More Questions than Answers By: Julie Fauble President, IOBA URL: http://www.centurybooks.com I have more questions than answers these days. What will happen in this rapidly changing online used book market? How do I respond to these changes? What do I want my business to look like? What can I do to make my business better? So many questions and so many different answers, as many answers as there are booksellers. I’m not going to give you any answers here. Instead, I want to talk about why we should keep asking the questions. First and foremost, books are important. Books change the world. The history of ideas, the history of human progress, is the history of books. In the present world of multi-media and digital wonders, the humble book is more vital than ever. Other media may be flashier or appeal more to our senses and need for stimuli, but it is a book that will slow us down long enough to think. It is a book that will connect to our higher mind, not just our emotions. The printed word is essential as an archive, a repository. An e-book can be rewritten and leave no trace of its original. Web pages come and go with the click of a mouse. With a few more clicks, a photo can be rearranged. Put Hollywood technology to work, and history on film can be changed completely. All the goals of an Orwellian Ministry of Truth can be accomplished in the digital world. Books do not so easily fall prey to this malleable reality. One cannot alter a book without leaving evidence behind, and if there is evidence of something removed, then there is someone somewhere who will seek out the original, seek out what the censors attempt to hide. Books are essential to the soul. In a world of noisy, intrusive mass media, the soul needs the oneness, the intimacy, the quiet of a book. The human mind wasn’t created for the non-stop bombardment of modern living, the omnipresent whine of television and radio, the crush of humanity in the daily grind. The mind needs a break from all this, and for many, the quiet time spent reading a book is the only break they have. The book is their means of renewal. When business is frustrating, when I wonder why I even bother, I bring myself back to this core: Books are important, and those of us who deal in them perform an important service to the world. Some will say that’s idealistic nonsense, that one only need to look at the corporate entities coming in to see it’s just a business like any other. Don’t believe them. Books cannot be exchanged for widgets any more than a doctor could be exchanged for a plumber. The corporatization of the medical world doesn’t alter the doctors’ sacred charge to heal the body. No more should the changes in the book world alter our sacred charge to feed the mind and keep the histories. Whether we are a seller, collector or reader and whether we deal in paperback romances or scholarly tomes, we all play a sacred role in the world of ideas. Remember that, and honor it. With all the best for a peaceful and joyous holiday season, Julie

BookWriter Web: Getting Your Inventory Where it Belongs — In Front of Buyers! Tom Sawyer is a co-founder of Interloc and Alibris. He served as Chief Software Engineer from 1993-2001. Over the years, he has developed many widely used programs for booksellers, including BookMaster, Record Manager, BookMate, and the UIEE format many of us use every day. Mr. Sawyer is now preparing to release BookWriter, which may well become the standard against which the next generation of bookseller software is measured. However, a little serendipity and a lot of work have yielded a surprise! Read on…* * * * * * Tom, I was prepared to interview you about the release of BookWriter, but it sounds like BookWriter Web is actually a different program? Yes — and no. BookWriter Web is now and will always be a working part of the complete BookWriter program. But, 3/4 of the way through its development, something unexpected happened: it became clear that the program was far more powerful than we had imagined, doing things we didn’t think could be done, producing results in seconds that would normally take hours or days to accomplish. I was floored. After some discussion, we decided to retain these features in the full BookWriter program but also to immediately release BookWriter Web as a stand-alone program (at lower cost) for both BookMate™ and HomeBase™ users. Given the current state of the online book trade and the fact that any dealer with a BookMaster, Record Manager or BookMate-compatible database can use BwWeb immediately, we felt it was important to make this available to dealers as quickly as possible, particularly in time for the holiday season. The Alibris-compatible version is ready now and the HomeBase-compatible version will be released shortly. What exactly does the program do? BwWeb is a multi-functional composer that makes it very easy to effectively present your stock in venues like the web and auctions, using the data you have already entered. It will create just about any kind of document you can imagine, but where it really shines is its ability to compose complete, ready-to-publish web pages and auctions, with integrated images. It composes pages one right after the other, in sequence, and I’ll explain more later why that’s important. The general answer to your question is that the program’s main objective is to help dealers sell more books. How does it work? BwWeb retrieves selected records from your database and populates pre-defined locations in other files with your records. You can produces web pages, auctions, catalogs, tables, export files — just about anything you can think of. You can work from a Hit List, ranges of records, or select records directly within the program. There is a very wide range of options available for composition including automatic image layout and sizing. And, it displays the composed results instantly — you can preview what you’re about to do before you do it, to make sure everything is just the way you want it. If I may say so, this sounds almost too good to be true. What are the advantages of using BwWeb? I’ve spent a lot of time doing pragmatic testing and I’ve come to some interesting conclusions. Some may not agree with me, but I have good reasons for believing this: 1: When the vast majority of potential Internet customers want to buy an OP book, they go first to Yahoo, Google, AOL, MSN, or any of the major search engines that pop up on their computers when they first turn them on, or when they launch their Internet browser. They type the name of what they want into the Search box, hoping to find it. Usually, they either don’t find it or they end up at Amazon or B&N through a collateral link. This seems to happen the majority of the time and it’s common sense, isn’t it? 2: Practically no one knows anything about on-line OP book listing services. One out of a thousand people recognize the names ABE, BookFinder, ChooseBooks, etc. It’s an insulated little world and I believe this will take many years to change significantly. Alibris is far ahead of the pack in this regard because of the vast sums spent on advertising, branding and promotion, but their records don’t show up in search results either. 3: Most book dealers put their books in listing service databases. These databases are not indexed by major search engines. Hence, your database records do not appear in search results either. So, to answer your question, there are many advantages to using BookWriter Web, but certainly one of the most important is the ability to get your inventory out in front of the people who want to buy it, without having to rely on sheer luck or having an OP book listing service to do it for you. A lot of book dealers have created their own web sites but their sales results haven’t been what they had hoped. How will BookWriter Web improve this situation? Frankly, I’ve looked at the source code for a lot of book dealer’s web sites and only a handful are actually set up correctly for proper search engine indexing. Most of them have their book records stored in non-indexable database files. That’s no surprise, that’s what most web programmers have been trained to do. But, the reality is that in order for buyers to find your books through search engines, you have to have a significant presence in the search results that appear before potential customers. The only way to do that is to make it possible for your inventory to be indexed automatically by major search engines. This requires that your web pages be composed and structured in a particular way, and that the information to be indexed by the search engine must reside in your web pages, not merely in a Microsoft database or other “private” file. Can you give me an example of what you mean by “significant presence?” Ok, for example: In my spare time I created a web site for my parent’s antique & collectibles business called “B&D Unique Antiques.” I hosted the site through TIAS.com and made sure the pages were set up correctly so they would be properly indexed by search engines. Long ago before my time, they used to have kerosene heaters in automobiles. Suppose you were an antique car collector and wanted to buy one online? If you go to Yahoo/Google and type: “antique kerosene auto heater” you’ll get about 600 results — and B&D Unique Antiques inventory will appear near the top of the results list. We did not pay a cent for that exposure. So, B&D Unique Antiques has a significant presence not because we’re offering stuff no one else has, but because our inventory exists as static web pages that can be properly indexed by search engines. It makes all the difference in the world when it comes to sales. On the other hand, if you go to any of the “mainstream” antique sites like Ruby Lane or CurioScape and type in the name of what you want in their own little Search box, you’ll probably find it right away. BUT, you’d need to know enough to go there in the first place, wouldn’t you? Most people don’t know anything about Ruby Lane or CurioScape or any of the “mainstream” antique sites. Like bookselling sites, they also live in their own insulated little world. So, since most people type what they want to buy rather than where they want to go to buy it, the majority of people who don’t know anything about these places won’t find them. But, if your records are properly presented, they will find your inventory. It’s the same situation for booksellers. Here’s another example: A fairly common book is: “FDR: Centenary Remembrance,” published in 1982. Go to Yahoo/Google and type: “FDR Centenary Remembrance” and again, you’ll see our book listed near the top of the search results, even though there are hundreds of copies available on ABE and other listing service sites. None of those show up. Very interesting indeed! Does this mean our inventory records will exist online as a series of static web pages and not as a single database file? That’s exactly what it means. Unlike a database whose contents are “hidden” from internet search engines, pre-composed pages allow your records to be directly indexed by search engines. This means people looking in search engines for specific books will find your records. However, they will not find those belonging to other dealers whose records cannot be properly indexed — because they exist only in online databases. Aside from containing the text, how do the pages created by BookWriter Web insure that they will be properly indexed by search engines? Well, aside from the formatted text describing your records, you can also instruct the program to include an explicit Document Type Declaration and a complete set of formal Meta Tags in your composed web pages. These are extremely important for proper indexing and will insure that your records appear in the proper categories when retrieved by search engine robots. You can even include introductory information about your business, specialties, location, etc — and you will be found by buyers! BwWeb will even collect keywords from your records and include them as Meta Tags to provide alternative retrieval criteria for buyers who search by category rather than by title. Don’t individual web pages require a lot of web space? No, they don’t — that’s a common misconception. Individual, pre-composed web pages occupy about the same amount of space as a traditional web-based database and often occupy less space. Hence, there is no storage penalty to creating individual pages. However, you do need enough storage space to handle your entire inventory, but of all the things you have to pay for, web storage space is one of the cheapest. What about retrieving and displaying web pages? Will customers experience any delays? In fact, there is a huge performance increase over traditional ODBC database retrievals. Since each page is pre-composed, no database record retrievals are required. And, unlike an active server page that can take many seconds to compose a page on demand, pre-composed pages load instantly — there is zero latency beyond the normal load times for text and graphics. You might call it a horse-sense approach. What about site setup and overhead? Is it expensive to do this? Well, no, actually it’s as inexpensive as it can possibly be. There is no server software required. No “Microsoft Extensions” are needed to display database records and images. Your web site is as clean and simple as it can possibly get. You pay nothing for “development” since there is essentially nothing to develop. If you want more sophisticated features such as a shopping cart or other interactive functionality, you’ll find that most of these features already exist elsewhere as separate, callable modules. For example, a number of services provide free shopping cart modules. The HTML can be cut and pasted right into BwWeb and it will include it in every composed page. Why re-design the wheel and have to pay money for the privilege? There are also many excellent free search engines available (such as Atomz, PicoSearch and others) that can easily be set up to perform fast text searches on your pages. You can have the equivalent of a searchable database at zero cost and the results are splendid. By the way, the two companies I mentioned place a small logo on your search result pages if you use the free service, but there are no advertisements added. You can have an extremely fast, efficient searchable web site set up and running in a matter of minutes. At the very least, if you still want a web programmer to set up a “custom” site and pay the extra money, fine — you can present him/her with a ready-to-publish set of web pages describing your inventory and still save yourself a bundle. You don’t have to worry about “import/export formats” — there aren’t any! You can put as many records on a page as you like, lay them out however you want, present images in a very professional manner, even include automatic links to display them full size. In a nutshell, you can do most if not all of the things you’ll find on web sites that cost their owners thousands of dollars to produce. How about maintenance? Is it more difficult to maintain separate pages than a single database file? Normally, yes, but in this case, No, definitely not. That’s one of the beautiful things about this program. If you update a few records and choose to update the corresponding web page(s), you do not have to upload huge database files merely to update a few records. Instead, you upload only the page(s) that have changed. Plus, your images can live anywhere on the web — you do not need to “marry” your images with a resident database server, which many database-hosting systems require. Your records exist as simple pages that you can edit or delete at any time. In effect, you have complete freedom to locate your files wherever you like. If you decide to make changes to your pages, you are faced with a simple task instead of a complicated one. Simply make the desired changes to your record(s) and then re-compose only the page(s) you want to replace. A huge amount of time is saved over the traditional “Front Page” approach of making changes to “master” pages and then being compelled to edit (and test) all of the subsequent branches in your web. Also, keep in mind that I’m not recommending that dealers should do this INSTEAD of using listing services — I’m suggesting that they should do it IN ADDITION TO using listing services. You mentioned marrying images with database records. Will BookWriter Web do this automatically? Yes, it will. All you have to do is be sure to name your image files in a certain way, then tell BwWeb where the files are. It automatically scans the images and matches them up to the database records. BookMaster, Record Manager, BookMate and HomeBase users can now compose complete image-populated pages without having to do anything other than what I just described. What about auctions? How does one use BookWriter Web to compose auctions? In practice, there are three things that take a lot of time to produce a good auction: (1) composing the presentation, (2) creating a good auction title that fits into the space allowed, and (3) choosing the best auction category. BookWriter Web will do the first two automatically. The code it produces can be dropped right into Mr. Lister or whatever auction software you choose, and it contains a flexible Auction Title Composer that intelligently constructs titles based on the fields you specify. It works pretty well, too. My own tests here have seen auction productivity skyrocket as a result of using it to perform these two labor-intensive chores. There are many dealers who know nothing about HTML or web sites. Is this complicated to do? How would a dealer go about setting up a web site as you’ve described? Everyone does things somewhat differently, and style is a major component when establishing an on-line business identity. BookWriter Web both expects and encourages creativity. Getting started is easy: You can use any of the example templates and document layouts supplied with BwWeb to organize your information the way you want it in a general fashion. You can then save the template and layout as your own files and customize them precisely the way you want them to “fine tune” your on-line presentation. BwWeb lets you instantly preview the results in partial or complete form, so there is never a need to “upload and review” as is normally the case with most web pages — your uploaded files will look exactly the same when viewed on-line. In general, all you need to have is the web site itself. Once you have a place to send files, that’s really all you need. The rest is handled by the pages themselves. It is honestly just that simple. What else will BookWriter Web do? Well, it creates catalogs, quotes, tabular index documents, detailed records, sorted lists, delimited files for uploading to Amazon and Half.com, HTML for use in eBay auctions, archival records — the list goes on and on. You can even use it to create UIEE files that are ready to upload. It’s all a matter of setting up what you want to create, and I’ve spent a lot of effort trying to make that very easy to do. You can basically set up an infinite number of layouts and compositions and save them for use later. And, since it always saves your current settings automatically, the program is always just the way you left it the next time you run it. I’ve also tried to include practical features that dealers will find genuinely useful. For example, there are some automatic editing options that will remove spurious punctuation, strip leading articles and things like that. These are admittedly details, but they can also add up to a lot of wasted time if you have to go back and hand-edit documents. BwWeb is targeted towards producing ready-to-use results. Is the program complicated to operate? This program is unlike anything I’ve ever produced. I’ve been told it looks a bit intimidating at first glance, but I think that’s because there’s a lot packed into a small area. I wanted a program that was right in front of me in toto, not hidden behind two dozen sub-menus. The learning curve is pretty short, given that you can start composing immediately by using the examples we’ve included. I’ve put a lot of work into laying the program out sensibly. There is a comprehensive Help system that describes the entire program in detail and how to use it. There’s even a Tutor that literally walks you through the entire program, describing what each control does and how it can affect your composition. My mother has no trouble operating it. What about technical support. What happens when a dealer needs help? E-mail support is provided at no cost to all users. We’re pretty good about responding quickly to inquiries and we take them seriously (though I’ve personally gotten behind in my correspondence lately). Additional pay-as-you-go support is available for dealers with more involved issues. We’ll also be offering pager-based flat-rate and long-term support services for dealers who wish to develop custom applications or who want someone “on call” to help when problems arise. What does BookWriter Web cost? We’re offering the program for $79.95 through December 31, 2002. Dealers who subsequently decide to order the complete BookWriter program will receive full credit towards their purchase through December 31. Where can dealers go to find out more information? Dealers can visit http://home.rochester.rr.com/bdunique/bwweb/bookwriterweb.htm for additional information and a link to order the software. The Alibris-compatible version is available now and it has been tested extensively. As I mentioned earlier, a HomeBase version will also be ready shortly. We’ll be issuing some announcements at the appropriate times, when I have completed software in hand, ready to install. Tom, this is really very exciting. I appreciate your sharing this with us! Thank you. It was my privilege to participate. ™ BookWriter is a trademark of TAS Software Innovations © UIEE is Copyright 1989-2002 TAS Software Innovations ™ BookMaster, BookMate, Interloc, and Record Manager are trademarks of Alibris ™ HomeBase is a trademark of Advanced Book Exchange Inc. #Software

