talks, exhibits, receptions, etc all abound. And for the first time in 2012, the ABAA hosted a Bookseller Showcase for the Bib Week attendees which I expect to become an integral part of this annual event. While perhaps not everyone’s ‘cup of tea’, I bring this proceeding to your attention, especially for those in the Greater Manhattan area, for it’s a wonderful way to network & meet prominent folks in the world of Rare Books, such as Terry Belanger, RBS Founding Director & Faculty at CABS, who was to been seen at divers talks/receptions throughout the week. Feel free to send me specific questions at vjz@tavbooks.com

I’ve always been an avid reader and bibliophile.  I have been selling books since my first job in a used bookstore right after graduating from the University  Of  Washington with a degree in  Comparative Literature in 1987, which makes for twenty-four years of bookselling. My partner, Sean Carlson, who also worked in the same used bookstore and was an English major, cab driver, and student activist when I met him in college, and I opened  Pistil Books & News, a retail bookstore in 1993. Pistil Books & News was located on Pike Street on Seattle’s Capitol Hill in an area that was in transition from “auto row” (warehouses and repair shops)  to independent small businesses, bars, coffee shops, clubs, and restaurants during Seattle’s “grunge” years. Pistil Books & News was a 25,000 volume used and new neighborhood bookstore which also sold magazines and zines and was known for its support of alternative publications and culture. During our seven -and-a-half years as an open retail shop, we held regular author readings, displayed art on the walls by local artists, and published our own zine, Pistil Prose, with its popular feature “Retail Hell,” which is excerpted on our website. During this time, we also exhibited and sold books at book fairs such as Northwest Bookfest,  Seattle Poetry Festival, and the Bumbershoot literary stage. We learned-by-doing all aspects of running a retail store including purchasing, supervising employees, and the joy of bookkeeping and taxes. We began selling books online during our time as a retail store, first beginning to list on Abe in 1996. By April of 2001, internet sales were about a third of our business and when we could not renew our lease on terms we were happy with, we decided to close our retail store and become an online-only business. In just a month and a half,  Sean transformed the unfinished basement of our home – in the same neighborhood as our retail store – from a low-ceilinged space with a dirt floor into our current lovely 13,000 volume warehouse/office with parquet floors and eight-foot shelves moved from our store.  We now sell our books on a dozen different bookselling websites. We joined IOBA in 2006, and I worked on the membership committee for about a year in 2009. Although we were sad to close our retail store, and miss the daily community involvement and human interaction of a retail store, we have found  running an internet-only bookstore to have its own rewards. As a retail bookstore, we were open 80 hours/week. I worked full-time and supervised a number of employees, including one employee, Tim Ridlon, who still works for us part-time fifteen years later. Now both Sean and I work about half-time, and we also employ Sean’s brother, Troy, part-time as our packer and shipper (he takes all our packages to the local post office on foot with a handcart).  We now have more time to travel, both for business and for pleasure (usually we combine both), and to read. In addition, running an online-only store has substantially lowered our operating costs. We have found  closing our retail store to be a sound business decision; we have watched as numerous local brick-and-mortar bookstores have closed over the last ten years due to the changing nature of the book business and increasing overhead costs. As an internet bookstore, the kinds of books we stock has changed quite a bit. We have learned over the years what kinds of books hold their value in a marketplace of intense seller competition, megalisters, and robot pricing. We carry a lot of books that we have a personal interest in – Sean picks up titles on alternative building and energy (he has five acres at the edge of the Cascade Mountains he is working on putting a garden and cabin on), and alternative/radical politics. And I can’t pass up vintage children’s library bindings with their buckram covers and cool illustrations. We also like period books of pop culture. One of our favorite finds was a copy of Andy Warhol’s Index Book, discovered in a box under a table at a library sale.  