Ye Olde Booksellers Adventures in American Bookshops, Antique Stores and Auction Rooms by Guido Bruno (Detroit: The Douglas Book Shop, 1922) is a swell little thing, the one in hand numbered 898 of 1,000 printed, with bumped corners and cracked hinges, at 125 pp. plus the index. It mostly covers New York City, excerpted in this issue; with brief stops in Chicago, Boston, and other cities that will have to wait until next time. The first passage is from his preface, and then we get good snapshots of many predecessors. “On reading the proofs, I feel I have not done justice to my bookselling friends. I wandered into their shops, I browsed among their books, I listened to their talk and wrote it down . . . . pictures not studies, impressions not descriptions. Some of my friends have since passed on to a better world and in these pages will be found perhaps the only record of their useful and laborious lives. This, I believe, is an excuse for the existence of my little book.” The Salvation Army Books and magazines are turned over at once to the book department, which conducts a book store on Fourteenth Street near Union Square, not in the name of the Salvation Army, but in the name of the Reliance Book Store. Its employees are experienced booksellers who do not wear the Salvation uniform. In fact, every possible indication that this store belongs to the Salvation Army is carefully concealed. Magazines are here sold wholesale to other dealers or retail to you or to me or to anybody. The magazines given to the Salvation Army by charitable people are sold for from five to fifteen cents each. A very well-equipped rare book department attracts collectors from all over the city; “Book Prices Current” is the guide for the sales prices. School books are sold in great quantities. I believe the profit of this shop to be far greater than of any other book shop in the city, as its proprietors do not need to pay for the books they are selling. There seems to be a good deal of hypocrisy in concealing the fact that the Salvation Army owns the Reliance Book Store. Why not put a sign out that would tell everyone that the books and magazines sold have been received as gifts for the poor and sick by the Salvation Army? In New York Book Shops Every city has its book streets. Book shops are gregarious, and they grow like mushrooms in groups. There is little competition in the book business. No matter how large and complete the stock of a second-hand book dealer may be, his neighbor’s collection will be quite different. The clients of second-hand bookshops like to “browse about,” they seldom ask for a certain book and they love to have a large territory in which to hunt. The location of book streets changes with the growth of a city. Seventy-five years ago the book centre of New York was far downtown on Ann Street; after the Astor Library opened its doors, Fourth Avenue became the city center and soon was lined with picturesque bookshops. The city grew and Twenty-third Street became the Dorado of the book-hunter. Then people began to make immense fortunes and build palaces and mansions on Fifth Avenue, Central Park was opened to the public. . . .and Fifty-ninth Street became the book street of New York. Ever further the city expanded. Harlem grew in population and One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street is another shopping center for lovers of books and objects of art. Most of the book dealers kept step with the times. They moved from street to street. The grandfather had been prominent on Ann Street, the son on Fourth Avenue, and the grandson flourishes on One Hundred and Twenty-fifth. Fourth Avenue has come to honors again during the past four years. Some big book dealers had the idea to move back to old “booksellers row,” new people soon gathered around them and today most of the second-hand book business of the United States is transacted here on this old street, surrounded by a ramshackle neighborhood, invaded by factory buildings and sweatshops. But some book dealers could never make up their minds to move. They stuck to their shops. They are the landmarks of New York’s book streets. The Den of a Pessimist The Nestor of the book dealers who “have remained” and have withstood the trend of the times is E. A. Custer on Fifty-ninth Street. Right near Park Avenue, next to a livery stable in the cellar of an old-fashioned brownstone house, is his picturesque shop. Large bookstalls with hundreds of books invite you to rummage about, quaint paintings and drawings will arrest your attention and make you stop even if you are in a hurry. Firearms of all descriptions, swords and shining armor add a war touch that seems quite appropriate in our time. If you look closer you see a pale face with keen black eyes behind the show window. You have to look very closely in order to detect it. And if you enter the store you will meet the proprietor of face and store, sitting at his look-out, watching his stalls, scrutinizing the passers-by who stop to glance at his wares. He continues in his position while he is talking to you; he never takes his eyes from his treasures, even while waiting on a customer, or delving into the depths of his shop. “I have to watch my property,” he offers as explanation