URLS: http://www.allusys.com and http://www.bookrouter.com When Shirley Bryant approached me with a request to do an interview for the IOBA’s The Standard newsletter, it forced me to reflect on what it is my colleagues and I do at Allusive Information Systems and how we got here to be doing it…. From personal experience, I can tell you that book dealers and computer people are very much alike – generally independent, a bit eccentric and definitely passionate about the ingredients of their respective vocations. Just as book dealers do much more than simply buy and sell books, computer folks do a whole lot more than simply sit and code, or create computer systems for clients. The world of books and the world of computers exist – both cultures of communication. I began as a citizen of the world of books…. After a stint in New York working for a Japanese trading company where I could use my Japanese language skills acquired in college to a practical end, I moved to northern California in 1975. I was working as a finish carpenter in 1977 when an acquaintance asked me to become his partner in a small used bookshop in a small apple town where the freight trains still ran down the main street (called Main Street, by the way) on their way to the cannery. The day I came by to talk to him, he gave me a set of keys and put my name on the checking account. Suddenly I was a book person – a full partner in a business that had grossed almost $14,000 the year before! Most instances of autobiography now turn to the enormous success that followed – fortune and the respect of colleagues accumulating through the years – the subject turning back in self-satisfaction to consider a life well led… In my case, I would have to say that, while I hope I have gained at least some regard from my colleagues and learned a little bit about the craft of dealing in the books of East Asia, what I really found that day over 25 years ago was a passion, a love for books and for the world of books. I did become a member of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association in 1980 (at a time when the ABAA was full of young booksellers in their late 20’s to their early 40’s). A few years later, I moved to Boston and became involved in the life of Helen Kelly and her business, the Boston Book Co., founded in the 1970’s. It was Helen who gave me the chance to see what a large urban book business could be and who opened my eyes to the joys of domestic life – we married and had a son in the late 1980’s. Helen had one of the first computers in the old book trade: In 1982, she bought an original IBM PC with specifications laughable by today’s standards – but it was top of the line (with a hard drive, no less) and cost her about $10,000! Not so laughable a sum then. Soon after I merged my book business into hers, I became involved in the care and feeding of that by then venerable PC and its successors – then creating a network…..I was hooked. Helen had introduced me to my second passion – the world of computers. Helen had equipped that original PC back in 1982 with Bookease – Marc Younger’s professional bookseller’s package, built on DOS, which he had created for his own bookseller wife Helen in the same year. By the early to mid-90’s I had become Boston Book Company’s information technology department – our computer network had grown – we had gone far beyond the first PC to the blistering speed of the 486! Marc had succeeded in creating a version of Bookease that networked well and stably, we had bought a commercial space specifically for our rare books. Our book business was prospering… we cranked out catalogues, published lists and I personally had also become our Asian book department of one and was doing a land-office business with Japan. But off on the horizon, no bigger than a man’s hand, a dark cloud was churning. The Japanese market was in decline; that was clear. Techno-friends were starting to talk about the growth of a “network of networks” called the internet and I decided to take a look. By 1992 I had an email address and a shell account so I could start exploring the ‘net (not via the Web, though, it was too early for that –I didn’t even use Windows….). But even in my halting fashion, I found my way in cyberspace and what I found astonished me: the internet was full of librarians! Viewed from the near side of the dot-com divide, the internet of those days seems quite quaint. Even folks with “com” domains were careful to give as little offense as possible to the dominant anti-commercial culture. The ‘net was for the exchange of information – if you wanted to share bibliographical information as a bookseller with your colleagues and with the library and academic worlds, that was fine, but booksellers should not flog their wares. But soon there was an accelerating move to make more than pure information available over the ‘net – fueled largely by the splashy, graphics-heavy and user-friendly World Wide Web. By 1993, Boston Book Company was on the Web and by early 1994 we had established a searchable database of our wares there. Interloc was still a Bulletin Board Service not open to the public, ABE and Bibliofind were just stirring, Amazon had only burned through their first few millions – spring was in the air. As the dot.com boom evolved in the mid to late 1990’s it became clear to me and many of our colleagues that the easy answers for marketing that the Web seemed to provide for small businesses like ours were not an unmixed blessing. Bibliofind, ABE, AntiQbook in Europe, Interloc (later Alibris) and soon many other sites were jostling each other for a piece of the pie – trying to lure dealers to post their listings and to draw eyes to view them as well. And just like that we all seemed to get bulldozed by big money – folks you would never expect it of were suddenly interested in books. Capital was being poured into the process – relatively big fish were being swallowed by bigger fish in the internet world – Bibliofind was grabbed by Amazon which had discovered a sudden interest in old books and ways to market them and Interloc became Alibris absorbing Bibliocity, hoping to create a whole new market for old books by raising their visibility through the pages of the New Yorker…. It was a strange time. There seemed to be a two-fold attack on our way of life. On the one hand, it was clear that money was trying to take over the old book world – whether that was sensible or not, whether there could be any reasonable return for the outlay of cash required to get noticed on Wall Street. One could foresee a future in which old book dealers would become glorified scouts for the various huge marketing venues. Not the sort of future most of the book people I knew relished. The second attack (or just plain change, to be more neutral about it) was a revolution in our day-to-day activities. Traditionally there had been a “food chain” in the old book biz – at least since the demise of the truly great generalist booksellers – dealers sold to other dealers up that chain, retailing to their own customers along the way and wholesaling to specialists or those with more savvy about marketing at the high end. The romance of the vagabond bookseller hunting for gold on the less-traveled roads of America was being written every day, even just a few years ago. Yet the growing access to information (and misinformation, alas) over the internet meant lots of people knew lots more about books and markets than ever before, and the out-of-the way bookshops got much less remote. In the meantime, the multiplication of electronic venues, and the growing need for sophistication in all things digital, meant that there was less time for actually handling the books we all love…. Our customers, who had relied on us for expertise, were going to the search sites or to Amazon, to find information certainly, but more often to find stuff cheaper. Ironically, the computer, which was supposed to make everything easier, ended up on the verge of separating us from our wares, making us work harder and maybe even making it harder to make a living. The old book world responded with a whole raft of marketing solutions – ideas like the IOBA, high-end venues like WorldBookDealers, the ABAA/ILAB website and search engine, the joint ownership represented by TomFolio, etc. Each was an effort to reclaim the old book world from the new giants. We had all seen too clearly the utter demise of the independent new book dealers. No one wanted to follow them. I supported all those efforts as best I could, but there had to be an answer from the computer side of things, as well. In that atmosphere, I decided to try and create some tools that would make it easier to interact with the brave new world of bibliospace, to alleviate some of the new drudge work that our friend, the computer, had created for us. As a member of Boston Book Co., I felt I was a good position to understand the joys and pains of 1990’s bookselling – we operated a used bookshop near the BU campus, and had a rare book operation in Jamaica Plain, a Boston neighborhood. At the rare shop we handled general antiquarian items, but we also pursued a fairly serious specialization in the world of Japanese books. In short, because of our internal diversity, whatever we could create to help us at the Boston Book Co. would probably help many of our colleagues, as well. If I turned to my book business for inspiration and experience, I turned to my next-door neighbor for digital muscle. My neighbor, Mark, is a very skilled database developer with over 20 years experience in creating database tools for hospitals and educational institutions. He and I started to discuss the idea of using the internet not merely as a marketing medium but also as a foundation for helping booksellers more easily control their businesses as well. Our talks, at first theoretical and purely speculative, soon became very practical and, by early 1999, we had formed an LLC: Allusive Information Systems. Mark quit his job and came on board as a full-time in-house developer. Over the course of those conversations, we developed a set of principles that would be the underlying theory of Allusive. Allusive was set up to fill a niche in the old book world, to develop a set of answers to some problems that I had learned about too clearly as a bookseller. First of all, as computer people, we had to learn to listen to the customer, to the bookseller. Technical people tend to see the world in terms of their own latest technical “fad” – they are excited by the new, want to explore the “bleeding edge” of technology. We were determined not to prejudge a solution by its technical “sexiness” alone. What works, works. On the other hand, it is true that clients and especially booksellers who aren’t computer literate have a certain Luddite strain (which I don’t entirely disagree with) that has to be dealt with. Sometimes the old way of doing things has simply gotten too complicated. I often find that booksellers use a Rube Goldbergian mess of structures, techniques and equipment that has evolved in response to practical needs as they have changed over time, which “works”, kinda, but which is so inefficient that it isn’t making economic sense for the business. The result of those two problems is that booksellers are sometimes stuck with systems that are either alien and unusable or antiquated and overly complicated. In both cases, the systems are further compromised by being unreliable. And where do you find somebody to help you fix a problem at a moments notice? If your technical “faddist” moves to Peru, who will understand what latest gizmo he or she has equipped you with? On the other hand, if your system is a crazy quilt of operating systems and older equipment, who can pull it all back together when it falls apart? Mark and I came up with the notion of creating a “toolbox” of software, both for the dealer’s office and for use over the internet. We figured that the basic task of the bookseller was the creation, storage, conversion and transfer of information. The average bookseller has data that they need to store and have access to – book records, sales records, wants, etc., etc. Most everybody has some sort of database that they use for helping them with that – a software replacement for the raw memory skills and the many, many index cards we all once used (and once had, in the case of memory skills). Those databases are sometimes brewed at home out of Access or a spreadsheet or Filemaker Pro. Alternatively, there have been dedicated bookseller programs around for many years: Bookease, Homebase, BookTrakker, BookHound, etc., etc. Some were built from scratch, some on a base of Access or Filemaker – all useful as far as they went. It was the integration of those existing tools with the internet, and the growing marketing opportunity the internet represented, that we wanted to aim at. It was at that point in 1999 that an interesting practical circumstance arose that put a point on our need to come up with tools for integration. I had been friends with Marc Younger, the developer or Bookease, for many years. He had handed over the maintenance of Bookease to other people soon after developing some simple tools for exporting internet-ready files out of it in the mid-1990s. The handover was not a success and became a classic case of the two failings we were seeing: too much tech on one hand, too little service on the other. The first group that took over Bookease for DOS meant well but never seemed to be around when there were problems or questions from the Bookease booksellers. In despair, Marc made an arrangement with another developer on the west coast – this fellow decided to rebuild Bookease from scratch as a Windows program on an Access foundation. Bookease had been brilliantly conceived by Marc and was a very stable and expandable piece of software built on a Foxpro foundation. Access, on the other hand, is not a foundation for a mission-critical business environment – at least not as it was used in the new “Bookease Pro” for Windows. The results were instability, loss of data, bookseller recriminations and the new developer’s disappearance from the scene. Bookease Pro was in shambles and Bookease Plus for DOS, while humming merrily along, was running into a limit we all saw in the late 1990’s – the Y2K dilemma. Bookease for DOS needed an update desperately and time was running out. It was at that point that Marc Younger came to us, and asked if we at Allusive might take over the maintenance of Bookease for DOS. Though it seemed a bit far afield from our primary mission of building all new tools, I saw it as an opportunity to establish a relationship with a whole group of longtime computer users who still used the old Bookease program, and an acid test for our ability to integrate the old and the new with software “bridges.” In late 1999 we set up a Y2K upgrade system, contacted those many Bookease DOS users who had been languishing a bit since the mid-90’s, created a service contract system and Y2K converted every dealer who wanted to sign up before the January 1 witching hour. It was a great experience, an early success, and it taught us a lot about where we should be going. It was also the genesis of the online data conversion system that would become BookRouter. As I mentioned, Bookease had a rudimentary capability to export book records in UIEE format, which had originally been developed by Tom Sawyer of the then Interloc as a lingua franca for the transfer of book data. That was great as far as it went; one could log on to the various indexing sites and upload the export files, or one could use email to send an attachment to a few of the sites, or send by FTP, or…. There were many ways to keep up – too many it seemed and I–and many of my Bookease customers–was spending one heck of a lot of time creating formats and logging on and sending by email, and it didn’t seem to make much sense. It was in that environment that my database-savvy neighbor and I put aside the development of yet another online search site, and decided to create a universal online data converter which could take pretty much whatever text-based data that was thrown at it, convert it to an appropriate format for the various indexing sites and send it on. We also thought it would be good if we could do things to the book records on the fly…. Perhaps the dealer would only want to send books over $100 to one of their sites – or perhaps they wanted to have an instant “sale” by lowering prices, or they wanted to add an html link to their homesite to each and every record. We (or should I say Mark) created a “swiss army knife” data converter online at http://www.bookrouter.com and our first “bridge tool,” the prototype for the whole concept, was born. BookRouter went public in mid-2000. It has gone through many changes and improvements since, but the original simple idea remains the same: Upload once to us and we will take care of the rest – including all the toing and froing and talking to the sites when a mistake occurs. We wanted BookRouter to become the ultimate time-saver. At first customers were skeptical – it was really quite easy to upload files after all, and it didn’t seem to take much time – skeptical until they realized just how much time they really had been spending now that they weren’t spending it anymore. The Bookease experience also showed that there really was a need for a multi-tiered approach to the in-house bookseller software dilemma. Bookease DOS had been built on a state-of -the art foundation that was very robust, but the platform was creaky now and it was clear that a lot of functions (direct export of data to emails, for one, “assisted cataloguing” like Homebase’s ISBN lookup, for another) that were so necessary for modern commerce could not be added via DOS. But the Bookease Pro disaster showed that simple conversion of Bookease functionality into a Windows-based environment was not the answer by itself. A “one-size-fits-all” mentality wouldn’t work where some folks were dealing with thousands and others potentially millions of book records. New thinking was needed. We had to look around for new systems, new approaches. We had been using a Linux data server at Boston Company for many years. Linux was free, or close to it, and it was incredibly stable and bulletproof, as well. It networked well with Windows and made it possible to set up data server boxes separate from the rest of the Windows network and thus protect against the data corruption that came from inevitable Windows crashes. In addition, hardware had gotten so cheap that there wasn’t too much economic pain involved in setting up those Linux servers, as well. Any “entry-level” machine off the shelf was more than capable of doing the job. Over the course of time, I have set up a number of Bookease users with whole new systems – integrating their old hardware with a new box that hummed along – delivering data. It was almost comical – I would stop by a client’s shop to deal with some problem or another or just to check in – and the server would be running perfectly. I would reboot it just since I was there anyway. There are data servers at some of my clients’ places that are only rebooted once or twice a year. So we had grown busier – besides the toolbox business, as exemplified by BookRouter, we were also doing systems consulting, taking care of all the Bookease DOS users, setting up hardware/software networks, consulting on equipment acquisitions (we have found that most folks overspend on hardware because they are insecure about what they really need), etc. Help was necessary. Especially since early in 2001, Mark, having built BookRouter and the online search engine, got an offer from MIT he could not refuse. We brought in a part-time developer, Steve Clay, to take care of further work with BookRouter and the search engine on a consult basis. In addition, we hired an office manager, first Cathy, then BJ – who sends out bills to our customers and makes sure at least some of us get paid. We added Scott Pezza to take care of customer service. He is the one who fields questions, sets up new clients, writes conversion scripts for the occasional exotic data format beyond the reach of even BookRouter’s built-in tools – in short, he is the glue that holds the day-to-day operation of BookRouter together. And he is a gifted developer as well. Over the last many months, he has been hard at work creating a new tool for the toolbox: He has written an order management system which integrates and organizes all the email orders from the various online listing services – puts them into a coherent form, generates reports, creates packing lists and invoices, keeps track of clients, etc., etc. All this can be done either locally over an intranet or over the internet when the user is away from home. We haven’t come up with a name for this analogue to BookRouter, a Swiss army knife for orders, the results of our labors, but we are thinking about one – for now it is just “OMW” – Order Management Web. We are refining the online search mechanism, which now exists in-house as a database of our BookRouter users. Soon we will be offering that database “backend” as a feature to our BookRouter clients: they will be able to search their own inventories from their own websites without potential customers being diverted into the ordering systems of the indexing services. The search results, logo, colors and all, will appear to come straight from the dealer’s own search engine. We have outsourced development work on the successor to Bookease DOS to a group of programmers in Europe and further east and are working closely with them to dot the “i”‘s and cross the “t”‘s. The program is called Biblioware and it is a total departure from the standard in-house bookseller’s database program. It has a front-end with all the bells and whistles derived from the best of the bookseller programs, a user interface that can potentially plug into any modern database you please – whether it be our home grown Java data backend that will allow the Java version of Biblioware to be totally self-contained and totally compatible with any operating system, or a heavy-duty Linux/Unix/NT database for heavy lifting client/server operation, for people with thoughts of putting a million book records online. Carrying the “toolbox” idea even further, we are also working with a fellow who has created a wonderful assisted cataloguing system that is at least as accurate as Homebase’s ISBN lookup feature, but which will also allow the lookup of older, pre-ISBN material, as well. Its functionality will be integrated into Biblioware, the successor to Bookease DOS, but it will also be “modular” so that it can integrate with any bookseller’s program out there. One needn’t have to convert to a whole new system like our Biblioware or stick to an essentially “light-duty” database like Homebase in order to derive the benefits of assisted cataloguing technology. Obviously, even with outsourcing some development, we are going to need more hands to make all this work. Scott needs an assistant, I need an assistant, we need an extra full-time developer on staff – the wish list is long. We “come in” in the morning (sometimes we log in from far away, actually), clear up any problems re Bookease or BookRouter first thing, then start to work on toolbox projects or in setting up connections with new customers or new indexing sites. We have, in the past, had to create entire new programs to allow bulk uploads to Amazon or Half – there is never a dull moment at Allusive Information. Finally, we are always looking for new ideas from our book-selling colleagues. We are committed to making this “computer thing” work for all of us, not just for the ones with the money or technical savvy to bulldoze their way to a solution. So far we have created BookRouter, which we are very proud of as a tool for reducing the day-to-day drudgery of the online bookseller. We have set up a stable maintenance contract environment for all the Bookease DOS users still out there. And we are hard at work on a whole group of new capabilities or tools – centered around the new bookseller’s program called Biblioware, but consisting of a group of universally adaptable modules: the order management system, the assisted cataloguing system, the online search engine. All of these will follow the BookRouter model of being universal and adaptable to as many legacy systems as possible. It all sounds very complicated, but, hopefully, the complication is under the surface where the user never sees it. Take one, or take them all, the tools are created to make things just a little bit easier and more simple for the bookseller client. With that, I think I have to say goodbye to you all. This essay ended up being a lot longer and a bit more technical than I thought it would be when I started. I am always ready to field any questions that anyone might have about what we are about, but for now, from Scott, BJ, Steve, our European friends and myself, I would like to wish all of you in the world of books heartfelt best wishes from the world of computers. #databases #Software