This is a piece of pop art itself, with pop-ups, a vinyl record, and other objects of the time (1967), including supposed LSD tabs. We also have a copy of  the controversial 1975 sex education book, Show Me by photographer Will McBride. We have our own website, www.pistilbooks.net, which includes virtual readings by local authors in the form of audio files, a blog on reading and bookselling, and  The Museum of Weird Books. We also have an annual outdoor book sale, which gives us a chance to get back in touch with the community and neighbors. In addition, we have recently begun co-hosting salons  with another bookseller friend in which small groups of people come together to  eat, drink, and converse on themes with a literary bent. I have also been quite interested in  printing and the book arts, and have taken classes on bookbinding and printing, including letterpress, monoprints, and screen printing. I re-bind old library books into blank journals, with the help of Troy, which I sell online and in a local shop. I was also able to take the class The History of the Book, 500-2000 at Rare Book School at the University of Virginia, thanks to an IOBA scholarship. For us, the biggest challenge in online bookselling has been the advent of the megalisters and digital versions of books, which have driven the down the value of books that we used to be able to sell for $5- $15 to nothing. It’s not easy to predict the changes that will occur in the trade in the next 5 – 10 years, but we have a hard time believing that the megalisters’ business practices are sustainable, even with a large portion of their stock being gathered for free or next-to-free. Also, if many people read digital versions of books and fewer physical books are printed,  we could see “common” books actually increasing in value down the road. Our biggest problem right now, guess what, is storage space. Maybe we’ll move to the middle of Montana and sell everything for one dollar from a huge automated warehouse.

1. Are you sure? We’re living the dream. Three-hour working days surrounded by our beloved books, more money than we can shake a stick at – I can’t help but feel sorry for all those non-booksellers out there. Oh wait, it’s not always like that though is it? The conventional wisdom is thabookselling is getting harder every year, and as with most such pearls there’s definitely an element of truth to that and it’s easy to see why. The devt elopment of new technologies – like digital books and print-on-demand books, the market dominance of one online retailer, the apparent profusion of ‘mega-sellers’ selling books for a penny, constantly rising postal costs and the relatively low barriers to entry for online selling certainly make it a challenging environment. If you do decide to take the plunge then you need to be aware that books are heavy, days will be long (all 365 of them each year) and some people are not necessarily suited to the self-discipline needed when faced with boxes and boxes of books and a cold, impersonal computer screen. If possible, it might be worth starting out small and combining online bookselling with other work to see if it is really the job for you. Having said all that, for many of us, selling and dealing in books is a vocation – and one from which we get a huge amount of satisfaction – but the important thing to remember is that this is certainly not an easy life or an easy way to make big bucks. 2. To shop or not to shop? One of the first issues any prospective bookseller has to wrestle with is whether to open a brick and mortar shop (B&M) or just sell online from the comfort of their own home/barn/shed/outhouse etc. In general, the numbers of both new and second-hand specialist bookshops are falling. Again, there are many reasons but they mainly boil down to the relatively high costs of running a shop (rents, rates and local taxes, staffing, utilities) and increased competition whether from new technologies (like e-books), the internet, large stores and even charity shops. But it’s not all doom and gloom, many B&Ms do thrive – often with a compelling mix of specialist knowledge and exemplary service – and actively use the internet to complement the physical store. Whether you decide to open a shop or not, however, you will need substantial space to store your books as it is a fact of life that books take up space – lots of it if you let them. So it will be important to identify an area that is secure, dry, with some airflow and preferably not too bright. It is also vital to make sure that your storage is well-organised so that when those books start flying out the door you can get your hands on them quickly and efficiently.  But don’t worry, whether you open a shop or not, as long as you sell online, you will still be able to join the best bookselling club there is – the IOBA! 3. Where do I get books? This is the $64,000 question, just where do all those signed first editions and leather-bound antiquarian gems hang out? Unfortunately, pretty much anywhere and everywhere … At the end of the day, where you get your books from depends on where you are but some of the most common sources include your own library, local and online auctions, other websites, library sales, garage sales, car boot sales, charity shops/thrift stores, estate sales, friends and family, private libraries and the general public. The best advice is to try all the local sources you can find and then pick the ones that provide you with the sort of books you want and prices that allow you to make a profit! But also, make sure you talk to plenty of your local bookselling colleagues that you meet while out and about. While they may be competitors in the heat of auction-bidding, you will be pleasantly surprised how helpful they will be. Booksellers all want to make money, but there is such a wide range of interests and specialities that there are plenty of books out there for us all and one dealer may well know of a source of books that might work well for you but don’t fit with their own store or speciality. 