while excusing himself. “I am listening to what you say,” he adds, “don’t mind if I don’t look at you while we talk. All people who stop out there to look at my books are thieves, and if I give them a chance to get away with my books they prefer to acquire them that way rather than to buy. They steal from earliest childhood and never cease until they are dead. I have been forty years in this very place and I know what I am talking about. And though I am as watchful as a dog, I lose about twenty per cent of the stock that I put in my stalls through thieving. All book collectors are thieves; people who never would think of taking anything else without paying for it must think a bookshop is different from all other stores. Their consciences are not sin-stricken if they incidentally slip a book they like into their pocket and walk out with it. I have long ceased to read books. I read human nature for my pastime. “There is not a day that I do not lose books by theft. Take for instance last week. I had a set of Dickens on my stands. A cheap edition on the table where I keep my books for boys. I saw a little freckled, red-haired, bare-footed lad inspecting the Dickens books for longer than half an hour. Some time later he came back and looked at them again. This time he had a few books under his arm. He laid his books on the table and managed very cleverly to pick them up after a while together with one of my Dickens books. The boy really wanted to read the book and I let him get away with it. I knew that he was passing my shop every day, and I thought of speaking to him another time. “The next day he came again, inspected the remaining volumes of my Dickens set for a few minutes, repeated his trick of the day before and stole another volume. He came every day and acquired six of the seven volumes. It was only on Saturday that he stole the sixth volume; this time I went after him, told him sternly to come back with me, handed him the seventh volume and said to him: “’Here, my boy, I don’t keep open on Sunday, and somebody might buy this one and spoil your set. Better take it along. You have the right spirit. Continue and one of these days you will find yourself a millionaire. Perhaps then you will endow libraries.’” “But,” I interjected, “mustn’t it be dreadful to sit in your shop day after day as a sort of watchman?” “I’m accustomed to it,” he answered, “and that’s the only way I can make my business pay. It was not always so. There was a time when people really loved books and bought them in order to read. Then they had time to read. The successful man of today has an automobile, has to go out joy-riding after business hours, has to spend his time in cabarets and road-houses. He needs books only as decorations when he buys a home or furnishes an apartment. And then he leaves it usually to his decorator to choose the most attractive and expensive bindings in keeping with the color scheme of his library. “I tell you, New Yorkers don’t know books, don’t want to know them. The men read newspapers, the women magazines, and the young people trashy novels. Of course there are our modern book collectors. They know as much about the commercial values of books as I do. They buy books as an investment, just like pictures. They follow the auction sales and gamble in books. You can hardly call such people booklovers. Thirty years ago I used to have comfortable chairs in my shop and in the evening big business men, lawyers, and physicians would drop in and examine at leisure some tomes that I had laid before them because I knew they were interested in this or that subject. Today most of the men who are interested in books are so poor that they can hardly pay their room rent.” And then he proceeded to show me some of his treasures. “Who do you think buys this sort of books in our day? Dealers, nobody but dealers. And they sell them again to dealers. Finally they find their way into the auction rooms and are bought again by a dealer.” A Whitman Enthusiast He loves Twenty-third Street and intends to stick there till the last house is transformed into a factory. You almost fall into his shop from the street, so steep are the stairs and tread-worn. He has the instinct of the born second-hand book dealer to find out-of-the-way books on out-of-the-way subjects. There is always something unusual in his shop, and his prizes are within the reach of the poor man’s purse. He likes his books and he likes to sell them to good homes. And therefore he often fits his price to the purchaser’s purse. His hobby is Walt Whitman. He has the most famous collection of Whitman items in this country, even larger and more extensive than the one Horace Traubel has guarded. He has original manuscripts of Whitman, proof sheets of his books, everything that was ever written in any language about Walt Whitman, more than four hundred pictures of the “good, gray poet,” and you couldn’t buy one of those precious things for any money in the world. An Optimist “If one keeps a bookshop something unusual happens almost every day. It is the uncertainty of the book business that always attracts me. Of course every book dealer who wants to make a decent living must have a specialty of his own. Mine is architectural books. I have a large clientele of architects and decorators; I know these books well, and they were the backbone of my business. Chance and good luck are the great factors in the book dealer’s life. Let me tell you a few instances: “A few months after I opened my shop at the time of the big auction sales, I felt very gloomy. Of course I needed cash in order to buy books, and I did not have it. One morning one of my best customers walked into my shop and asked for a copy of Canina’s Ancient Rome. I told him that the book was so scarce that there was no use to ask for it. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I am willing to give you two hundred and fifty dollars for it any time you bring me a copy.’ The very same afternoon I noticed a copy of the book in an auction catalog to be sold the next day. I went to the auction and sat there shaking like a leaf, waiting for the first bid after the book was put up. Nobody seemed to be interested to buy it. Somebody bid five dollars, and I got it finally for six dollars and seventy-five cents. I had it wrapped up, took it around the corner to my customer and collected two hundred and fifty dollars. That was the first real money I made, and it gave me a chance to acquire better books.” A Gambler On Thirty-fourth, near Lexington Avenue, Jerome Duke has opened a bookshop of a peculiar sort. It is not exactly a book shop because there are antiques and curiosities all over the place. The books are thrown together topsy-turvy, Latin authors, modern novelists, theological books, old French tomes and German philosophers. I asked the proprietor about his books and his answer was: “I don’t know anything about them. I never read books and would not be bothered with them. I buy them at a certain price and I try to sell them at a profit. In fact, I intend to buy anything I can get cheap enough, no matter what it is. I went into the book game in order to gamble and I am going to gamble on anything that people bring in here. “There is one thing I have just refused to buy because the man wanted too much for it. He said that he had recently returned from Europe, had been a soldier, and wanted to sell me the embalmed finger of a German general. I forget the name of the general, but the man said that it was authentic and that he would sign a document before a notary public, swearing that he had been present at the time the finger was cut off of the general’s hand. Now, if he had asked fifty cents or a dollar, I would have been willing to take a chance, because it would make a good window display in this time of war; but he wanted five dollars, and I couldn’t see my way clear. That’s too much of a chance, to stake a five-spot on an embalmed finger of a German general. So I bought a slipper instead. It belonged to a Madame Jumel, and she is supposed to have worn it on the day that she got her divorce from Aaron Burr. I paid a dollar for it and I consider it a pretty sound gamble.” “How so?” I asked. “Well,” he answered, ”because Aaron Burr was the second Vice-President of the United States.” Of course that argument was final, and I wished him luck with his purchase. The Oxford Book Shop If you wish to know what authors Mr. Goldsmith does not like, look at his ten-cent stand in front of the shop. Extraordinary values can be had there for one dime, because Mr. Goldsmith does not like the books. Casement’s Book Emporium All his books are alphabetically arranged and I don’t wonder that many a scarce book can be found amongst his stock. Mr. Casement is a solitary figure among the book dealers of New York. Very silent, always kindly, smiling, obliging and unassuming. Often in the twilight, when he drinks his cup of coffee, and eats his herring with rye bread, I love to drop in and watch his self-content and real satisfaction with his life and with his lot. He is the only happy man among all the book dealers in New York—from hope and fear set free—content among his books. The Man Who Knows His Books A spotlessly clean little store on Thirty-eighth Street near Sixth Avenue, book shelves all around the walls, friendly pictures right beneath the ceiling. In the middle of the room a little desk, and in a chair before it Mr. Corbett, who prides himself on having read every book that he ever sold. Jack London used to spend hours here whenever he was in New York, and Edwin Markham received a good deal of inspiration from Mr. Corbett’s suggestions. Literary hack writers are his daily visitors; to call them customers would be too optimistic. He dreams of magazine articles, he invents titles for them and he sells you for a few pennies all the material to write them if you happen to be a journalist on the lookout for suggestions. He had his own peculiar ideas of what people should read and what they shouldn’t read, and it is not an unusual occurrence that, for instance, a young girl should enter his shop and ask for a certain book, and he would answer: “Yes, I have it, but you shouldn’t read it, and I won’t sell it to you.” And then he will tell her about some other book, and picture it in such desirable colors that she will change her mind and buy it instead. “You know,” he told me once, “the bookseller has a very important mission in life. The writer writes his books, but he