“In October 1985, three bombs exploded in Salt Lake City, killing two innocent people & injuring a third, Mark Hofmann. Subsequent investigations revealed that the young documents dealer, Mark W. Hofmann, had planned and executed the bombings to cover up a five-year trail of deceit and forgery. Over twenty years have passed since Hofmann began his notorious career and while Hofmann spends his days at the Utah State Prison, his forgeries continue to appear in the marketplace and claim new victims.” The above paragraph led the announcement of a symposium that was held, recently, in Salt Lake City, Utah. Living in south-west Wyoming, less than 200 miles from the site of the murders in late 1985, I can certainly remember the news of the bombings, the ensuing investigations, the trial, and the aftermath. Even though the news was sensational, at the time, I never felt that those events would ever have the potential to involve me. I even read some of the books (see ‘Suggested Reading’ – at the end of this article) about the events, and still I never thought that any of this could possibly be of any significance to me, other than just a passing interest. My belief was based on a false assumption that Mark Hofmann had only been involved in the forgery of Mormon (LDS) related items. I wonder how many other book and document dealers, if they have even heard of Mark Hofmann, suffer under that same assumption. The first challenge to my belief came a little over a year ago, during a visit to Ken Sanders Rare Books, in Salt Lake City. During one of our conversations, Ken related how he had been called in to evaluate a book collection, for potential purchase. One of the items in the collection was a ‘signed’ copy of Moby Dick by Herman Melville. Ken said that he “was hardly able to sleep for the next 24 hours” – until he realized that the signature was a Hofmann forgery, because it had been detailed on a list of items known to have been in Hofmann’s possession. Ken went on to tell me of further known, and suspected, Hofmann forgery items. During another recent visit to Ken’s store, I learned that he was hosting a symposium on Mark Hofmann and his ‘works’. I made certain that my schedule would allow me to attend the event, where I was certain that I would obtain some valuable knowledge – in hindsight, that was quite an understatement. Simon Worrall’s book The Poet and the Murderer: A True Story of Literary Crime and the Art of Forgery had just been published – and I was able to obtain and read a copy before I attended the symposium. A very fascinating book, and it further served to help me learn that there is a great quantity of non-Mormon Hofmann forgeries – but, still nothing like I was to learn during the symposium. Ken is on the right and collector Anthony Marks is on the left. More about Tony Marks, and his purchase, later in the article. The event officially began on Friday, September 13 th at 7:00 p.m. Ken had originally planned to host the symposium in his store. Interest in the event, though, quickly showed that this would be highly impractical. Ken was able to make arrangements with the nearby Broadway Theater to house the lecture portions of the event. Preliminary to the first session, Simon Worrall read the introduction of his book to a small audience, in Ken’s store. He also read a magazine article that he wrote,Tracking Mark Hofmann , relating his experiences in Las Vegas while tracking the ‘provenance’ of the ‘Emily Dickinson poem’ that is the subject of his latest book. The serendipity of that trip would make for a marvelous movie script, but no one would believe it. Simon, with an infinite amount of journalistic luck, just happened to be in the offices of Todd Axelrod’s Gallery of History when couriers in a rented limousine delivered the ‘Emily Dickinson poem’, being returned from Sotheby’s – the auction purchaser having discovered that it was a forgery. Simon emphasized the point that “if Sotheby’s didn’t know that the Emily Dickinson poem was a forgery, they certainly should have, at least, checked on the provenance of the piece.” The symposium officially began with Ken Sanders making a brief statement of the purposes of the event – stating his hope that the book and documents trade could begin a registry of known and suspected Mark Hofmann forgery items. He also pointed out the fact that we should remember the Sheets and Christiansen families as the primary victims of Mark Hofmann: “they lost family members, while others only lost money.” Will Bagley, noted Utah historian, whose most recent book is Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows , then took over as moderator of the symposium. Will stated that the Mark Hofmann story “bedevils historians,” that separating fact from fallacy will be an “immense challenge to determine the hallmarks of truth.” He then introduced the first speaker, Kenneth Rendell, noted autograph and documents dealer. Kenneth Rendell, author of Forging History: The Detection of Fake Letters & Documents , started his remarks by stating that he was attending as a member of a “club I’d rather not belong to,” being one of those who lost money and valuable, genuine, inventory to Mark Hofmann. Ken called Hofmann “the greatest forger of the 20 th century” and, having established himself as a collector and specialist of Mormon documents, Hofmann then began dealing in books and documents not related to the Mormons. One of Hofmann’s most audacious forgeries was that of the ‘Oath of a Freeman’ – the first document ever printed in the U.S. The Library of Congress came very close to purchasing this forgery from Hofmann, for an amount in excess of $1 Million. The method that Hoffman used to establish the provenance of this document, while beyond the scope of this article, gives insight into the true level of the sophistication of Hofmann’s deceptions. Part of the secret to Mark Hofmann’s success as a forger lay in the fact that he always used contemporary paper – stealing these by removing end-papers and the like — from books of the same period as the forgery he wished to produce. Hofmann also learned how to manufacture inks using the same components and methods used by contemporary artisans. Although Hofmann took many people for a lot of money, there has never been an accounting of just where the money went. Mark Hofmann was imprisoned for the 2 murders, but no one has ever pursued Hofmann for the fraud aspects of the case. Kenneth Rendell concluded his remarks by stating that “Hofmann is gloating over the fact that we are meeting to discuss his work.” Will Bagley then introduced Richard Turley, noted historian for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (the Mormons), author of Victims: The LDS Church and the Hofmann Case . Mr. Turley told the audience that the LDS church has identified 446 items in their possession that have been associated with the list of known Hofmann forged signatures. He then read a list of Mormon and non-Mormon names known to have been forged by Hofmann. See the end of this article for a list of the non-Mormon names. For those interested in the Mormon list, please see page 348 of Mr. Turley’s book. Richard went on to say that there will probably never be a complete list of Mark Hofmann forgeries, but that any books or documents that have any Hofmann association should be highly suspect, that book and document dealers “need healthy skepticism of all new documents regardless of content.” The next speaker, introduced by Will Bagley, was Steve Mayfield of the Salt Lake City Police Crime Lab. Steve Mayfield reviewed some of the history of the case, how detectives and forensic experts had been able to determine that many of the Hofmann books and documents were forgeries. Much of the work was just good detective procedure – comparing dates, looking for contradictions of time and place, looking for obvious flaws. He showed an example of one Hofmann forgery, with multiple signatures, with one of the signatories having died before another was born. Mr. Mayfield stated that dealers in books and documents should always ask, “Who had this article, where has it been?” Steve’s final advice to collectors, “If you are going to buy a document, buy the cheapest one, because it’s probably fake anyway.” The next speaker was George Throckmorton, a leading forensics investigator, and author of A Forensic Analysis of Twenty-One Hofmann Documents . George Throckmorton and others of his staff developed the ink and paper tests that were finally able to prove that many of the signatures and documents sold by Hofmann were indeed forgeries. Of all the symposium speakers, Mr. Throckmorton seemed the most jaded regarding the case, almost certainly due to the fact that he has been called upon to testify and speak about the affair innumerable times over the past 17 years. George went into great detail regarding his background, his training, his experience – and that of the other members of his department. He also gave a not-so-gentle scolding to ‘experts’ who have stated, in public, the methods that can be used to determine Hofmann forgeries. He stated that he has never publicly listed the entire battery of methods that he and his staff used to declare the Hofmann documents as forgeries. He also went on to state that he thought that most book and document dealers “were concerned with a quick buck, rather than establishing a good reputation.” He stated that a signature alone on a book or document should always be suspect – the signature, by itself, is insufficient to establish authenticity. His final, albeit highly questionable, advice to collectors – “If you think it’s authentic, then what difference does it make if it’s a forgery.” The final speaker of the evening was Jennifer Larson, antiquarian bookseller, owner of Yerba Buena Books, noted expert on forgeries and those of Hofmann, in particular. Jennifer Larson started her presentation by noting that the Mark Hofmann forgeries were not exposed from within the rare books and documents trade; they were exposed as part of a murder investigation. She showed examples of a number of known and suspected Hormann forgeries. She urged caution and careful scrutiny of every item – but especially those that have any known involvement with Hofmann. She also noted that Hofmann is not the only forger – there is a currently active forger producing fakes of Sinclair Lewis related items. After Jennifer’s presentation, there was time for a short question/answer period involving all the speakers. One of the interesting, but very worrisome, points that was made is that there seems to be a market beginning for Mark Hofmann forgeries – that the forgeries, themselves, are now being sought by collectors. This led to one panelist to remark that now we have to worry about someone “forging Mark Hofmann forgeries” – what a conundrum that would be. Another point made during this question/answer session was that forgeries are not always done for immediate financial gain, as many might suspect. The forgeries may be done to establish precedence and/or provenance for future forgeries – forgeries may also be done to alter or establish historical perspectives of events. On Saturday, September 14, the symposium’s second session began at 1:00 p.m., again in the Broadway theater. Prior to the start, I overheard some of the attendees remarking on the symposium and on the career of Mark Hofmann. One particular remark stands out: “. . . too bad about what he did, especially since it involved ‘The Brethren'” – you probably would have to live in, or close to, Utah to appreciate the full irony of that statement. After a few ‘house-keeping’ items, Will Bagley introduced the first speaker of the afternoon, Brent Ashworth, well known rare book, document, and autograph dealer/collector. Ashworth lost a small fortune, and significant portions of his genuine autograph collection, to Hofmann. It has also been speculated that Hofmann’s third bomb was really intended for Mr. Ashworth. Brent Ashworth stated that he did not come to the symposium “to pay homage to Mark Hofmann.” He “came to pay respect to the victims, Kathy Sheets and Steve Christiansen” and the other victims “past, present, and future.” Financially, Mr. Ashworth was probably Mark Hofmann’s primary personal victim, with only the Mormon church being taken for more. Brent said that many of the Hofmann items were “almost produced to order” – Mark and Brent, in conversations, would discuss the importance of a particular document, especially of Mormon history, if that document were ever found. Within a few months, Mark Hofmann would ‘produce’ the document. Hofmann was good at “supplying dreams” – ‘finding’ documents that other LDS historians had been seeking for decades. Mr. Ashworth also read a list of known Hofmann forgeries that are now ‘missing’ – no one knows the current location of these items: a ‘Billy the Kid’ letter, a Joseph Smith, Sr. note, Brigham Young ‘Truth will Prevail’ item, Eliza R. Snow poem, an ‘inscription’ by Abraham Lincoln during the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Butch Cassidy letter to Josie Bassett on Union Pacific letterhead, and a Francis Scott Key item. Brent Ashworth did not originally believe that Mark Hofmann was guilty of the murders – and of the forgeries. He said that the moment that he knew Hofmann was guilty was when he finally saw Hofmann’s bombed-out car. Inside the car were numerous unopened book, document, and autograph catalogs. “No legitimate dealer has unopened catalogs – we, in the trade, immediately open every catalog we get.” The next speaker of the afternoon was Al Rust, owner of Rust Rare Coin and author of Mormon Money , who was taken by Hofmann for some $200,000. Al Rust stated that he was “reluctant to participate” in the symposium, but did so in the hope that collectively the group might come up with information of use to others. Mr. Rust considered himself a friend of Mark Hofmann, traveling with him to book shows and auctions. Rust was assisted by Hofmann in his historical research on Brigham Young and early Mormon money. “It was great,” according to Rust, “but I was gullible.” Rust remembered thinking, during the early parts of the investigation, that Hofmann couldn’t be guilty. “He couldn’t have forged, couldn’t have murdered.” Mr. Rust also made a very similar comment to that of Brent Ashworth, that Hofmann produced items almost “made to order.” Whenever a question of provenance or authenticity came up, Hofmann “always had an answer.” Seventeen years later, Al Rust has “hardly any answers” – he just had to put the entire Hofmann affair behind him. Next to speak was Dr. Anthony ‘Tony’ Marks, a Boston cardiologist, who owns a ‘Daniel Boone’ item that has recently been declared to be a probable Hofmann forgery. Tony Marks came to the symposium to relate his own “tiny little vignette” regarding the Mark Hofmann story. Mr. Marks purchased a Daniel Boone document in 1984 (while still a med student) from noted autograph dealer, Charles Hamilton. Over the years, Tony would occasionally take the document from its place in a safe deposit box, admire it, show it to friends, and return it to safe storage. While on a recent vacation, Tony’s wife gave him the Scott Worrall book to read, with neither Tony, nor his wife, knowing what would be revealed by the book. When Tony read the part about Mark Hofmann using Charles Hamilton’s business to authenticate and sell some Nathan Hale related items, he immediately began to suspect that his Boone item might also be a forgery. He eventually contacted Jennifer Larson, who suggested that he write to Hofmann at the Utah State Penitentiary. Jennifer told him to include a small quote from the document, then ask Hofmann to provide additional details – the theory being that if Hofmann had forged it, he would know the contents of the document. Hofmann wrote back to Dr. Marks, supplying sufficient detail, including a misspelled word, to convince Tony that he did, indeed, own a Hofmann forgery. Tony has really taken a quite interesting position on learning that his Boone item is actually a forgery. He stated that he has had more “fun” with it since learning that it is a fake than he did in all the time prior. “Even if it’s a forgery, it’s more interesting than owning WorldCom.” The final speaker, of the day, and of the symposium, was Simon Worrall, who once again read the forward to his book, this time to the much larger symposium audience. After the reading, Simon expounded upon the Mark Hofmann affair. He stated that Hofmann, in producing the Emily Dickinson poem, used the research of eminent Dickinson authority Ralph Franklin to produce an item that would ‘fool’ any Dickinson expert, including Mr. Franklin himself. Dickinson’s handwriting changed considerably over her lifetime, and Hofmann used that information to produce a fake that “was right for the period.” Although he used contemporary paper, Hofmann did not have to fake the ink in this instance. The fake poem was written in pencil, which Dickinson used for all her writing except for final drafts. Many people have stated that the fake Dickinson items is a ‘poor poem.’ Worrall disagrees, stating that it is “not a bad poem.” Hofmann himself has stated “If the poem is not as good as her best, it was at least better than her worst.” Worrall went on to state that he thinks the “internal splits and divisions of his childhood” were responsible for Hofmann’s crimes of forgery and, ultimately, that of murder. Hofmaan, says Worrall, “. . . felt most comfortable when Mark Hofmann was being someone else, most at home when he was pretending to be someone else. Money was a factor, but it wasn’t the most important. Forgery brought intrigue and excitement into his life. He enjoyed re-writing history as he thought it might have been. For a brief moment, he became Emily Dickinson, or Abraham Lincoln, or Joseph Smith.” The symposium ended at approximately 4:30 p.m., after another brief question/answer period. Robert Stott, of the Salt Lake County District Attorney’s Office, answered a number of questions from the audience regarding the case, the evidence, and Hofmann’s ultimate confession to the murders. Mr. Stott was the lead prosecutor in the murder case against Mark Hofmann. Doralee Olds (the former Mrs. Mark Hofmann) put in a surprise appearance. She stated that although she no longer speaks with Mark, that Hofmann does telephone their children every Wednesday night from the Utah State Prison – where he is serving a life sentence for those two lives that he took during those autumn days of 1985. I came away from the symposium, with a much greater knowledge that Hofmann forgeries run the gamut of literary persons of note – and of various media: books, documents, scraps of papyrus, and more. I just hope that he didn’t forge any of Bruce Kiskaddon’s signatures – otherwise I’m going to have a very unhappy collector in southern Colorado! The following is a list of non-Mormon-Church related names that Hoffmann, either by self-admittance or via strong suspicion, is associated with in regards to known or suspected forgeries. John Adams, John Quincy Adams, William H. Bonney (Billy the Kid), Daniel Boone, Jim Bridger, John Brown, Emily Dickinson, Button Gwinnett, Nathan Hale, John Hancock, Andrew Jackson, Francis Scott Key, Abraham Lincoln, Jack London, Thomas Lynch, Jr., Herman Melville, John Milton, Robert Leroy Parker (Butch Cassidy), William C. Quantrill, Paul Revere, Betsy Ross, Haym Solomon, Myles Standish, Mark Twain, George Washington, Martha Washington, and . . . ? Suggested Reading: Lindsey, Robert – A Gathering Of Saints: A True Story Of Money, Murder And Deceit (Personal Note: The paragraph at the top of page 295 (hard cover edition) has provided me with a great deal of amusement, over the years.) Sillitoe, Linda & Allen Roberts – Salamander: The Story of the Mormon Forgery Murders Naifeh, Steven & Gregory White Smith – The Mormon Murders: A True Story of Greed, Forgery, Deceit, and Death  (Note: This book and ‘Gathering’ were competing for the ‘most sensational’ prize!) Turley, Richard E. Jr. – Victims: The LDS Church and the Mark Hofmann Case (Note: Regarded by many as the best researched book on the Hofmann affair, regarded by others as an attempt at ‘vindication.’) Rendell, Kenneth W. – Forging History: The Detection of Fake Letters and Documents  (Note: One chapter on Hofmann; also covers other famous forgers and forgeries.) Worrall, Simon – The Poet and the Murderer: A True Story of Literary Crime and the Art of Forgery (Note: The first ‘Hoffman’ book that doesn’t focus, primarily, on the Mormon aspects of the case.) #fraud #seminars