4. Should I specialize in one area? What should I buy? This is one of the most common questions asked by wannabe booksellers and the answer is probably yes – but many sellers start as generalists (and often finish as generalists but with pockets of specialism). Obviously some books sell better than others and, even if only by trial and error, you will learn amazingly quickly. One quick and dirty way of seeing if a particular book might sell is to look it up on Amazon and see where it sits in Amazon’s bookselling rankings. But obviously this can only ever be a guide and other factors such as the condition of the book and the price you want for it will have a significant impact on whether your copy will sell. As for specialism, then the best advice is simply to find an area that you have a particular interest in and day by day build up your knowledge of books in that area. It will take you a lifetime and you will still not know everything there is to know about your chosen area but your knowledge will allow you to more reliably identify the best books, spot gems that others may miss and, most importantly of all, generate ongoing relationships with customers who share your interest and will appreciate the knowledge and expertise that you bring to their passion. One free tip to finish … if you can come up with a way to make money from Reader’s Digest Condensed Books then you could well be on your way to becoming a gazillionaire. 5. Do I need a database or catalogue? For once a definite answer – absolutely yes. A database of some description is a vital tool for any online bookseller, particularly if you are selling on more than one site. It is the only way to effectively manage your stock so that you can keep your stock up to date on multiple websites. A decent database will help you to keep your book descriptions and pictures in a manageable format and also help with your internal inventory management. There are many different database programs available with different levels of functionality. Some of these are free, some require a one-off payment and others are on a subscription model – so it is vital that you do your homework to find the one that’s right for you. Many of the databases actually give you the opportunity to try before you buy. As with any software, it’s also important to check out the level of support you can expect both now and, as far as possible, in the future. 6. How do I learn to grade books? Learning how to grade your books accurately is one of the most important skills you will learn, particularly for an internet bookseller when the buyer cannot handle book they are buying. There are standard bookselling condition grades and terms which have been used by booksellers for many years, however these have been watered down to some extent by the fact that each different bookselling website tends to use different words and definitions for their book descriptions. The first thing to do is to understand the standard condition descriptions and the words and phrases used by booksellers. One of the best starting points is the IOBA website itself where you can find information on book conditions – http://www.ioba.org/desc.html  – and more information, including a useful bibliography in the IOBA’s Resources section at www.ioba.org Another skill that you will need to learn includes how to accurately identify and describe the edition, particularly in the case of first editions, of the books you are selling. Your research skills and knowledge will grow over time and it is important to listen to and learn from feedback from both fellow booksellers, collectors and also the general public to help hone your skills. 7. Where do I sell my books? The good news is that there are many different places to sell your books. Online, these include the big aggregator sites which list books from hundreds or thousands of different sellers eg Amazon Marketplace, AbeBooks, Alibris, Biblio, IOBABooks and many others. Auction sites like Ebay are also popular ways of selling books online. However, the one thing that all these have in common is that they take their cut – usually a percentage of the sale price – and it can be significant. Most websites work on some form of commission basis and some give you the option of paying a monthly fee along with a lower commission, so you need to do your maths to make sure that you are not paying more than you have to. Obviously one way to avoid some of these charges is to develop your own website (see Q8). Many online booksellers also have their own B&M shops and other physical places to sell your books include book fairs, stalls and sales and auctions. 8. Do I need my own website/credit-card facilities? Not necessarily, but – as stated above – sales through your own website are likely to be significantly more profitable than sales through the big aggregator sites thanks to the lack of commission charges. However, developing a professional-looking, user-friendly website can be a significant investment and it is unlikely to generate a lot of sales at first compared with big aggregator sites. There are pre-packaged website solutions available which help to keep costs down. Having your own website does also demonstrate a degree of commitment and professionalism which can increase your sales. The more work that you do to develop repeat customers and create a vibrant, interesting website – for instance with the help of social media – then the more sales that you can generate through your own website. Booksellers with strong specialities are also likely to benefit more from generating repeat sales through their own sites. The facility to process your own credit cards, although often costly to set up, can prove useful even for a bookseller who sells solely through third-party websites. Some people prefer to deal direct with the vendor and you might be surprised how many customers will ring direct to place orders. 9. Do I have to ship my books every day? If you want good feedback – yes. Picking, packing and posting are part of the daily routine of most online booksellers. The quicker that you can safely and securely get items to your customers then, more often than not, the more satisfied they are with your service. That has two benefits, firstly satisfied customers are more likely to become repeat customers and secondly on sites with well-developed feedback processes (like Amazon and Ebay) then there seems to be some correlation between feedback scores and sales. Given two books in similar condition at a similar price then buyers are more likely to buy the one from the seller with the better feedback rating. In addition, most sites will expect you to be posting orders at least once every other day and you will need to make sure you meet their requirements to keep selling there. At first, shipping every day will probably require a trudge to the local post office, but once you are a big enough seller then, in many countries, you will be able to get your own postage contract which will significantly reduce costs and the number of those time-consuming trips. In the meantime, it can be worth shopping around and considering other providers, particularly for international sales. 10. Do I need to be part of a bookseller organization? No, of course not, but as with a website it can improve how you are perceived by potential customers and can be a nice little boost to self-esteem as any organization worth its salt will expect you to meet certain professional standards (e.g. http://www.ioba.org/code.html). Good bookseller organizations – like the IOBA and the many other regional and national trade associations which exist – can be an invaluable source of help, support and advice and it’s amazing just how useful that is in, what can at times be, a relatively solitary profession.

The aim of this article is to offer you, the buyer, some insights from a bookdealer on how to avoid these unpleasant experiences and to make buying a book online feel more like shopping in your favorite book store. The first thing to do before making a purchase is to define what kind of book you want. I’ve broken this down to two broad categories: a reading copy (meaning a recent, common book), or a first/special edition. Determining what kind of book you’re looking for will help you decide where to purchase and give you a way to sift through your choices. In this article, I’ll cover purchasing a basic reading copy since there are fewer variables (but many of the principals also apply to first editions). I’ll use Amazon for my examples since it’s the most trafficked venue. Start by using the search box to find the title you’re looking for. I default to the “advanced search” option since it provides separate fields for title, author, etc. When you reach a book’s individual title page, you’ll see a box labeled “More Buying Choices. [#] copies used & new” on the right. Click on this link and you’ll see used copies arranged in order by price from low to high, with the cheapest copies having the best screen real estate near the top of the screen (except for Amazon partners or “Fulfillment by Amazon” deals which are bumped up regardless of price). There are also tabs for new, used and collectible, but for our purposes use the “All” tab. You will find that in most cases the first page or so of listings for a common or backlist book will be priced at (or near) the hard-to-believe price of one cent. One cent certainly sounds good but look closer and you’ll notice that listings from these “penny sellers” offer very little information about the book. Their descriptions are usually based on a generic template, used for every book they list, and these descriptions often raise more questions than they answer. Here are samples of typically unhelpful template copy: May show water damage, moderate or excessive highlighting or underlining and/or excessive wear. Books may or may not include additional materials such as CD’s, cassettes, cards, dust jacket, etc. May contain highlighting/notes, may not include CDrom or access codes, customer service is our top priority! In each of these cases, the space a professional bookseller would use to give clarifying detail is entirely filled with CYA (Cover Your A**) copy that warns the buyer to expect nothing. The verbiage on potentially missing “access codes” and “CDRoms” is also wasted as these descriptions are all from paperback bestsellers which would not contain such supplementary materials to begin with. The dirty secret here is that the sellers of .01 cent books make their profit on the shipping commission; the meager difference between the cost of mailing and the slightly greater amount that Amazon reimburses the seller for the shipment (a difference of around one or two dollars). Subtract from this amount the price of a bubble mailer, the cost to acquire the book (often negligible because penny dealers get inventory for little or nothing), and Amazon’s commission and it’s easy to see that such a seller can’t afford to spend time describing a book or providing any manner of customer service. So to save a few dollars, you may wait indefinitely, receive nothing like the item you intended to buy, and have to manage a return with a potentially unhelpful seller. Isn’t your time worth more than that? My guideline for purchasing even a reading-copy is to scroll past all of the $.01 listings and template copy until I find a bookseller who is actually describing the book in hand; one whose description provides some assurance that I’ll be satisfied with my purchase. There are professional organizations for booksellers, including IOBA, ABA, ABAA, ABAC. and others. Most of these organizations hold their members to high standards. For instance, the IOBA code of ethics states [link to full code of ethics]: Members will provide a thorough and accurate description of all items offered for sale, noting appropriate bibliographic details, all significant defects, and all restorations or sophistications. When you deal with sellers who value their trade enough to acquire professional credentials, you are not only more likely to get the book you thought you were ordering, but you can be assured that if anything goes wrong, the seller should be responsive and eager to correct any problem. Once I’ve found a few potential sellers, I check their feedback (if available). Amazon’s stars and “percentage positive” ratings are broadly useful, but be sure to click through and skim the comments left by customers. See if there are negatives or complaints from previous buyers that would annoy you if you were treated the same. Also, see if any buyers went an extra mile and left a glowing positive review. There are a few caveats however. Since leaving feedback is optional, most buyers won’t bother unless they have a grievance (justified or not) or had a stellar experience. Also, because of the way seller rating is calculated, a single recent negative comment can have more weight than hundreds of older positives. Think of customer feedback the way you would a restaurant review on Yelp, useful information but to be taken with a grain of salt. Once you’ve chosen a seller and checked feedback, determine if you have any outstanding questions. Is this the correct edition of a book required for a class? Do you need the book for a vacation next weekend? Do you have special sensitivities to pet or smoking odors? Send the seller a message and see if you can get a response. Most good booksellers will appreciate a question (even if it doesn’t lead to a sale) because you are giving them a chance to personalize their service. You may even be bringing an unknown selling point to their attention. Unfortunately, figuring out how to contact a bookseller is often harder than it should be. Many of the larger aggregate sites (venues that display wares from many sellers, like Amazon) hide or anonymize seller contact information and monitor customer/seller communications, filtering out email addresses and weblinks. The stated aim of this barrier between buyer and seller is to prevent information abuse, but a side effect is that a seller often can’t send you an additional image, refer you to another item in his or her stock or give you direct contact information to speed service. Here is Amazon’s description on how to contact a seller with pre-order questions: From the product listing, click the seller’s name. You’ll be taken to their storefront page where you’ll find information about the seller and a “Contact this seller” link. The seller will respond to you via e-mail. Once you’ve chosen a bookseller you have confidence in and received answers to any questions, add the book to your shopping cart. During the checkout process, select a shipping option that will get you the book when you need it. Use expedited shipping if you’re in a hurry (with confirmation from the bookseller if you have a hard deadline). Also, check that your address is up-to-date. Many buyers forget to update their shipping information after a move which leads to misdirected packages. Finally, click the checkout button and know that you’ve done everything you can. Now a week or two later and it’s the moment of truth. Was the shipment on time? Was it well-packaged enough to survive the USPS? Is the book everything you expected? If so, congratulations! Your extra effort paid off. Leave feedback for the professional bookseller who served you. We often lead solitary existences—with little to no contact with the outside world–so kind words are appreciated. You’re feedback also makes the shopping process that much easier for