I have been taking a look lately at how books & booksellers are portrayed in the pop culture….and it ain’t pretty folks. If you were to pick up a remote today, you would find that only two prime time shows display the reading of books as an important part of their everyday routine: West Wing and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, [ain’t that a kick in the head?] and the only one presently portraying anyone reading for pleasure is Gilmore Girls. Oh sure, you may see a kid doing their homework on TV…but it’s always math and they are always the ‘nerdy’ kid. Aside from Cspan’s BookTV [http://www.booktv.org/] which is about as fascinating as a college lecture, the other only non-fiction shows I could find that promote reading are either for the pb&j crowd like Reading Rainbow and Sesame Street or infotainment that blatantly cross merchandises to the mesmerized masses whatever nonsense novel Bertelsmann has bought the rights to today. On US TV ‘Ellen’ had depicted a ‘bookseller’ in it’s natural element, but it was quite unlike any real bookstore anywhere on the planet as it didn’t actually ‘sell’ anything and no one was ever seen reading anything. BBC-4 has Black’s Books [http://www.channel4.com/entertainment/tv/microsites/B/blackbooks/index.html], featuring a foul tempered, eccentric and drink-fuelled proprietor of a grubby bookshop; apparently the British are much more familiar with the realities of bookselling. [btw if anyone has this on tape in the U.S., I will bear your children to see it] On the big screen we are having a small resurgence of visualized reading material, technology finally catching up with fantasy enabled Lord of the Rings to recruit new followers and the 2 hour commercial for Harry P. merchandise left nothing to the imagination, however neither portray people actually reading…well except for Hermione. In the 1930’s booksellers were always popping up on the big screen, usually in B movie mysteries, They weren’t actually selling books though, it just seems like writers used it as an indicator that the character was better educated than the average jamoke. The 1939 version of Fast & The Furious had rare book dealers sleuthing a murder, ………………………. sorry, I just flashed on Vin Diesel playing with books, but I’m back now. My personal favorite is the Big Sleep, with not one but two bookstores: one run by a pornographer and one by a lucky clerk who gets to spend a rainy afternoon drinking with Marlow. Lately you have to look fast to find a book professional on the big screen, You’ve Got Mail was sweet but incredibly ludicrous; if a guy from a megastore killed my independent bookshop I’d kick his ass. Also not-at-all-like-reality, I’m sure Notting Hill was just some bored clerks wet dream, please note that that store owner would have had to put in 80 hours a week just to keep the doors open. And will someone please bring me the head of Roman Polanski? How can you make such a silly movie from such a fine book? Dumas Club was smart & textured, Ninth Gate was just insipid & hokey. [that didn’t stop me from buying it though…hey, it has Johhny Depp as a bookseller, okay?] Jasper Fforde’s literary fantasy novels [http://jasperfforde.com/] where people both real & fictional pop in & out of books all the time harked back to all those Merry Melody cartoons I saw as a kid. With all the television I consumed as a child, I can’t imagine why I became a bookseller. No doubt I have spent more hours watching flickering images than creating my own inside my head. But my first collected books were those that had already been regurgitated by Hollywood. Perhaps I had tasted their product and found it lacking and gone in search of more filling material? Beats me. But every time I hear a character on West Wing quote verbatim something they had apparently read years earlier in college, I feel excluded; as if I am missing out on half the conversation. I get the urge to pick up a book I should have read and catch up with top percentile, then I turn the TV back on and the urge goes away. Joyce Godsey (Publisher of SIC MAGAZINE)

David, when did you start being a book collector? Was it a particular book or subject that got you started? At some point in the late 1970’s or early 1980’s I decided that I wanted to express my artistic side by learning and doing photography. As was my habit, I learned by reading…lots and lots of how-to books on the technical and artistic aspects of photography. My specialty, motivated by my then hobby of growing flowering plants, especially lilies and day lilies, was close-up (macro) photography of…flowers. As has been the case with almost everything I’ve been interested in, I eventually became more interested in the history of the subject than in the doing…in this case, helped by the fact that I proved to have little or no artistic talent. I started reading contemporary books on photographic history, and eventually started haunting used bookstores to find older ones. Aside: As a kid, starting at about age 10, I began taking the subway from Brooklyn to Manhattan to visit museums and libraries. At the main branch of the NYPL, I spent days reading issues of the NY Times from the period of the Civil War, a special interest at that time. On a few occasions I wandered past the used bookstores on Fourth Avenue, but didn’t know what a treasure I’d found, and didn’t have the money to take serious advantage of it. At about that time, I wandered into an antiques show at the armory just south of Grand Central Station on Park Avenue. I was fascinated by the stereoviews, especially those of nineteenth century NY, another interest. I bought a few for what was very little money at the time, but wasn’t able to collect seriously as even the small amount I paid per slide was a real splurge for a young kid. Much later, in the late 1960’s, while I was in graduate school in Philadelphia, I bought a Civil-War era cabinet stereo viewer for, again, very little money to a true collector, but too much for a student. (I still have all the stereo cards and the viewer…as well as two Edison gramophones that I also bought — in Lahaska, Pennsylvania, when it was still a great antiques town — during my grad school years.) Back to the late 70’s-early 80’s. As time went on, I developed an interest in the history of color photography, but found very little any older than the 1920s or 1930s. As I became more interested in the history of photography, I also noticed photography books, including at least one early book on color photography advertised in Shutterbug, the tabloid weekly in which photographic equipment is sold and traded. Shutterbug introduced me to mail order (catalogue) booksellers. I sought them out, including ones in England and France, and bought lots of good older books. I became obsessed with hunting books, received catalogues almost every day, and visited bookstores on trips to professional conferences. I began to become familiar with the open shop booksellers of Chicago, Washington, and a few other cities…like Traverse City Michigan, cherry capital of the U.S., where one conference was held every August and where, I noticed a few months ago, this year’s cherry crop was a total failure. As a result of my interest in early color photography, I became very interested in our understanding of the physics of color and of color perception, and started buying books on those subjects. Since Sir Isaac Newton was the first to understand color the way it’s now understood, I started buying every book I found in stores and catalogues about Newton…at least those that I was able to afford. I read all the Newton biographies and can still hold my own with historians of science who don’t specialize in that period. On a visit, probably about 1982 or 1983, to the one used bookstore in Westfield, NJ, near where I now live, I was searching for Newton material and picked up a book by, not Sir Ike but, rather, A. Edward Newton. At that time, when I got a new catalogue in the mail I quickly turned to the N’s. More than once I was excited by a “Newton” listing, only to be very disappointed when I discovered that it was an “A. Edward” Newton book rather than an “Isaac Newton” book. Who was this A. Edward character who dared to compete with one of the founders of modern science? This time, though, I picked up the A. Edward book, started reading it, and didn’t stop until I’d finished at about 4:00 AM. The book was A Magnificent Farce — refers to Warren Hastings’ trial for treason when he’d never committed anything like treason. Newton was addicted to English literature, and was able to afford it in first editions, often with strong association value. He was interested in Hastings, not as a writer but rather as an eighteenth century British Governor of India, because Hastings had named his estate “Daylesford,” and Newton lived, in Berwyn, PA, along the Main Line just west of Philadelphia, across the street from a PRR station with the name “Daylesford.” One of the illustrations in the book was a ticket, from Newton’s collection, to Hastings’ trial. Other chapters of the book dealt with famous and not so famous English writers, Newton’s association copies of their books, their letters or their manuscripts, and with Newton’s hunt for literary rarities. I later found out that Christopher Morley referred to Newton’s essays as “printed personality.” The personality was appealing, and Morley was right. (By the way, I was ripped off for that first Newton book. It didn’t have a dust jacket, wasn’t a first issue, and was way overpriced at twenty 1982-83 dollars.) How you go about searching for books on the internet? Do you still use methods of searching other than the internet? I loved Bibliocity and Bibliofind because they allowed a full-text search of a book’s description; a specialist needs that. I love ABE because it allows the user to store wants and emails matches as new books are uploaded. At the moment I use ABE, passively, by reading matches. (I’ve perfected my many wants to the point where I rarely go to the ABE site to look for books or to add or modify wants.) I regularly use the ABAA web site because it allows full-text search…but doesn’t allow the user to store wants. I rarely go to open shops any longer because there’s so much good material on the net. There are a few stores I do go to, mainly in L.A., currently the best open shop city in the U.S., because they don’t list all their stock in my fields of interest, which now include the history of book collecting and antiquarian bookselling in America and Britain. If you are especially eager to obtain a copy of a particular book, do you buy one in lesser condition if that is all that’s available? Yes, I recently realized that I’d never even seen a copy of the English edition of Newton’s Dr. Johnson, a Play, and bought a fairly ratty copy with no dust jacket. Nothing better has shown up on the internet, but I’ll buy it when one does. I care about the condition of books I buy “just” to read, but will buy a copy in bad condition if that’s the only copy available. Do you upgrade to a better copy when one becomes available? I’m always doing that with Newton books, but “better copy” can mean “better condition” or “has a good association value and the earlier copy had none.” Having learned about association copies from Newton, I buy any good association copy I can find of any Newton item — except in a few cases when the seller gets too greedy and sets a price two or three times the going market price. I have as many as ten or twelve really good association copies of some Newton books, and as many as 20-25 of a few of the Xmas issues. My goal is to have at least one good association copy, in dust jacket, of every issue of every Newton book printed during Newton’s lifetime. I’m not too far from that. I also own lots of letters and galley/page proofs, and some of the little extant manuscript material. Have the book-related lists proven to be a good resource for finding books you’re looking for, or alerting you to books you didn’t know existed? Unfortunately not. I’ve bought a very few really good items through the lists, but very, very few and not for quite some time. Do you use search engines like Google to find new venues either notifying you of books you didn’t know existed… I never have. Various online library catalogues have alerted me to the existence of previously unrecorded items, like a recent edition of This Book Collecting Game in Chinese. (My Chinese teaching assistant eventually got me a copy through friends who were visiting the U.S.) …or for looking up facts that lead to variations on a theme of your interests? I use Google for just about everything but finding books to buy…including identifying inscribees whose names I don’t recognize. Are the descriptions by online booksellers usually adequate for your purposes in deciding whether a book is one you want or in the condition you want? I can usually tell if a seller is knowledgeable;if s/he isn’t, I simply ask questions. Anything in particular that “turns you off” in sellers’ listings? “Very good for its age.” I’ve handled a Gutenberg Bible and have concluded that age and condition have little necessary relationship. Do you only buy 1st printings of books in your interests? As I’ve said, I buy every issue of every edition of anything Newton. When it comes to books about collectors, libraries, booksellers, etc., I used to do the same, but there’s not enough space and not enough money to do everything I’d like. Are you interested in ephemera relating to your interests? Finding ephemera is usually far more exciting than finding another issue of another edition, or even another title translated into Braille — have one — or Chinese…because they’re usually far scarcer…and many are not recorded in any bibliography. I have an extensive collection of prospectuses of Newton books and books to which he contributed an introduction or a chapter. I also have lots of announcements of talks by Newton and lots of invitations to get-togethers at his home, Oak Knoll; some of the most fun ones are invitations to marionette parties that Mrs. Newton gave for kids and their grandmothers. I also have lots of original Newton-related newspaper clippings. I also collect material about book collectors’ organizations. I have lots of Grolier Club, Book Club of California, Zamorano Club, and Roxburghe Club ephemera; just had an auction lot of about two hundred pieces of California ephemera arrive yesterday. What is the particular thing about Newton that keeps you so interested? Newton had so many interesting close friends that an interest in Newton leads to all sorts of things, like most of the important collectors of his period, the Golden Age of Book Collecting in America, to the formation of great library collections, to the history of the teaching of English literature in American universities and those who pioneered it, many of whom were Newton’s friends, to Dr. Johnson’s literary circle, etc., etc. Even to the development of Philadelphia’s western suburbs, by railroad barons, in the late nineteenth century. Can you give us a list of what you do collect? Everything mentioned above except the history of photography; am still interested but don’t have enough space or money. Are you a reader, as well as a collector (of things other than what you collect, that is)? Yes. If so, what types of kinds do you like to read on a more casual basis, just for enjoyment? Technical material in my field — software engineering — and, to a lesser extent, the history of computers and computing. I enjoy my work, so technical and historical reading is enjoyable. I’d love to have time to read fiction, but am so busy that I don’t. What other hobbies, interests, or recreation or arts, etc., do you enjoy? I wish that visiting museums was an aerobic activity; I might be in better shape if it was. I’m interested in urban history — especially NYC, Chicago, and L.A., the three American cities which compete with London and Paris on cultural grounds — and in architectural history, mostly American. (Yes, I said “L.A.” Beyond the Hollywood glitz it has more cultural activity than any American city other than NYC. I love San Francisco; have lived in the Bay Area a few summers, but it doesn’t compare on density of cultural activity.) My wife and I both love crawling around red rock in the southwest and visiting historical sites. We’ve covered just about every square inch of CA, UT, and AZ, and quite a bit of NM, WY, OR, CO, and WA. We plan to see the rest of all these states as well as lots of western MT. We’ve also started spending time outside the U.S. again after a long period of traveling solely in the U.S. (We travel about six times a year, usually in connection with a professional meeting that I have to go to. There are trips to Japan and Spain coming up in the next few months.) What would you like to tell us, business or personal, about yourself? I’ve been a professor of computer science for about twenty-eight years; used to do technology research and currently do process research and pedagogy research. I love it and never want to retire. I have one wife, three grown daughters and the two cutest, smartest granddaughters in the world — all more important than work or books, as much as I love work and books. #booksellers #collectors

The basis of the past popularity of Lost Race novels were the novels of H. Rider Haggard, whose excellence in such classic novels as Allan Quatermain and She hundreds of lesser talents recognized as worthy of imitation. Of course, Haggard didn’t invent the idea of lost races, which was abroad from antiquity, in cultural myths about submerged former inhabitants of conquered regions, in utopians and Swiftian satires of distant island cultures, in speculations on the whereabouts of Israel’s lost tribes, in the continuous and widespread expectation that Amazons and similar exotic societies thrived beyond the limits of the known world. Columbus, then the Conquistadors, watched soberly for Amazons described in romances of Amadis the Gaul; and the very state of California is named for a queen of one of these imputed nations, a woman no less thrilling than Haggard’s immortal She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed. Haggard placed most of his sundry lost races in Africa, where also the majority of the lost races imagined by Edgar Rice Burroughs were located, especially the lingering Atlantean city of Opar ruled by Queen La, who is patently a copy of Haggard’s Queen Ayesha. The Ayesha-like queen recurs and recurs in “Haggardesque” novels, and Africa was one of the most popular locations for hidden cultures. Lost Roman Legions founded static societies in Africa in Cecil Bullivant’s The Enchantress (1932) and Burroughs’ Tarzan and the Lost Empire (1931). They survive underneath the Sahara in William Chaplan’s The Pagan City (1938) and in the Atlas Mountains according to James McLaran Cobban’s An African Treasure (1899). But if not in Africa, then the Romans persist in a volcanically warmed valley of Antarctica as in Charles Romyn Doke’s A Strange Discovery (1899), or somewhere in the Pacific as in Charles Dudly Lampen’s Mirango the Man-eater (1900), or in a subterranean world beneath England as in Joseph O’Neill’s Land Under England (1935). These are just random citations. Dozens — scores — of other such novels plus pulp magazine serials reveal the whereabouts of Romans somewhere or another. And Romans aren’t even the most common choice for a Lost Race rediscovered. Atlanteans seem to have scattered to every corner of the globe avoiding discovery until quite recently. They’re often in the Hollow Earth beneath the North Pole as in Emma Louise Olcott’s The Divine Seal (1909); beneath the Andes according to Roy Norton’s The Toll of the Sea (1909), under the Sahara in Pierre Benoit’s Haggard plagiarism L’Atlantida (1920), in Australia according to Rosa Praed’s Fugitive Anne (1902), on scores of uncharted islands, a typical example described in The Ultimate Island (1924) by L. de Giberne Sieveking. And, of course, many assume Atlantis survives at the bottom of the sea, as in David McLean Parry’s The Scarlet Empire (1906). A bibliography merely of novels about Atlantis surviving into the modern world would be extremely long. Nor is the theme too used up for new books to continue to find their way onto bestseller lists from time to time, as in Clive Cussler’s Atlantis Found (1999), or Disney’s animated version. Scores of similar novels find Aztecs, Mayans, Toltecs and Incans surviving in the Americas (often assumed to be simultaneously survivals of Atlantis), or the Lost Tribes of Israel at any point of the globe, or Conquistador culture snared in the Sargasso Sea, and so on ad infinitum. Ancient Egyptian culture gets discovered here and there, not to mention ancient societies of unknown origin entirely imaginary. Many such books regard the survival of Neanderthals, often enough coexisting with dinosaurs in some out of the way location. These books were not considered to be completely beyond the realm of possibility in the Victorian Era when so much of the world was as yet unmapped and unexplored. Lost Races held such scientific credibility that jungle-hidden cities in Cambodia were once believed, by Eurocentric writers, to have been built by a people descended of Alexander the Great. The Modoc Indians of the Pacific Northwest, because of their fine features and some tortuously arranged and wildly improbable language parallels, were regarded by Victorian ethnologists to be the remnant of a lost Roman legion. Even before that absurd theory gained favor, the Modocs had been named for a Welsh God because Lewis and Clark, on their westward expedition, had been convinced they would encounter a millennia-isolated Welsh outpost and decided the Modocs were as close as they were going to get. When Haggard wrote his stories, many clung to the pre-Darwinian, Deist belief that every part of creation required every other part to continue ticking; therefore nothing ever becomes extinct. If it did, creation would cease to function, like a watch missing a gear. That creation persisted was of itself proof that prehistoric valleys thrived somewhere, with former races of man and beast living as they had in past epochs. Such locations were sincerely sought during the great era of Victorian exploration. The source of the Nile was not yet known and many expected a remnant of ancient Egypt really would be discovered still flourishing there. The last unmapped place in the United States was the Grand Canyon, so when James Patrick Kelly wrote Prince Izon (1910) readers were willing to believe classical Aztecs hid therein. The interior of South America was a blank on the maps; malaria was an invisible barrier that made the interior of Central America inaccessible; the North and South Poles were as yet unseen and certain to have volcanic hot spring valleys of green paradises; new Pacific islands (surely inhabited by descendants of Phoenician explorers if not Lemurians) awaited discovery; the Gobi desert and the Himalayas were but marginally explored. Victorian discoveries of ecologically distinct high plateau environments in the New World inspired Arthur Conan Doyle’s Lost World, which in turn inspired a plethora of prehistoric survival tales with Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon peoples untouched by the modern world. There were simply scores of places where Lost Races not only might but surely must linger. If the novels were read as escapist fantasies, there was nevertheless a tension of credibility for Victorians that as the 20th Century progressed was whittled away by cartographers. Even at that, there would never be a complete end to uncharted locations for lost races. There remained the Hollow Earth and domed Atlantis under the sea. There were dimensional worlds-within-worlds. There are New Age occult crackpots who still believe in such things quite devoutly, but you might be surprised by current “scientific” speculations of archeologists still eager to believe the Lost Race argument. Biblical Archeology not long ago recapped evidence from professional archeological journals that North American Mound Builders were Jews (the Lost Tribe factor still at work in the minds of scientists) when all they have to go on is an iron-age blade recovered from one of these mounds with scratches on it, very unconvincingly compared to a proto-Hebrew script. For the most part, even before our era of world-spying satellites, it became increasingly evident that explorers were not going to find descendants of Prester John or Roman legions deep in China, nor any advanced theosophic adepts in mountain-kingdoms more inaccessible than Forbidden Llasa, no mesa of cave men and dawn horses in Honduras, no Northwest Passage to a mammoth-haunted Arctic’s isolated Viking colony, no Pharoaic estates in the interior of darkest Africa, no thriving Aztec cities with Atlantean technologies hidden by Peruvian jungle vines and mountain mist. By the 1920s, the Lost Race theme began slowly to die out as adult literature in book form, though it puttered along another thirty years in pulp magazines at the hands of decadent nostalgists such as A. Merritt, and in juvenile series books about Golden Cities visited by white feral lads, stumbled upon by scout troops camping out in the Yucatan, or young inventors in rocket-powered dirigibles blown off course to some remnant of Atlantis. But even now in comic books, genre science fiction paperbacks, cinema, and the occasional best selling novel, the theme is recycled again and again. It may never again be credible as it was for Victorians, but the human need for the fantasy of it seems never wholly to die out. At the cusp of our new millennium we had a movie about an Indian tribe cut off from the modern world in the Rockies, a revisit of Haggard’s Solomonic Mines and cannibal apes in a Michael Crichton book and film, even a hack hireling’s Lost Horizon sequel entitled Return to Shangri-la. So the theme survives, though not as broadly explored as formerly. Yet with a handful of exceptions, most of those among my chums who are avidly pursuing lost race novels are Seniors who remember when they (or at least their parents who assisted in formulating life-long tastes) regarded these books as contemporary, lending an immediate nostalgic power not as easily felt by young collectors. Many of the vintage authors wrote only one book of this type, in some cases only wrote the one book period, and very few are well known today even among collectors of antiquarian books. Many of these books are still exciting reading, though not many are even close to the timeless quality of Haggard, and quite a lot of them are so bad that only the novelty of the thematic material makes them collectible even if unreadable. It would be sad if the fondness for vintage lost race novels became mislaid by younger generations of fantasy lovers. To insure these books are forever cherished, it is essential that those of us aware of Haggard’s actual greatness express this vehemently to new readers: for it is alongside Haggard that the merits of all other lost race novels will always be measured, and for as long as Haggard is read his imitators retain comparative interest. copyright © 2002 Jessica Amanda Salmonson A checklist of Lost Race Literature can be accessed here: http://www.violetbooks.com/lostrace-check-guide.html #collecting

(Keynote Speech from the Summer 2002 Colorado Book Seminar) First, the beginnings – at least for me. Dick Weatherford By the time this particular day rolled around in late October, 1978, about a week before Halloween, I had been buying and selling books for a half dozen years. I had a book catalog finished and at the printer, but my “real” job was as an Associate Professor of English at The Ohio State University. My wife, Harriet, and I had two sons, Matt, age 9, and Steve, age 6, so we were pretty busy with academic life, school and activities for our sons, and the book business. I had hired two of my graduate students to help us sort the address labels for my new book catalog into zip code order for bulk mailing. This involved typing 2000 names and addresses onto 4-part carbon sheets of address label paper, gummed on the back and separated into about 40 labels per page. This meant that, theoretically, when I finished typing all the addresses, I had enough labels to do 4 mailings of my catalogs, which I sent out about 4 to 6 times a year. In order to make the process of correcting and adding names more efficient, I made separate sheets for each state and for other countries. Thus I could add and delete names from the correct sheets and still be able to do a bulk-mailing sort for the catalogs when they were ready to distribute. This typical Fall day in central Ohio was a good one for indoor work, so Harriet, my two workers, and I were on our hands and knees in our living room sorting the small address labels into piles. It was grueling work, and we had been at it for some time and were nearly finished when we heard the boys talking and shouting as they approached the front door. As always, they were happy to be home, ready to play, and swung the door wide open and ran into the room, accompanied by the blustery winds of an Ohio October day. The address labels blew across the hardwood floor like leaves, piling up around the furniture and scatter rugs we had moved to the sides of the room. There was a long moment of absolute silence. After we locked all the doors and windows, it took us about 4 hours to gather them all up and re-sort them into state and zip code piles. This became one of those small, important moments that can change one’s life. I resolved to find some better way of doing that job. And since the first personal computers had just begun to appear in the market, I resolved to get one as soon as it could store names and print mailing labels. It wasn’t until three years later, after I had quit teaching, had moved back to the Seattle area, and had gone into the book business full time that I finally purchased my first computer. It did store and print mailing lists, one or two states per floppy disk, but it did not yet store and print catalogs. I was still typing the catalogs, each with approximately 500 entries, by hand on a manual and, later, an electric typewriter. The more I learned about computers – and these were the days when you had to wire up your own printer cables, and modems ran at 300 baud or slower – that is slower than even I can read! – the more I realized the potential these machines held for a business dedicated to keeping lots and lots of information that had to be re-used, including book descriptions and names and addresses. This may seem pretty obvious now, but it was really an abstraction at the time — a few talked about doing it, but only a handful were actually experimenting with computers. I put a small system together with an original Winchester data storage drive that had a huge spinning platter powered by a large rubber band in a frame the size of a small refrigerator, with a tiny little monitor and a keyboard that spoke an 8-bit language called ASCII. That gave me my first real experience with computers. I liked it despite the difficulties, and it started to become apparent what might be possible. I began transferring more of my manual work to the computer, printing texts I had previously typed by hand, and things slowly started to improve as I accustomed myself to a new way of thinking. Not surprisingly, I found things that worked well and things that did not. I started getting calls from my bookselling contemporaries asking for advice, and I guess I gave good advice because pretty soon it seemed like I had become an authority. It wasn’t planned, it just happened that way. In the Spring of 1983 I wrote an article titled “Computers in the Antiquarian Book Trade” and submitted it to AB Bookman’s Weekly for publication. Much to my surprise, the editor of the magazine, Jake Chernofsky, not only published it but also called to ask if I would write an occasional column about computers and bookselling. I agreed and wrote more articles over the next several years, the effect of which was that I became a de facto “expert” in computers. These articles covered such stirring topics as: what is a floppy disk? And what is the difference between a dot matrix and a daisy wheel printer. I suggested equipment, I explained ways one could use computers to make repetitive tasks easier, and I talked some about software. After about 6 columns had been published, Jake Chernofsky called to ask if I would come to the Colorado Book Seminar for a day to talk with the students about computers for their businesses. Shortly after giving the demo, which consisted primarily of my explaining what a computer was and how it worked, and answering lots of questions, I was approached by one of the faculty members. He came right up to me, wedged his way through the small group of people asking questions, looked me right in the knot of my tie (he was a little short), poked his index finger at me, and told me he didn’t like computers and didn’t think they had any place in the book business. I left early for the airport! This person, who shall remain nameless but whose initials are M.G., did me a huge favor that day. First, he let me know that I would meet resistance to my enthusiasm for using computers in the book trade and that I had better get used to it or quit now. Second, he taught me that everyone in the trade did not want or need to use computers to run their businesses, that the traditional ways had and would continue to have merit, and that the business was about the books and the customers, not the typewriters, fax machines, and computers. Pre-Internet Online Database/Information Sites : The very first serious attempt to create a book listing service was Interloc. I formed it as a company in 1983 and produced a business plan based on the used auto parts network model. The company was in negotiations for funding in 1984. The plan was reasonable, but the concept of an electronic marketplace for out-of-print and scarce books was too new to get funding, so Interloc was put on hold. But only on hold – the idea remained fresh and continued to develop. The first book “site” to actually operate was Antiquarian Databases International (ADI), founded by Larry Costello in 1988. It was a Bulletin Board Service, or BBS. The computer programmer Tom Sawyer created the now standard UIEE record format for use by ADI and supported it directly with his BookMaster software. Larry was a student at this seminar and asked me to help him launch his service. I declined to be personally involved, but I did spend some time working with him, making suggestions regarding problems and strategies. ADI launched but worked only briefly. Let’s remember, those of us who were in the business back then and haven’t suffered serious memory loss, that before the internet became available to commercial users, all so-called “online” activities involved modems and telephone calls, usually directly to computer venues like CompuServe and Delphi that were essentially bulletin boards. The next was BookNet in 1989, which wasn’t a “site” but rather an office with a bunch of fax machines. The concept here was that booksellers would fill out want list forms and fax them to the BookNet site. The computers there would “read” the faxes using optical character recognition, or OCR, software. Their computer would parse the information and match the wants against the items listed for sale. The results would then be faxed back to the dealer, who would be responsible for contacting the seller. This system also had a very short life. Then came BookQuest in 1989, which was the first dialup service to have more than 100 dealers. BookQuest was owned by the Faxon Corp., a large company with 100 years of experience providing magazine and journal subscriptions to libraries worldwide. There were actually two components to the plan, BookQuest for monographs, and SerialsQuest for journals. When the Faxon leadership discovered that their investment was going nowhere, they told BookQuest to find someone who could help them fix it. I was called in as a consultant and later hired as a VP, but my insistence that they needed to re-write their software and change their business plan, including their methods of charging users, fell on deaf ears. Faxon closed BookQuest in May of 1993, and the entire Faxon Corp. collapsed the following month. Meanwhile, BookBytes opened in 1991, operating from a small bedroom in Bellevue, Washington, a suburb of Seattle. It lasted a few years but never achieved enough subscribers to make it profitable. Then Antiquarian BookMan began developing a system in the late 1990s. Their Automated Bookman system was an attempt to build on the large volume of wants that the magazine published every month, but the system design was not successful. This was really a shame, a huge opportunity lost for the magazine, as I still believe that a good system design, a reasonable business plan, along with the many thousands of loyal AB Bookman subscribers could have been tremendously successful. After BookQuest failed, the idea of Interloc still persisted. Several dealers who were using BookQuest to buy books for their customers and sell books to other dealers for their own customers called to encourage me to start a listing service. It would be a kind of automated AB Bookman’s Weekly that booksellers could use to find books for customers by listing “Wants” and to sell books to other dealers for their customers or for stock. In those days subscription magazine publishing was the natural business revenue model. That was because it was an entirely dealer-to-dealer environment. The idea of a listing service collecting a commission for an online sale was as foreign as AB Bookman’s Weekly trying to collect a commission on a sale generated by its Want ads. Past failures made it clear that we had to do it far better than it had ever been done before if such a system were to be successful. Before I decided to do the project, I called Tom Sawyer, author of BookMaster, then the leading software program for booksellers, and asked him if he could work with me to design an online dealer-to-dealer system for buying and selling books. After several long telephone conversations, he told me he could do the job, but that we would need a computer network and systems expert to set up and run the data center. For that job, he recommended Brad Councilman, a computer consultant who had been supporting dealers for years in the Connecticut River Valley area of Western Massachusetts, which many of you are aware has perhaps the highest concentration of antiquarian booksellers in the country. I called Brad Councilman and we talked about what it would take put together what he called a “data center” – 800 number phone lines, computers, backup systems, tech help, and all the rest of it. From talking with these two gentlemen, I realized that this would take money (several tens of thousands of dollars) and, most important, would put me in the position of running a company from a distance, dealing with two people I had never met. I would have to be willing to trust them with my money and that of investors, with my vision as it was modified by their experience and knowledge, and with my reputation, such as it was, in the book trade. Furthermore, we would have to operate as disconnected individuals in different parts of the country. We would have to design and code software for both the back-end system and for the booksellers to use, software that had never been conceptually written. We would have to create a hardware architecture that supported the flow of information we envisioned. It would have to be totally secure and reliable and yet be capable of working through existing telephone lines on most computers. We would have to make the whole thing work on a fully automated basis, controlled by the very booksellers who would make use of it. And, we would have to do it with three people in six months. The whole idea was, frankly, crazy. But I had learned in working in the book business for about a dozen years that honesty and trust are essential to the working of the book trade. Would it be any different working with programmers and technical consultants? It might, I believed, so we decided that each of us should have a large vested interest in the success of the company. My philosophy was that I retained control, but that each of us had enough stock so that if I could not convince one or the other of my business partners about the wisdom of a direction I wanted to take the company, they could pool their stock and out-vote me. I explained this to them and they agreed that this was a sensible plan. So we formed a corporation, issued the stock, raised some money from friends and a few booksellers, and launched what was actually the second iteration of Interloc in mid-1993. As it turned out, this was one of the best decisions I ever made. Tom and Brad consistently supported my management, and I in turn supported their efforts in every way I could. The issue of voting never arose even once, and we had a superb working relationship. We are still friends. For anyone interested, the name “Interloc” was one I derived from the term “interlocutor,” meaning a person who facilitates a communication between two other parties. For me, at the time, it defined the nature of the listing service model for books. Interloc customers were the booksellers. We were like a newspaper classified advertising service. We derived income from booksellers, but we did not participate in any way in the transaction between the booksellers who subscribed to the service and their customers. In fact, we were forbidden by company policy from buying and selling books at all, since that would put us in direct competition with our subscribers. Thus, when Interloc started, I resigned my membership in the ABAA. Our advertising campaign was directed toward getting more dealers to subscribe. We held workshops all over the U.S. and even in London, England, to help train booksellers on the use of the system and our software, the Interloc Record Manager. And we advertised in bookseller magazines, like Firsts, Book Source Monthly, and others. During its first two years, from 1993 to 1995, Interloc created many of the features we take for granted today, but it did so in a pre-internet world. For example, Tom Sawyer created a very sophisticated Wants matching service. Many people think it was far superior to anything available on the Internet today. He created “Best Seller” and “Most Wanted” lists. And he adapted a program that would allow him, with the client’s permission, to dial in to a customer’s computer and fix problems. He also created the Interloc Record Manager, a subset of his popular BookMaster program. During the Interloc days, more than 5,000 copies of the Record Manager were downloaded from the Interloc site, and many of these are still in use. Brad Councilman set up a “data center” on a folding banquet table in the back of his consulting office in Greenfield, Mass. The accommodations were, of course, sumptuous as befits a computer-related company. In fact, Brad Councilman was provided with a sleeping area in the office so he could keep track of the computers. And for his bed we provided nearly new bubble-wrap. After extensive testing, the computer there received its first call on March 24, 1994, at 2:00pm. It was capable of receiving millions of book records to be listed, deleted, and changed every day. Brad also worked with a friend of Tom’s named Dennis Drew, one of those electronics geniuses of legendary ability, to design and build telecom switches that routed customer calls past busy lines until it found an open line and connected the caller’s computer. At this time, these switches were available for thousands of dollars each, but Dennis designed and built several of them for us for a fraction of the cost of one of the type we could purchase. This meant that multiple Interloc customers could simultaneously dial in and use the system to upload, retrieve match reports, and search the database pretty much anytime day or night. You might be interested to know that in the five years Interloc existed as a listing service, from 1993 to 1998, Tom, Brad, and I met together only three times – once in late 1993 to do the preliminary design for the service, again in 1996 to work on taking Interloc to the internet, and finally in 1998 when we discussed the transition from Interloc to Alibris. The Internet Begins – In 1995 the Internet went commercial. Within a year two Interloc customers, Michael Selzer of Farshaws Books in Mass., and Rick and Vivian Pura of Timeline Books in Victoria, BC, launched listing services similar to Interloc, namely Bibliofind and The Advanced Book Exchange. The Internet made the investment in such services relatively small; while the companies needed to develop software for searching for and displaying books online, they did not need to develop any software for their bookseller clients (Interloc already had done that) and they did not need any telecommunications infrastructure like 800 numbers, rollover switches, and multiple phone lines. The internet replaced all of that. And they didn’t even need to find customers – both of them, as Interloc subscribers, had our complete customer list. They didn’t steal it – it was available to everyone. It took a few months, but my partners and I realized that the small amount of money needed to start an internet listing service would eventually make it possible for just about anyone to get into this business. For this reason, I believed that Interloc, as a listing service, had a limited time to live. So in 1997 I began casting about to find a new business model that would make it possible for Interloc to survive in an internet-focused world. If Darwin taught us anything, it was that if you don’t adapt, you die. The business concept I settled upon is one familiar to all booksellers. Instead of being a listing service, we created a new bookseller called Alibris. We dropped all listing fees and, instead, earned our money only when we bought a book from one