the next buyer. And make it all fives. Don’t try to be nuanced. You’re making up for the guy who left one star because he didn’t think the book was a good read and blamed the seller. If the book isn’t what you wanted, stay calm. Most buyers don’t realize that a book order is the responsibility of the seller until it arrives safely, in the condition described. First, save the packaging in case the book needs to be returned (or you need proof of damage for insurance purposes). If the book didn’t arrive on time, check the postmark and the shipping method to determine if the seller or the postman is to blame. Once you’ve collected these facts, contact the seller. Explain your grievance and offer a possible remedy. Would a partial refund satisfy you? An exchange? If the item needs to be returned, ask the bookseller what shipment method to use and send it out promptly. Media mail will often suffice. You aren’t doing the bookseller a favor by returning a $20 book via priority or express mail for which the seller then needs to reimburse you. If you came to an agreement and received satisfaction, consider leaving positive feedback. After all, handling a complaint with care and courtesy is the definition of customer service. If, however you’ve stated your case and the bookseller is unresponsive, explain that if you’re not satisfied by a given date, you plan to leave negative feedback and seek a chargeback on your card. Then do it. Many sub-par sellers count on buyer inertia to accept a lesser product and not seek a refund. This may seem like a lot to go through to make a book purchase but more effort up front leads to a better book buying experience and more time to read. In the next installment, I plan to cover the purchasing of first and special editions with information on how to choose the right venue, and using the search tools of each to find the best books.

Central/Eastern Europe Last Spring, my wife and I spent two weeks in Central/Eastern Europe. We started in Krakow, which we used as our home base in Southern Poland. My father’s family is from a small town called Gorlice, about 100 kilometres from Krakow, so we spent a day with a Polish driver/translator seeing the town and the house where my father lived until he came to America at the age of 15. I didn’t find any bookstores in the town, but there was a small museum where I purchased my first book of the trip. It was a paperback, published by the museum called Zydzi Gorliccy, a history of the Jews of the town written in 1998. I don’t speak any Polish, but I was able to find my father in the book, in a listing of survivors of the war. The book stated that he served in the Polish Army, then settled in Connecticut. This supports the adage not to believe everything you read in print, as he left Poland at 15 and served in the U.S. army. Back in Krakow, there are two excellent bookshops in the Kazimierz district, the site of the former Jewish Quarter, that specialize in books on the Holocaust in many languages. The Jarden Bookshop is part bookshop and part Jewish Heritage travel agency, while the Yidishland shop is part of the High Synagogue Museum that contains photo exhibitions of Poland before and during World War II. Both shops specialize in new holocaust books and offer numerous holocaust memoirs from survivors from all over the world, many that I have never seen or even read about. In both shops the most of the books were not shelved, but piled high on tables by language, then title. I am in the process of putting together a collection of material about Anne Frank, but these shops focus on Poland and Auschwitz, while Anne died in Bergen Belsen. I did find some nice books on Krakow before the War. The new Oskar Schindler Museum, built on the site of his factory in the Krakow Ghetto, also has an excellent bookstore specializing in material on Poland during World War II. The museum, itself, is first-rate and a must-see for any fans of the book or the movie. The next day we took the bus to Auschwitz. As you approach the entrance there are several small kiosk type bookshops, with a large selection of Holocaust books in several languages, but I did not buy anything, as this excursion was neither a shopping trip nor a photo-op. We left Krakow that night for Budapest, where I visited several bookshops, looking for a copy of Ulysses in Hungarian. It turned out to be impossible to find. There are some beautiful Rizzoli-looking shops on the Pest side near St. Stephen’s Cathedral, like the Ceu Bookshop, but they specialize in foreign language books for visitors, and few if any of them decide they want to read James Joyce on a European vacation. On the outskirts of the Jewish Quarter, there is a large academic bookstore called the Alexandra, but they did not have any Joyce translations. I ended up buying a very nice hardcover copy of Kerouac’s On the Road in Hungarian instead, because I thought the cover was interesting. The title in Hungarian is Uton which mydaughter’s boyfriend Aron told me is a direct translation: ut is the word for road, and the on suffix meaning “on the.” On Sundays there is a small open-air market on Gouba Street with several vendors selling books. We met up with a British bibliophile friend in Budapest, and we had a