of the booksellers who agreed to make their stock available to us. To make the business model work, however, we had to do a lot of advertising and, by doing so, make more buyers aware of the rich selection that the used and out-of-print book world had available. So far, it has worked, and Alibris continues to make changes to its business model, as do many companies that try new approaches to established markets. Many of you know that this change from Interloc to Alibris was not the most popular decision in the history of the business. Even though Alibris was closely modeled on the role of the traditional bookseller, many dealers, especially those who were familiar primarily with the internet listing service model, didn’t like it. Alibris bought books from other booksellers at a discount and marked them up to its own customers. This was standard practice for hundreds of years in the book trade. Alibris also bought books for its own stock. Again, standard practice. And when Alibris offered a book to one of its customers via its web site, it did so under its own name. Once again, standard practice. Many booksellers familiar with the long-standing practices in the business understood what we were doing. Others, many of whom were new to the business or were focused primarily on the internet, didn’t like it, and it was this group that began to refer to me as “The Great Satan.” My children agree, of course, but my wife considers this a bit of an exaggeration. I still think the change from Interloc to Alibris was a smart move, because in the past half dozen years more than 60 listing services have appeared on the internet but more than half of them have failed. The rest (not counting ABE) have had trouble getting dealers to list with them. The reason is quite simple. Interloc worked as a listing service because the people who subscribed were also the customers, just like AB Bookman’s Weekly. It was a dealer-to-dealer community in which transactions were carried on between dealers. Booksellers kept and served their own customers with the help of other Interloc subscribers. But on the internet, all of this changed in some fundamental ways: 1 – With the explosion in the number of people using computers and the internet, any and everyone can become a bookseller. It takes no training, no knowledge of books, no investment, and, most important, no reason to support the long-standing conventions and ethical standards that have made the antiquarian and used book trade so attractive to the small number of dedicated people who have worked for hundreds of years to build and sustain it. 2 – Pre-internet bookselling was about the booksellers themselves – their sources, their knowledge, and their customers. To the degree your stock was unique and your customer service was good, the business was about you. In those days you sent out your catalogs and found books for your customers, but you never, never shared your mailing list. You kept your customers coming back to you. This is why Interloc was designed as a dealer-to-dealer community. Internet bookselling, on the other hand, is not about the dealers. It is about the customers. That is easy to say, but the implications are enormous and they are just beginning to be understood by most booksellers. For example, it is customers, not dealers, who set the prices of books, because we now operate in a supply and demand economy in books. But wait a minute. Hasn’t it always been `supply and demand’? Of course! What has happened is that the internet has removed much of what business people call the “friction” from the marketplace. Instead of expensive, slow and necessarily periodic paper publications (like catalogs and magazines), or technically arcane pc based databases (like Interloc) dependent upon expensive proprietary telecommunications infrastructure, we now have the internet, which is an immediate, inexpensive, transparent, high bandwidth infrastructure available to practically anyone, seller or buyer. The promise of the internet for booksellers has always been a seemingly ever-increasing number of customers. This is, to some extent, still true. The problem, however, is not that there aren’t enough customers. It is that there are far, far too many books. When the supply of some titles exceeds the demand for those titles, prices fall. And when prices fall, customers demand lower prices by not buying at higher prices. They are willing to wait for prices to fall because, in essence, the number of books that are truly “rare” has fallen sharply. Even these scarce books sometimes suffer price deflation simply because customers see so many books online that they assume that all books are common. There are many titles, millions probably, that are nearly un-saleable today. For these books there is so much supply that prices have fallen to nearly zero (or 15 cents on Half.com). This has already happened with some books we thought would remain scarce, including signed copies of the first printings of works by major writers of fiction, history, cooking, travel, art, photography, self-help, religion, biography, and other areas. Two brief stories will illustrate what I mean. The first is an incident that happened at the Boston Book Fair in 1997. Brad Councilman and I had a room next to the book fair venue where we showed the Internet version of Interloc to potential customers – booksellers and book buyers. Our agreement with book fair management was that we would not allow people to search books online for fear they would do price comparisons in order to haggle with dealers at the fair, so we demonstrated the Interloc service but only used a few commonly available books as examples. About halfway through the second day of the fair, the book fair manager came to our room and asked if we were allowing people to do searches. We weren’t and told him so. He left satisfied. Then he returned in an hour or two saying that booksellers were complaining that customers were looking at the books in the fair booths, making notes, and then leaving the fair. They were then coming back to the booths saying that they had found a similar copy on the internet for less money and offering that reduced price to the bookseller, who more often than not was very unhappy. It turns out that a listing service was set up in the non-ABAA fair across the street and was allowing people to do searches to compare prices on books that they found at the fair. The customers were setting the prices, and if they couldn’t buy at the price they wanted to pay, they went home and bought the book via the internet or they waited until the price fell to one they were willing to pay. The second story is about a dealer I know in the mid-west who a few years ago purchased several boxes of signed first edition hardcover copies of Elmore Leonard, Robert B. Parker, and several other good popular writers. He paid about $6 to $8 a copy for these when he bought them by the carton, most of them left over from personal appearance tours and signings at bookstores. When I last checked there were ca. 400 copies of Elmore Leonard signed books on Alibris and more than 1,750 on ABE. A search for signed Robert B. Parker books brings up 450 on Alibris and nearly 1900 on ABE. Unsigned copies of these books by these authors total a staggering 12,000 copies of Robert B. Parker books on ABE and 11,000 Elmore Leonard books on ABE. The bookseller who bought these signed copies admits his investment is now essentially worthless; it costs more to store the books than it would to recycle them. 3 – The vast majority of book buyers are not collectors. They are readers, libraries, businesses, researchers, museums, government institutions, nostalgia buyers, etc. who have little or no interest in the o.p. book trade as such. Many have probably never considered entering a used book store. In other words, they are just people, companies, and institutions that want to buy a book or two. This appears to be good news until you consider that it takes far more money to reach these buyers than it does to reach collectors. That is because book collectors have always known about the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America, Interloc, ABE, and individual booksellers and shops that trade in books of interest to collectors because they read the same magazines, go to the same book fairs, and talk to the same people we do. And the collector market is still very small and probably will remain so for a long time. The public market is, however, huge. It represents millions, possibly hundreds of millions, of current and future book buyers. One problem is that these buyers may purchase only one or two books a year, or a few books over a lifetime. Even so, the opportunity is enormous, but so is the problem of reaching these customers. “Customer Acquisition Costs” is a phrase heard a good deal in the internet world. What it means is that it costs a certain amount of money to find a person who comes to your site and buys something. A couple of years ago, it was not uncommon to hear companies talking of spending $100 to $150 to get each customer to their site to make a purchase. Supposedly, if they had a good experience, the customers would come back, and those high costs could be spread across several purchases. But maybe not. This is why Amazon, for example, will not share its list of more than 32 million customers with anyone, and it is why Barnes & Noble gets mad when it finds dealers trying to go around them in order to sell directly to their customers. For listing services, the problem and the expense of reaching end buyers doesn’t really exist, because their customers are not book buyers but book sellers who list books on their sites and pay subscription and listing fees. The money these services get from bookseller/subscribers goes back into keeping the site running, upgrading computers, buying more communications bandwidth, hiring more customer service reps, developing software, etc. The listing service derives no direct benefit from getting more book buyers unless it receives a percentage of those sales as either a fee or a commission. It does derive an indirect benefit from getting consumers to purchase books in that more dealers will list with the service if other subscribers are selling books. Not All Bad News Since books are one of the easiest, most natural commodities to sell on the internet (along with CDs, Videos and DVDs), more and more large companies are getting into the internet bookselling business. Just as it was initially easy for book listing services to start up, now individual booksellers are competing against Amazon, Barnes & Noble, eBay’s Half.com, Buy.com, Alibris, etc., etc. I predict that as these large companies grow their customer lists and their sales, the number of people buying from listing services will dwindle. Collectors will continue to use listing services and any other venues that may have books they want, including auction sites. But general book buyers are migrating to the larger, better advertised sites. Customers want what customers want, and most internet buyers want easy one-stop shopping, low prices, and secure transactions. They also want interesting jargon-free content, easier and more natural searching, and they mostly want books that have been published in their lifetimes. So I further predict that people who are not committed to the book trade will lose interest over time, and those who have the stamina and imagination to build a viable book business will stay the course. The major difference between these large companies and individual booksellers and their listing services is that the large companies have the financial resources to find, attract, and keep customers. So individual booksellers appear to have a choice. They can either compete with these large companies, or they can work with them. At first blush, competing against them may seem like the purest folly. Most booksellers are content to work with these companies, even though they realize that when they sell to someone else’s customers, they do so under terms dictated by the company who has those customers. However, I would argue that most smart booksellers do both – they sell to the large companies, but they also keep and cultivate their own clients and build their own distinctive businesses. Nobody thinks this is easy, but it can and is being done. In fact, it is being done by most of the booksellers currently serving on the faculty of this seminar. Each of them will tell you how they work, what their approach is to the business, as it exists today, and why they believe their approach works. They won’t give you the names of their customers, and they will keep their sources of books, but they are all realists, and between them they have well over a century, probably more than two centuries, of experience to share. Three centuries if you include me. As much as anybody in this room, I grieve for the passing of the old days of bookselling. Dealers have traditionally resisted any changes to what they, in their time, believed was the perfect environment. My guess is that they didn’t like mechanical printing, they didn’t like the advent of the post office, they didn’t like the first mechanical typesetting machines, they didn’t like the telephone, and I know that they didn’t like computers and the internet. This is my 30 th year in the business, and while I have witnessed some major changes in the business, I firmly believe that the o.p. and rare book business is still viable, even thriving. Would I go into the business today? Yes! Would I be nervous about my prospects? Not any more than I was in 1972. Would I have a clearly defined plan? Not any more than I did earlier. Most of us came into the book business from other pursuits. It has been a choice, not usually something handed down to us from our families. Because we have chosen it, either as a full or part-time occupation, we have more reason to want to succeed, to make the business interesting and challenging for us. I don’t speak for everyone here, of course, but here are some of the things I would do if I were starting out. 1 – Internet bookselling is changing and will continue to change in ways no one can predict. Sites will come and go, dealers will start and abandon the business. Companies will be bought and sold. And the stock market will do things we wish it wouldn’t do. Don’t worry about these things, and don’t live in the past. Worry about your own business. If someone offers you a viable, profitable opportunity to sell books, take it. Remember that you are booksellers. Leave the philosophizing to people who can afford to spend the time on it. 2 – If you think the internet encompasses the whole o.p. and antiquarian book trade, you are peeping through the keyhole to get a look at the whole house. Opportunities abound, and they are limited only by your own creativity and hard work. Every day I get letters (email actually) and phone calls from people griping about how they can’t make a living in books on the internet. I ask them, who said you can only sell on the internet? If you rely entirely upon some other company for your income, you are likely to be disappointed. 3 – One of the people who trained me in the book business – his name was Arthur Phillips, and he was a book scout for Ernie Wessen of The Midland Book Company in Mansfield, Ohio – told me that it would take me a minimum of eight years to learn the business. I trusted what he said, but I think he was short by at least 22 years. For example, a couple of months ago I attended the New York ABAA Book Fair. In the nearly 20 years I was issuing catalogs, I listed approximately 40,000 Americana books and pamphlets. But I saw lots of Americana items at the fair that I had never encountered before. And I’ll bet if you ask the faculty members here this week, they will tell you the same thing. To keep your edge and to enjoy what you do, you need to continually see new things and take on new challenges. The more open you are to learning about the business and about the books, the better you will be as a bookseller and the more satisfying your experiences will be. And finally – you have already taken an important step in your quest to become a successful bookseller. You have taken the time and spent the money to attend a seminar that has, for many years, trained many of the best and brightest people in the antiquarian book trade. It is no exaggeration to say that the future of the book trade is in your hands. Some of you may become leaders in the trade, officers in local and/or national groups. Some will become opinion leaders or will, by example, show others the rich possibilities the profession holds. What you learn here will give you a useful, practical basis for making good business decisions and conducting yourself as a professional in a world that is changing in some ways but in other aspects is not changing at all. Be sure to ask questions, take notes, keep handouts, and talk with the faculty and the other students. The people who teach at this seminar are following a long tradition of investing their time in and sharing their experiences with you and, through you, in the future of the book trade. They, and I, hope that you have the best, most interesting and useful week in your bookselling careers. Now, let’s get to work! #CBS

Among those who post regularly on the message boards of the various booksellers’ communities that I frequent, it is safe to say that the company Amazon.com and its founder and CEO Jeff Bezos are somewhat unpopular. While this phenomenon is not universal, there is a culture of Amazon-bashing across all these communities, in which no topic or rumor is too trivial or too grand for the regulars to resist taking potshots. Bezos is blamed for everything that is perceived as being wrong with Amazon, and Amazon is blamed for everything that is perceived as being wrong with the world of online bookselling. Jeff Bezos Although the animosity toward Bezos may be slightly more intense because of his publicly chronicled Forbes 400 wealth, the fact is that booksellers have not come just recently to the practice of identifying and bemoaning crises, bogeymen, nemeses, or unfair competition, and online booksellers are no different in this respect than the broader category of our brothers and sisters. When Bezos was still in short trousers and the internet was unknown beyond MIT and the Defense Department, booksellers of all kinds had long been dividing the world into “us vs. them” warfare of one sort or another, but it seems worth noting that the identity of the bogeyman keeps changing. “It’s the chains that are killing us!” we said in the 1980s, and since then we have alternately identified the hit men as the publishers, then the discounters, then the jobbers, then the Super Stop and Shops and the Walmarts, then the video shops, then the used booksellers, then the remainder sellers, then the age of the computer, then Amazon, then ABE and Alibris, then Amazon again, and always, of course, the penny sellers. It’s positively dizzying. It may indeed be that this state of dizziness is an especially appropriate one for many booksellers these days. Lately when I take a step back and observe the actions of the growing mass of booksellers, I am struck by similarities between our activity and that of a large, established ant colony and its thousands of ant-citizens. And, with apologies to the fascinating ideas of author Steven Johnson ( Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software ), when I get down on my hands and knees and watch some ants for a while – something I’d rather do than watch most TV – they always seem a tad dizzy to me. As individuals, ants seem dizzy. As individuals, they live extremely short and pointless lives. As individuals, there often seems no economic rhyme or reason to their lives. Yet, taken together, they can populate and work effectively for the betterment of a highly complex yet leaderless “system” of astonishing systemic wisdom, efficiency, and organization. Despite the myth of the misnamed queen, there is no leading monarch or central committee, yet their colony gathers and rations food, defends its reproductive agent, disposes of its dead and other refuse, and may live as long as 15 years on a decidedly hostile and menacing planet. I would never disrespect Jeff Bezos or his company by likening him to an ant queen or any other player in the colony. But Bezos’ signature accomplishment — Amazon’s recognition of and relentless adherence to a set of “rules” that define its customer-driven business model – has done more than just build out Amazon as a formidable corporate entity. The same rules that have built Amazon have also dictated the birthing of a far wider and more complex system of sellers and buyers. Indeed, the “Marketplace” name says it all. Amazon’s goal is to create a multi-channel, multi-product marketplace, almost in the classic sense of the Greek agora , that will meet virtually all of its millions of customers’ online shopping needs, and to allow market forces to dictate as much of the customer experience as possible, even if it means driving prices on some mass market paperbacks down to a penny a pound. One result of all of this, of course, is that Amazon continues to capture a greater and greater share of the growing number of internet-connected consumers in the world, and that more than any other group of visitors to any other website, Amazon’s customers come to its site with their credit cards handy (or already on file), ready and usually eager to buy books and/or other products. An increasingly clear result for booksellers is that nearly everyone is selling on Amazon, including a growing number of independent booksellers who are stalwart members of the American Booksellers Association, and even some former online competitors such as Alibris and abeBooks. If you want to sell books online, ignoring Amazon or refusing to sell there because you feel it is the independent booksellers’ bogeyman is like wanting to open a brick-and-mortar bookstore and ignoring the old maxim that the three most important factors in determining a retailer’s success are “location, location, and location.” You can turn your back on Amazon’s customer base, but why would you want to do that? Ideology? Please. Personally, when I read comments by the developer of a fledgling online bookselling database, to the effect that his site should not be compared with Amazon because Amazon is not a “pure bookselling site,” I have to wonder if puristic hasn’t become puerile. The activities of writing, publishing, and marketing a book about online bookselling, in and of themselves, have focused my attention more on trying to step back and gain a wider perspective on what is happening in bookselling than I ever achieved simply as a result of my day-to-day work in the