great time looking at the titles by English language authors and trying to guess the original English title. It was interesting that most of the translations here were in hardcover, not in paperback, which they are in much of Western Europe. From Budapest we traveled to Vienna, where I actually purchased two Joyce translations in one day. One morning we took a side trip from Vienna to Brataslava the present capital of Slovakia and formerly along with Vienna, a second capital of the Austria-Hungarian empire during the Hapsburg era. It is a much smaller city than I had expected, but a major University seat in the region. While we were there for only a few hours, I found a bookstore, Knihy, right off the main square. The shop contained mostly used academic books. There was a table in the center of the store with some books each individually placed with the front cover face up, and lo and behold I saw a hardcover copy of Ulysses translated into the Sklovak language. We returned to Vienna in the early afternoon, and I figured I was on a roll, so I went into another academic bookshop, Frick, in the center of town, a stone’s throw from the apartment where Mozart composed the Marriage of Figaro. The shop specialized in books in many languages, and the clerks were very helpful. I told them that I collected Ulysses translations, and was looking for a German one, they quickly turned up with a brand new copy, then spent 15 minutes unsuccessfully scouring the store for copies in other European languages. We stopped in the small picture-postcard town of Cesky Krumlov in the Czech Republic en route to Prague. There were two small bookshops in the town, one catering to English speaking tourists selling used books, the other selling European books and prints. I walked into the later one, figuring this would be a better bet for Ulysses in Czech. When I asked the clerk, he smiled and said “No, sorry, your friends were already here asking. I don’t have a copy.” We were traveling with friends and had split up so they could go antiquing while we climbed up to the castle. I am sure it was the first time he ever got two requests for Ulysses in one day. It is the spirit of Kafka, not Joyce, than infuses the city of Prague. Every few blocks there is a Kafka-something – the Kafka Bookstore, the Kafka café, etc. When you stand on the bridge looking at the old section of Prague, on the wall along the waterfront is a large sign for the Kafka museum. The Kafka bookshop is a clean well-lit shop with lots of Kafka in many languages, but the prices seemed a bit inflated. I bought one book, Franz Kafka and Prague: A Literary Guide, which I later saw back home at the Strand in NYC for a third the price. After visiting the Kafka museum, which is a must for any literary person, I had a hankering to read his Letter to my Father. Near the museum is an English language bookshop called Shakespeare Astnove (or Shakespeare and Sons) so I popped in for a look. There was a large selection of used and new books, mostly paperbacks, but the prices were pretty expensive. The last morning, before heading to the airport, I went into the bookshop in the large modern shopping mall across from our hotel. If I took my glasses off, so I couldn’t read the titles (which were all in Czech), it looked just like any mall bookshop in America. There were very few English language books, so I headed over to the literature section to look for Ulysses. There was no Joyce to be found, but I did see two different hardcover editions of On The Road. At first I could not figure out why there were two recent, but different, translations. Closer examination revealed that one was a translation of the 1957 edition, the other was a translation of the original scroll, first published on 2007. I was so impressed that someone would make the effort to translate the scroll, that I was ready to spend the $30.00 on it, until I looked at each copy of this heavy but not well-made book and noticed that both had tears in the front boards. In the airport, I spent my last Czech crowns on a souvenir copy of Kafka’s Letter to my Father which I read on the plane home. Overall, I guess you can say that experiencing bookstores is a lot like trying different brands of ice cream. Mall Bookstores everywhere are like Baskin Robbins, the ubiquitous mall ice cream stands, lots of flavors to appeal to everyone, but none of them very good. Many big city bookshops are a lot like Hagen Daz, readily available, yet expensive, with an aftertaste that is a little too sweet while the big chain stores are like frozen yogurt, not quite the real thing. Stumbling upon a shop with interesting items with reasonable prices, is a special treat even rarer than really great ice cream. My own town has a sweet shop that makes the world’s best coconut ice cream, but not one bookstore. Postscript Since returning, I have managed to find and purchase three interesting translations of Ulysses on-line. Europa has published both Polish and Hungarian editions in hardcover. I also found the second German translation, from 1930, which was done at Joyce’s request, since he disapproved of the original German translation. If anyone knows of a copy of Ulysses in Swahili or Czech that is for sale, please let me know.