bookselling and publishing trades over the past couple decades. The desire to consolidate various scattered efforts to market the book left me to establish a free website, the Online Bookselling Resource Center, and one end result of the entire process is that I find myself engaged daily in reading emails from sellers, message board posts, and news articles and other documents of and about the issues facing online booksellers today. In the process one can’t help but notice that, beyond the bogeymen, there are six major problems that vex and preoccupy online booksellers today: the market glut of sellers and available copies; artificially low pricing or lowballing; the inconsistency of professional standards and ethics among online sellers; a wide range of perceived threats related to the Amazon business model; selling venue glitches, conspiracies, and performance issues; and the coming shakeout. Some of these problems are serious, but some can be overcome. Let me offer a somewhat contrarian view on each. Six CrisesThe Market Glut The concern here is that everyone with two pages to rub together, attached to a binding or not, is proclaiming himself a bookseller, flooding the market with copies, and driving down the price market of all legitimate booksellers’ wares – used, new, and antiquarian. Personally I believe that the phenomenon is more about the increased transparency of the market of books for sale, rather than the increased quantity, and it is important to remember that the total number of books in existence is finite. If secondary markets begin to reduce profits for publishers, they will produce fewer books, and eventually this will slow the growth of secondary market copies available. This long view may not offer much hope to a seller who is hanging on by the fingertips today, but for those who can hold out, it is likely that some buyer-seller equilibrium will obtain in the future, particularly with respect to less common titles. The key to this equilibrium will be the continued growth of the online buying market, which has a great deal more room to grow, given that online book sales still hover around 10% of all book sales. A few months or a year can seem like a very long time in the online world, but it is worth noting that, in the case of Amazon, its active customer base has grown from zero to something over 30 million in just over seven years, and its population of third-party sellers has grown from zero to over 200,000 since early 1999. As Amazon continues its push for growth in each category, it is natural to expect that some equilibrium will occur between the two growth rates and populations in the near future. Fortunately, it now seems likely that Amazon will continue its recent practice of ratcheting down its owned inventory of new titles when the Marketplace supply of alternatives is ample. Lowballing Apart from the existence of a market glut, many sellers are artificially depressing book prices by offering books at prices significantly below those of competing copies. This, in turn, leads to other sellers coming along and making a snap judgment that they will not be able to sell X title unless they price it alongside the cheapest copy available. A herd is created and, dumb as sheep, lowballing sellers create a relentless downward pricing spiral. A great deal of speculation occurs as to the motivation or rationale of sellers who would price large portions of their inventory at a penny: are they making money off of shipping, are they acquiring email addresses to sell at a profit, are they trying to attract traffic to a site, are they trying to build up their customer feedback rating, are they nuts? It doesn’t matter. In any marketplace, as Dr. Vernon Smith, recipient of this year’s Nobel Prize for Economics, has shown, there are a significant number of players who, faced with uncertainty, act compulsively, irrationally, and self-destructively, and sometimes they influence others to join them. My view is that one should never join them, but should see them as loss leaders in one’s shop, and be grateful that one is not taking the financial hit for providing the loss leader. Where a lowballed book is in some demand, the lowballer may make an excellent arbitrage victim. To assign lowballers too much power is to underestimate the power of the huge online bookbuying customer base. Buyers often choose higher priced copies within a title’s selection based on condition, presentation of both copy and seller, and perhaps some of the same phenomena observed by Professor Smith. Over time, we can hope that sellers will become wiser about their pricing strategies, and that market forces will find a way of saying goodnight to those who don’t. Meanwhile, our best protections against lowballing are to avoid those hypercommon titles where the downward pricing spiral is most pronounced and to do what we can to increase the population of online bookbuyers. Professional Standards Many sellers believe that the huge influx of casual and often unschooled sellers is laying waste any and all standards for book packing and shipping, descriptions and rating, and customer service and business ethics to an extent that will turn off and away significant numbers of buyers from repeating as online customers. Further, beyond this casual and benign or ignorant neglect lies another more sinister level of dishonest sellers who actively defraud customers by failing to ship, misrepresenting an item, relying on drop-shipping without any concern for follow-up, etc. Amazon and Half.com have been shamelessly laissez-faire about these practices and are fouling their own nests as a result. While Amazon seems to depend on free market forces to fix a great many problems, all one must do is review the customer feedback files of some of the larger Marketplace sellers to reach the conclusion that the market is not working effectively on this problem. Instead, Amazon needs to do a better job of policing flagrant and frequent offenders, and sellers need to continue and expand efforts such as IOBA’s Buyer’s Bill of Rights to educate buyers about how to avoid or follow up on bad deals. It’s also my hope that my forthcoming book,Buying Books Online: Finding Bargains and Saving Money at Booksense Stores, Amazon’s Marketplace, and Other Online Sites, will make some small contribution to this educational effort. Amazon’s Business Model Sellers have recently become fond of referencing “the good old days” of selling on Amazon, from the Spring of 1999 through early 2001, when all manner of books would sell quickly, seemingly at any price posted. Having regularly sold 40% of my listed inventory each month in those days, I miss them too. However, I have to admit that I find laughable the accompanying commentary to the effect that what’s gone wrong is that Amazon has changed everything, and that if Amazon had simply continued doing what it was doing then, all would be fine. The continued development of Amazon’s customer-driven big tent business model, while it may not have been entirely predictable, is the inevitable denouement of the company’s guiding principles over the past few years, and of course Amazon has every right to continue its growth in the future. In thinking about how we as third-party booksellers ought to relate to this business model, it is essential first to try to understand the model and what it creates in terms of the customer base which makes Amazon an appealing selling venue in the first place, and second to understand that all of the “trade association” proposals we might want to make to somehow limit the population of sellers or available books are going to fall on deaf ears. Amazon is going to be around for a long time, and it is going to continue play a huge role in defining how bookselling is done on the Internet. We would be wise to adapt, unless we do not want to participate. Selling Venue Glitches, Conspiracies, And Performance Issues Every seller who depends on large database venues such as Amazon, half.com, abebooks, or Alibris has plenty of horror stories about glitches, lost listings, twice-sold tales, and overall poor site performance. On Amazon at least, the remarkable thing about all these many problems – and they are many – is that they almost never seem to affect the customer experience. I am constantly mystified at how a company can run such a smooth and seamless site for buyers while exposing such a slow, clunky, and generally flawed back end for sellers. The problems can be serious; for instance, when failure to update open or closed listings makes it difficult for sellers to avoid duplicate sales. On the other hand, too much worrying and checking for site performance problem resolution ends up being counter-productive, particularly if the problems are things that don’t effect sales or fulfillment. The Coming Shakeout Many online booksellers have worried for over a year now that a combination of forces – generally speaking, the sum total of the five crises enumerated above combined with a failing national economy – would shake a large percentage of our colleagues out of business over the course of the next year or two. My view is simple: if it has not happened yet, it probably will not happen. The national economy did not keep Amazon sales from growing more than 25% over the year-ago quarter, and Marketplace sales are growing at an even faster rate than Amazon’s owned-inventory sales. B&N.com also grew in the same quarter. Publishers’ retail prices continue to rise. As for the “revolutions” of e-books and print-on-demand, well, you know, we all want to change the world. The basic demand for a secondary market of used and antiquarian books continues strong, and in the case of used books may be intensified by weakness in the economy. A Challenge Despite my earlier comment that online booksellers should recognize Amazon’s likely staying power and adapt to that reality, we are not without choices. Many booksellers may function like the ants studied by Steven Johnson or the irrational traders studied by Nobel Laureate Smith, carrying crumbs or books to the post office or offering them for sale at inexplicably low prices, and some at least of the former category will survive. But I still believe that the world of online bookselling today is a hospitable one for many sellers to thrive if they are willing to spin free of traditional models and develop new supply and marketing approaches aimed specifically at providing a higher level of income. The key is to identify your goals for your bookselling efforts and to organize your business to meet and surpass those goals. If that sounds simplistic and smacks a little too much of Dr. Phil, let me elaborate: my suggestion is that a seller should establish a clear business plan, spreadsheets and all, with a clear sense of the supply lines and selling venues he will need to develop to meet his income goals, and review the plan and performance on at least a monthly basis. The dizzy pheromone-driven behavior of ants may work well for the system of the ant colony, and it may even work well for the overall system of the marketplace, but for sellers who want to thrive, it’s all about fighting the dizziness. Over the past year I’ve seen plenty of booksellers complain about changes in the market, while others have restructured their business and now list fewer books, but at significantly higher prices. The tools available to help sellers with this kind of restructuring are becoming more sophisticated every day, from wants and Buyers Waiting lists to data mining and other software, as well as the well known search engines. Some of these sellers depend heavily on book scouts and loose networks of other sellers, and others undertake a fair amount of book arbitrage online. Some have altered their businesses to build in a significant amount of affiliate traffic from their website and, of course, some of us have augmented retail bookselling efforts by publishing books or software aimed at helping other sellers. All of these strategies tend to make the market more fluid and drive customer traffic, and in the long run that will help not only these cutting-edge practitioners but also the wider community of sellers. Windwalker Despite the aforementioned bogeymen, we’ve probably come far enough to establish that the bookselling wars are not primarily about the big eating the small. If there’s going to be any eating done, the challenge for all of us is to be the fast who eat the slow, and the key to that challenge lies in our ability to be active students of our business: to stay informed about changes in our business, to know what we will be able to sell tomorrow, where we will be able to sell it, and where we will be able to get it, and to stay ready to adapt daily to the changes we perceive. Meanwhile, a little Amazon bashing never hurt anyone, and as King of the Hill, they’ve got to be able to take it. But just make sure it doesn’t keep you from a clearheaded analysis of what’s really going on in this business of bookselling. Stephen Windwalker Author: Selling Used Books Online: The Complete Guide to Bookselling at Amazon’s Marketplace & Other Online Sites Website: Online Bookselling Resource Center

During the Gulf War it was said that folks were sitting down to watch the children’s television show, Mr. Roberts’ Neighborhood, with their children. It was comforting to watch a placid program that could be counted on to just give calm, soothing sounds, sights and welcoming words and simple ideas of family and friendship. Now, again we are inundated with our ‘way-of-the-world’ news. Sometimes it is just too much to take in and process. We have to turn off the TV news. You are lucky if you have a child close by in your life. Pick up a Little Golden Book and give yourself and the child a rest from the chaos of the world. And if you don’t have a little one around go ahead anyway and look through some of the most wonderful stories and illustrations of childhood. Illustrators like Garth Williams of the Little House on The Prairie books wrote and illustrated for Little Golden Books, as did hundreds of others. Richard Scarry, Gustaf Tenggren and many more contributed to the essence of these little books. My favorite was The Taxi That Hurried, written just a year after WWII when people again wanted peace in their lives. It is a cheery little book about a taxi in a busy city. But, then I did love my brother’s copy of The Animals of Farmer Jones with the cows and the chickens and the ducks. The last page was ripped out but I didn’t care. Steve Santi, has written several definitive collector’s identifications and value guides on the Little Golden Books. I have the 1989 issue that has The Poky Little Puppy on the cover. There have been several new editions since. His web site is a delight and well worth your visit. http://www.thesantis.com/home.htm Now as an adult, I realize the importance of these books in our lives. And I seem to think of the books several times lately. I turn off the television and forgo reading the headlines. I look through Santi’s book and remember. I remember my mother reading about The New Baby, and Good Morning, Good Night illustrated by Eloise Wilkin. I wanted to find out more about this woman who wrote and illustrated more than 100 books in her lifetime. And as did Tasha Tudor, Eloise Wilkin spread her creative talents into other venues. She designed a baby doll for Vogue Dolls that has been listed as one of their most favored dolls. It has the same characteristics that her book children have; rounded cheeks, bright eyes filled with trust and wonderment. I found one of these dolls on E-bay and bought the Baby Dear doll for a fair price to go along with the So Big book I had just received from a bookseller in Hawaii. Why? What will I do with it? I don’t know – I will probably just put it on a shelf in my office. When I tire of listing Chilton manuals into my inventory, I can glance up and see the doll and the book that take me back to a quieter time, a less tiresome life. The books command prices from ten to several hundred dollars in very good condition. The Eloise Wilkin Treasury; a delightful book filled with the artists’ cherubic faces and sweet stories, favorite nursery rhymes, prayers, and poems is currently at $60.00 to $75.00. What kind of a woman wrote and illustrated these famous old stories still popular and important in the book collector world? Born in Rochester, New York in 1904, Eloise Burns became an illustrator after graduating from The Rochester Institute of Technology. Little is know of her early life but she was fortunate to have had a mother who seemed to be a free spirit and encouraged her children to enjoy their creative gifts. One fine day she allowed them to draw all over one wall in their house just before redecorating. Imagine the squeals and happy scribbles that day. After she graduated, Eloise and her friend Joan Esley, another illustrator, moved to New York City where they decided they had a better chance of success in the world of illustration. They would later corroborate on several children’s books. Eloise Burns became Eloise Burns Wilkin in 1935 after her marriage to Sydney Wilkin and soon began a family of four children. She illustrated over 20 books with her sister Ester, who also married a Wilkin. In 1943, she was offered a contract with Simon & Schuster in New York. She signed to do four Little Golden books a year staying with Little Golden Books exclusively until 1961, then only occasionally doing a book for them up until the mid-eighties. On October 4, 1987, at the age of 84, Eloise died of cancer in Brighton, New York, bringing an end to a beautiful and fulfilling career and leaving a legacy of delightful stories and pictures still loved by 21st century children and the folks who read to them. At the time of her death Eloise Wilkin was still illustrating and working on a new doll design. #authors #collecting

Part of the fun of being a bookseller is the never-ending opportunity to learn more about books and writers. I consider myself especially fortunate as a seller of used books to have such a wide world of material from which to choose. Walk into a new bookstore and you know pretty much what you can expect to see. But walk into a used bookstore and you never know what you might run into. In a used bookstore you may find a book heretofore unknown to you, a book published 10, 20, or 100 years ago, a book that turns out to be, somehow, the very thing you were seeking — you just didn’t know that when you walked in the door. Secondhand shops are repositories of potential discovery and rediscovery, of rescue and rehabilitation. Books never embraced by a wide reading audience are still available on these shelves, still waiting for appreciative readers, as are the books — once celebrated — which have been declared unfashionable, booted from the pantheon, and now virtually unread. Why does one book recede from the public’s memory while another remains in print year after year, continues to be assigned in literature courses and recommended by critics? What is the confluence of influence that produces lasting fame for some writers and some books, but not for others of equal literary merit? There are many reasons. The fickle fashions of critical and popular taste do have their effects on literature, just as they have on other forms of culture. The vicissitudes of the publishing industry, which itself has undergone a sea-change in the past few decades, obviously affect what is in print and therefore readily available to the reading public. Small press books can have a tough time getting noticed, and even large publishers don’t promote all their titles with equal energy. Some books never receive serious attention because they have been pigeonholed into a category (be it mystery, fantasy, or “women’s fiction”) that has historically been a bit snubbed by the critical establishment. Jane Austen even had a rough hoe of it for a while, because her subjects didn’t seem “large” enough to some. Occasionally a terrific first book will appear which, unfortunately, never achieves much of an audience and the writer, due either to lack of encouragement or early death, does not go on to develop a body of work with enough cumulative impact to keep his or her name in the public’s (and publisher’s) eye. On the other hand, and more happily, there is from time to time a resurgence of interest in writers formerly consigned to the dustbin. For example, witness how Dawn Powell became a critical darling long years after her death in 1965. Now, many years after Gore Vidal, in an essay intended to spur interest in his old friend’s work, declared that “… her name has been erased from that perpetually foggy pane, ‘American Literature”,she is readily available in two volumes of the Library of America series. She has, it appears, come into her own at last. From time to time brave publishing ventures pop up, such as the Lost American Fiction series published by Southern Illinois University Press, and Virago’s heroic efforts to reissue books by women writers. So some deserving titles get put back into print — at least temporarily. In any case, it cannot be denied that many worthy books get buried in the sands of time. Even though some do eventually re-emerge, most remain six feet under. Where there had once been an eager, large audience, now there is little interest. And where once there was at least a little interest, well, now there is next to none. There will always be books waiting to be discovered or rediscovered — either by the critical establishment, or simply by readers and collectors who rescue them, one by one, from dusty shelves. And so we arrive back at the perfect place to look for books worthy of a second chance — the secondhand bookshop, where almost anything might eventually wind up, including many wonderful books waiting patiently for the right person to pluck them from the shelves, blow away the dust, and discover the glories to be found within their faded covers. The fact that my own shop can give good books another shot at an audience, and thereby become a small part of the ongoing work of reclaiming lost and neglected books, is one of the most satisfying parts of my job. I should stress that this is definitely a two-way street, and that I have learned at least as much from my customers over the years as they have ever learned from me. I cannot count the number of conversations I’ve had that began with a simple purchase or inquiry and went on to excited bursts of “Oh, but have you read so and so? You must!” and “If you like this sort of thing, you have a treat in store — this writer is right up your alley!” I’ve chosen for this essay a few writers I, myself, am rather fond of who I think have been undeservedly a bit lost in the shuffle and who deserve a wider audience of readers and collectors. Since