I thought I knew what to expect from my ‘first’ fair. From a visitor’s perspective, I had a visual and sensory expectation set, which went something like: heavy lifting, eight-hours standing, casual browsers, heavy hitters, high rollers, soft selling, gentle banter, brain teasing questions, booth memory game, occasional water breaks, invoice writing, rinse, repeat. All true. But I missed an important piece to the puzzle: it’s a love story. Some time ago, some century or decade past, our story begins with a font’s impression, a pen’s flourish. The object of affection: bound, free or gathered, emerges and makes its way through the hands of time and man, until we are here at this moment. Now the dispensary of art, beauty, and the word awaits discovery. Thus the courtship begins. Time to decorate for company. Counting down to their arrival, books are gently upwrapped, paired with easels and shelves as they find their way into context and storyline. How does this guest become drawn in? The lures: visual, sensory and tactile – the cadence and tone of the siren’s song. The bacchanalian stage is readied, the curtains rise: seekers descend and set forth, clutching maps, on a quest for their object of longing. Hopes high for literary intervention and sated appetites. Some liltingly run their eyes across the general culture of the booth and move quickly on. Some are captured by a shelf, a book propped open to an illustration that tempts. Some resist, but some fall madly. I sent a personal friend (a first time fair visitor) to wander about, and my counsel was this: Allow yourself to take in the macro, then slowly attune to the micro. A cacophony of spines and text slowly filters into meaning and recognition, look close and see.. a shelf, book. Then really look. Start a conversation and listen – what is the book whispering to you? Asking of you? Stirring in you? A young, dynamic, lovestruck couple strolled in on Sunday, and some of Vic’s ‘Books on Books’ reference titles got piled up for purchase. Their heads were clear and they were making sober choices. But then: the siren called. A lush, richly and naturally buffed leather Bible, in Gaelic, spoke to them, haunted them with font and form – love at first sight. Two visitations and a couple of gold coins later, and they rode off into the sunset together. One morning, a seasoned, perhaps jaded, lover of the book strode in, and again, and again. He visited perhaps three times – caressing and courting one particular San Francisco journal that he coveted. He was a collector of loves, had 60 of the same title in different manifestations, but was missing this particular binding color. Butterflies will be caught and pinned – the suitor would have his way, and he did. A green eyed, mature beauty who had suffered love and loss in the flesh spent time with us one day. She had become a lover of Fine Press titles, a new fascination and friend to her, something to adore and cherish, somewhere to pour the love that once poured out. She sought much from the book but as well in the company kept. Here, the custodians and fellow lovers are all in communion – she found solace in this love story. Thus, with naive eyes I witnessed, in the course two rich, influential days, the stories not of the written page -but of those inked upon the human heart. As we rolled up our tents and caravan, I slept dreaming of the tales yet to be spoken and discovered. Such to be spun not by tradesmen, but by talismen, as we administer the rites for lovers and seekers. Dreamers, hope! The muse awaits.