this is my essay, I get to pick — but I’m sure that everyone reading this has his or her own share of recommendations. In fact, I would be delighted to hear them! Since I’ve been talking about finding unanticipated delight within faded covers, perhaps it’s appropriate that I draw this batch of neglected books from literature which, similarly, takes as its subject the complexities found lurking behind unprepossessing exteriors and the intrigues behind what is, at first glance, the stuff of ordinary, everyday life. I offer here a few “neglected” writers who have written intensely and expressively about “ordinary” lives. The British writer Celia Fremlin is usually shelved in the “mystery” section, but her books are not so easily classifiable. She chooses as settings for her novels scenes of unremarkable domesticity; then bit-by-bit these familiar territories turn, well, strange. Crying babies, quarreling couples, anxious children, eccentric landladies and lodgers who are a bit odd … these are the characters who populate Fremlin’s small, but irresistibly creepy, universe. As the distinguished writer Ruth Rendell has written, “Celia Fremlin’s ‘mysteries’ … concern ordinary people, usually in conventional domestic relationships, living in suburbs or provincial towns, who are brought under pressure from some kind of appalling stress … Identification of her characters is very easily made … partly because the awful situations her people get themselves trapped in, the tedium of running a home, the stress of never having quite enough money to live comfortably, the nagging demands of small children, the pressures of a boring or unsuitable job, are familiar to most of us at some time or another through personal experience.” ** Fremlin is a prolific writer with a long career, but is an example of one whose work has been lost to a larger audience because of the relegation of her work to a particular genre ghetto. If her works were not automatically categorized as “mystery: women’s soft-boiled division,” she might at last achieve a larger audience. Ernest Raymond was a prolific writer of English family life and character, and he might be considered a bit of a sentimentalist today. But I think at least his 1935 work We the Accuseddeserves a wider readership. The story of “a totally unremarkable man,” it is, in fact, based on the real story of Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen and is convincing in its portrayal of the desperate longings that can lie behind the everyday life of an apparently humdrum fellow. By its end this inconsequential man has become both monster and tragic figure, driven to an appalling deed but still, somehow, sympathetic for all that. It is a work of extraordinary power and compassion. Tess Slesinger is an example of a promising young writer who died far before her time. But still, she left a novel and several remarkable short stories that deserve continued recognition. In her stories, particularly, she addresses a range of issues (from marital woes to writer’s block to life as a department store clerk) with wit and style, and not a little compassion. Her wry humor, social consciousness, and attention to the details that make up women’s lives make her work seem very contemporary to the modern sensibility. It’s a shame that she left such a small body of work, but at least we do have that. Slowly, By Thy Hand Unfurled In Romulus Linney we have the case of someone who has achieved quite a bit of success as an Off-Broadway playwright (and father of the actress Laura Linney), but whose early novel, Slowly, By Thy Hand Unfurled, remains relatively obscure. This is a strange and disturbing work, written in the form of a journal by an uneducated, almost illiterate woman in an unspecified small town, in an indeterminate earlier time. As she struggles for expression in the limited language available to her, the reader becomes increasingly able to read between the lines and into the heart of this woman’s repressed emotional life: her self-delusion, self-absorption, her pain, and her real but stifled impulse to love. It’s fascinating how Linney, who as a playwright must have honed his abilities to listen well, seems in this work to have gone straight through language and out the other side. These writers don’t need exotic locales or femmes fatales to produce works with a great emotional range, to produce sentences to make your hair stand on end, or to provide a compassionate world-view from a very small setting. All they need is the ordinary human heart, and ordinary human emotions — sometimes under extraordinary stress, to be sure, or in extraordinary need. And like the unprepossessing display of books in the secondhand shop, these works — like many others — may well deserve a second look. * Vidal’s essay originally appeared in The New York Review of Books, November 5, 1987. It has been reprinted in the omnibus collection of his essays United States, published by Random House in 1993. ** Rendell’s remarks are taken from the terrific book, Writer’s Choice, published in 1983 by Reston Publishing Company. Writer’s Choice is a collection of recommendations by well-known writers of works of both fiction and nonfiction. A wonderful starting point for finding buried literary treasure, not to mention the fun of seeing what writers one’s own favorite authors recommend. Notes on Authors Cited: Celia Fremlin’s many novels of suspense include The Hours Before Dawn(1958); The Trouble Makers(1963); The Jealous One(1965); With No Crying(1980); and Listening in the Dusk(1990). The novels of Patrick Hamilton (1904-1962) include Craven House(1926); Twenty-Thousand Streets Under the Sky (1935); Hangover Square(1941); and The Slaves of Solitude (1947). Romulus Linney published Slowly, By Thy Hand Unfurledin 1965. Also of interest is his first novel, Heathen Valley(1962), which has to do with sin and salvation in 19th century North Carolina. Ernest Raymond (1888-1974) had an unusually long writing life. Sixteen of his novels constitute “A London Gallery,” intended as a portrait of half a century of London life. We, the Accused(1935) is part of this ambitious enterprise. Other novels include To the Wood No More(1954) and The Chalice and the Sword (1952). Tess Slesinger (1905-1945) left behind the novel The Unpossessed(1934) and the story collection Time: The Present(1935; reprinted in 1971as On Being Told That Her Second Husband Has Taken His First Lover, and Other Stories), as well as several screenplays (including a co-writing credit for the 1945 film, “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn”). #collecting

Relics of revolutions are avidly collected— uniforms, bullets, swords, guns, and propaganda, are carefully preserved. Until recently, however, relics of one of the most sweeping revolutions, the social revolution in women’s rights that culminated in the suffrage struggles of the early twentieth century, gathered dust or were discarded. As interest in the feminist movement has increased, so has interest in its collectibles. In the following article, the first of two or more articles dealing chronologically with the suffrage movement, I’ve tried to cover the most important events of the movement between 1848 and 1873, fill in a little background and refer to the most important books and collectible ephemera of that period. Susan B. Anthony House Thirty years ago, the home of Susan B. Anthony in Rochester, NY was rarely open to the public, barely maintained by the contributions of a few dedicated volunteers, and almost entirely unknown to Rochesterians. Thanks to recent interest in the history of the women’s rights movement, it’s now much expanded, open to the public, fully staffed, and a favorite site for visiting politicians’ press conferences. I became a docent there about ten years ago and have found myself increasingly absorbed in the history of the women’s movement—much of which happened here, in upstate New York. Books and ephemera inscribed and/or published by Anthony, as well as other suffrage items turn up here with some frequency. Or, at least, they used to. They are now much scarcer. The suffrage movement was a battle fought and won largely with words—with mountains of paper and hours of speeches at meetings and conventions, with lobbying, and with banners and sashes, pins, handbills and posters. According to historian Andrea Kerr Moore, the American Women Suffrage Association “sent out almost 216,000 leaflets from its Boston headquarters” in one year. Even during the most “violent” period of the suffrage movement, the early 20th century, when militants marched, chained themselves to the White House fence, and were jailed and force fed, the great majority of suffrage workers pursued a comparatively moderate course. The History of Woman Suffrage and The Life and Works of Susan B. Anthony are, essentially, the official records of the movement. They were intended to be exactly that and, without them and the incredible amount of information they contain, much of the history of the women’s movement would be lost. The most frequently repeated stories of the suffrage movement are largely drawn from those works and from Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s Memoir, Eighty Years and More. Both works were written by the leaders of one group, the “ultras,” the radical wing of the movement led by Anthony and Stanton, and reflect their point of view. The work of the more conservative and broadly inclusive wing led by Lucy Stone, Henry Blackwell, Julia Ward Howe, Mary Livermore and others is less well remembered. Abolitionist and temperance newspapers of that period sometimes contain articles and speeches referring to or that were written by Anthony, Stanton, or Stone. One of the earliest temperance papers, The Lily, published by Amelia Bloomer in Seneca Falls, NY, was strongly influenced by Stanton, then living in Seneca Falls. Stanton essentially changed the direction of both the paper and its editor from temperance to women’s rights. As a student at Oberlin, Lucy Stone began speaking for women’s rights during the mid-1840s and when, in 1847, she became a lecturer for the American Anti-Slavery Association, she spoke part of the time for women’s suffrage and part of the time for the abolition of slavery. When Stanton and Anthony and Stone were girls, the legal situation of women, especially married women, in the United States was abysmal. Stanton contended that married women were essentially enslaved: “the condition of married women under the Common Law, was nearly as degraded as that of the slave on the Southern plantation.” [The History of Woman Suffrage] They had no legal existence apart from their husbands. Unmarried women, unless they had unusual resources, were either dependent upon family members or worked for miserably low wages. Women were not allowed in the professions and, with a few exceptions, notably the Quakers, not permitted to speak in public. They were rarely educated beyond eighth grade. They could not, of course, vote although the founding fathers had not excluded women from voting and, for a time, women in New Jersey were allowed to vote. By the time that Stanton and Anthony died, in 1902 and 1906 respectively, all of those restrictions had been removed except the prohibition against voting. Four western states did allow women to vote in federal elections during the 19th century and more were added during the early 20th century, but not until 1920 was the nineteenth amendment, franchising all adult women, ratified. Anthony, Stanton, Lucy Stone and numerous other less well-known women worked to bring about the revolution through the last half of the 19th century. Each pointed to incidents of injustice that exemplified the need for change—Stanton was especially effective at writing the history of the suffrage movement. Her account of the background of the first women’s rights convention, the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, now memorialized by the U.S. Park Service with the Women’s Historic Park in Seneca Falls, NY, is famous. Stanton married abolitionist Henry Stanton in 1840 (“obey” was not in the marriage ceremony) and they immediately left for London to attend The World’s Anti-Slavery Convention, an event that turned out to be, arguably, as significant for women’s suffrage as for the abolition of slavery. The American delegation to the convention included not only such stalwarts of the movement as Henry Stanton but also it was the first to include women, among them Lucretia Mott, a prominent Philadelpha Quaker. The inclusion of women had already led to a split in the American abolitionist movement with the Garrisonians favoring women as delegates and the “political abolitionists” opposing their inclusion. British hosts, many of them clergymen, were shocked at the appearance of the women and debate over whether or not to include them occupied the first day. (Henry Stanton argued for their admission.) The Garrisonians were voted down by a “crushing majority,” according to Stanton’s biographer, Elisabeth Griffith, and the women were seated in the gallery, behind a curtain, to observe but not to participate. Stanton and Mott became friends as a result of the anti-slavery convention—discussed the necessity for a change in women’s place in society, both legally and in the perception of women’s “proper place”—and talked about having a convention as soon as possible after their return to the United States. It was not, however, until 1848 when Mrs. Mott was visiting in the Seneca Falls area and Mrs. Stanton, now the mother of three (later seven) children, sat down with three Quaker women in Jane Hunt’s parlor in Waterloo, NY, a few miles from Seneca Falls, and planned the convention. At the convention, which has been well documented and is usually thought of as marking the beginning of the suffrage movement, eighteen resolutions were passed. Stanton, the primary author, modeled theDeclaration of Sentiments on the Declaration of Independence, and included eighteen resolutions because there had been eighteen resolutions in the Declaration of Independence. Most controversial turned out to be the ninth resolution, resolving that women should have the franchise. Unlike the other resolutions, which passed unanimously, the ninth resolution was strongly opposed and passed by a small majority, pressed by Frederick Douglass and Stanton. As a result of the ensuing furor, especially from the press and clergy, a number of the signers of the Declaration later withdrew their signatures. One of the few favorable accounts was in Frederick Douglass’ famous North Star, the abolitionist paper he published in Rochester. The Seneca Falls Convention was soon followed by a convention in Rochester, NY and the first national convention in Worcester, Ma. Conventions continued to be a main vehicle for organizing the suffrage movement. The History of Woman Suffrage records these conventions quite completely and original documents as well as pins, admission tickets, delegate badges, programs, etc. from them are now collectibles. Until the Civil War, suffrage and abolitionist workers, men and women, worked together in reasonable unity for the rights of women and slaves. During the Civil War, suffrage workers partially put aside their work for women’s rights and, in 1863, Stanton, Anthony, and Stone formed the Women’s Loyal League to work for passage of the thirteenth amendment abolishing slavery. National Woman Suffrage Association After the war, suffrage and abolitionist supporters differed over the problem of supporting the passage of the fourteenth amendment, which extended the franchise to black men and, for the first time, specified males as voters. Stanton and Anthony, feeling betrayed by their former allies, including Douglass, formed The National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA). A more conservative group, The American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) was led by Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell and included Julia Ward Howe, Mary Livermore, and the prominent male reformers of the period. The two groups remained separate until 1890 when they merged and became the National and American Woman’s Suffrage Association (NAWSA). During the period between 1867 and 1872, the leaders of NWSA were involved in events which brought the entire suffrage movement an enormous amount of unfavorable publicity and which, according to historians of the movement, set the cause back for a long time. The first was the association with George Francis Train, an open racist, who campaigned with Anthony in Kansas for the passage of a state amendment granting women’s rights and who offered to finance a suffrage newspaper. The second involved the association of Victoria Woodhull with the suffrage movement. Woodhull, who published a newspaper and was a self-nominated candidate for President of the United States, was also well known as a “free love” advocate. Third was the Beecher Tilton scandal, which also involved leaders of the suffrage movement. It was the tabloid story of its time and the popular press, especially, reveled in accusations that Beecher and Tilton’s wife were lovers. Beecher, a prominent clergyman, was President of AWSA. Theodore Tilton, who had been President of NWSA, accused Beecher of seduction and Woodhull, too, was involved. All three stories are fascinating, too complicated to summarize, but exhaustively covered by the contemporary press.Other Powers, a 1998 book by Barbara Goldsmith, covers the Woodhull and Beecher events in detail and constitutes just about the only recent “light” reading available on the suffrage movement. Goldsmith makes the case that the Beecher Tilton scandal largely explains why the suffrage movement failed to gather greater support during the last part of the century. Both NWSA and AWSA published newspapers. NWSA’s paper, The Revolution, was underwritten for a time by Train (who also used it as a vehicle for his economic theories), and some of Stanton’s best writing appears in the early editions of The Revolution. It was the first of a number of suffrage newspapers, most of them listed in The History of Woman Suffrage, all of which are now highly collectible. Copies of The Revolution are scarce now and very collectible. The most successful and long-lived of the suffrage papers, The Woman’s Journal, was published by the AWSA. 20th Century copies turn up most often; 19th century copies with interesting content are scarce. Newspapers published by and for workers in the suffrage movement served several purposes. They spread the news of the movement, news that was generally neglected or distorted by the popular press, and provided a sense of community to women who were often isolated. They also helped to create the new sense of self, which was so important in building the feminist movement. Two recent books on the long-neglected suffrage newspapers, one edited by Lana F. Rakow and Cheris Kramarae on The Revolution, the other, edited by Martha M. Soloman, on suffrage newspapers in general, are especially good reading on these not very well known papers. By the beginning of the 1870’s, the suffrage movement had suffered serious set-backs: suffrage supporters were divided, The Revolution had been sold because Anthony, the publisher, was unable to get advertisers and Train, imprisoned in Ireland as a Fenian, had withdrawn his financial support. The movement was associated with scandal in the public’s mind and new approaches were clearly needed. In the following bibliography I’ve tried to list only the most significant, recent and/or definitive works. A number of other good references, obviously, exist but many are out of print. I don’t know of a complete bibliography more recent than Albert Krichmar’s The Women’s Rights Movement in the United States 1848 – 1870, published in 1972. Barry, Kathleen. Susan B. Anthony: A Biography of a Singular Feminist. Published in 1988, this is the most recent biography of Anthony. Earlier biographies by Alma Lutz, Kathleen Anthony, and Rheta Childe Dorr are, unfortunately, out of print. Barry’s is the most scholarly biography; Anthony’s is quite complete and very readable. Gordon, Ann D., Editor. The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Two volumes have been published: Volume I: In the School of Anti-Slavery, 1840 to 1866 and Volume 2: Against an Aristocracy of Sex, 1866 – 1873. Part of a massive project from Rutgers headed by Gordon, these two volumes include letters, diary entries, speeches and articles. Wonderful notes go along with the entries. Harper, Judith. Susan B. Anthony: A Biographical Companion. This 1998 alphabetical reference includes entries on all the people and events of the suffrage and other reform movements with which Anthony was involved and is an invaluable “quick” reference. Griffith, Elizabeth. The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton. This most recent and comprehensive biography of Stanton was published in 1984. Harper, Ida Husted. The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony. The first two volumes were written during Susan B. Anthony’s life, based on her records, and with her active assistance. They were published in 1898 and constitute her “authorized” biography. The third volume was published in 1908, two years after Anthony’s death. Stanton, Elizabeth Cady. Eighty Years and More, 1815 – 1897. Stanton’s autobiography was first published in 1898. The most recent edition includes an Introduction by Ellen Carol DuBois and an Afterword by Ann D. Gordon, which add current scholarship and recent interpretation of Stanton’s work. The Suffrage Movement Goldsmith, Barbara. Other Powers. Thorough and entertaining coverage of the period between 1866 and 1871 when several leaders of the reform movements were involved in a series of widely publicized scandals . Gurko, Miriam. The Ladies of Seneca Falls: The Birth of the Woman’s Rights Movement. A very readable history covering the women who led the suffrage movement and the period from 1848 through 1920. Originally published in 1974. Kraditor, Aileen. The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890 – 1920. Classic analysis of the philosophy and tactics of the leaders of the movement. 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. Suffrage Newspapers Rakow, Lana F. and Kramarae, Cheris. The Revolution in Words Righting Women 1868 – 1871. Excerpts and analysis of Stanton and Anthony’s suffrage paper. Soloman, Martha, editor. A Voice of Their Own: The Woman Suffrage Press, 1840-1910. Various authors on the suffrage newspapers. *Thanks to Mary Huth, Assistant Director, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, University of Rochester, and Barbara Smith of Barbara E. Smith Books Martha Kelly, Gutenberg Books gtbooks@frontiernet.net #collecting #women