doesn’t know into whose hands they will fall, the publisher sells them as merchandise to dealers all over the country, but we little shop-keepers come in contact with the real readers. It’s up to us to place something in their hands that might be decisive for their future career, that might inspire them to great and noble thoughts, and that might make criminals out of them. A few pennies that we might gain might mean the perdition of lives and souls.” Mr. Stammer, Their Great Patron Do you ask “How do all these people manage to darn a livelihood?” Mr. Stammer, the great book dealer from Fourth Avenue, whose specialty is hunting up every book that anybody in the United States might desire, no matter when and where printed, and who knows the most obscure book dealer in the most obscure part of New York, answered this question: “Because two-thirds of the book dealers in New York are selling exclusively almost to the remaining third. The big book dealers very rarely buy books from private sources. These little book shops are our vanguards, that collect the honey for us and we come and take whatever we can use, or they bring it to us, and we are glad to have them come regularly.” Mr. Stammer makes his round to these small book dealers almost constantly every day. He is their educator and patron. He tells them what books are worth money, and he pays a good price whenever he can use them. He is a welcome figure on rent day, and most of the treasures of these cobwebbed corners wander to the comfortable shelves of his palace on Fourth Avenue. Mr. Madigan’s Interesting Shop A complete change of scene. The most fashionable shopping district of New York, just around the corner of Fifth Avenue in Forty-fifth Street. A window filled with expensively framed autographs marks the sanctum of Mr. Francis P. Madigan. He is a jovial man who has all the qualities which make for the success of our Fifth Avenue art shops. He knows when to stop talking, he knows when to say “the word” which closes the deal: he sells to his customers, they do not buy from him. The high walls are hung with innumerable autographs in appropriate frames, signed portraits of great celebrities; some little drawings and sketches by lesser know artists—Mr. Madigan also dabbles in art. His specialty is selling books signed by their authors. He is one of the few men who realized Oscar Wilde’s importance at a time when no one paid much attention to this unfortunate poet. In the course of years he collected a mass of Oscar Wilde material, and he is now reaping the harvest. I spent an afternoon in his shop. Quite a study for the observer of human souls was the procession of visitors who came and went continuously. They pay for autographs of men who never could even sell their work during their lives. Mr. Madigan has sold more Poe material during the last ten years than anybody else. Poor Poe! During his entire literary career he hardly got in direct returns as much money as this dealer in dead men’s letters receives for one single epistle. Schulte’s Book Store Scattered about the throbbing city are a few quiet nooks and corners that seem especially made for the lover of antiques. They are not numerous, but full of a certain charm. Book stores, with big boxes in front of the doors, where you can choose for your pennies, tomes in old-fashioned binding and printing. Inside are shelves laden with books in delightful disorder left by the book-hunter who looked through them before you. The narrow passageway becomes narrower on each visit you pay to the shop because of newly-arrived books and pamphlets. A long vista of boxes and cases well filled with a delightful miscellany of books marks the front of Mr. Schulte’s book store on the southwest corner of 23rd Street and Lexington Avenue. Don’t cast suspicious looks at the nice girls in immaculate white blouses who loiter about the aisles. They won’t interfere with you. They won’t ask you any questions. You will soon feel at home after you have glanced at the titles of the books on any shelf, and if you meet Mr. Schulte he won’t be a stranger to you. There is such a deep-founded relationship between the man and his books and customers. He is the appreciative, sympathetic co-collector and, after you have gained his confidence, if the friendship is mutual, he will spread out his gems before you: a first edition with a rare imprint, or some unknown etching by Whistler or Haden or Zorn. George D. Smith, Speculator in Literary Property A new type of bookseller has developed since books and literary property have become commercial and subject to corners created by shrewd buyers and holders, and to fluctuations caused by selling en masse. Mr. George D. Smith, the king of rare books and great dealer in literary property, operates on the largest scale. Mr. Smith buys carloads of books for millions of dollars and sells again by the carload to millionaires who build palaces in California and who order their libraries complete. Mr. Smith is the leading figure in our auction houses where he buys, excluding all competition, by paying an exorbitant price for anything he desires to possess. He is a millionaire and the chief counselor of our nouveaux riches when they furnish their homes with rare autographs and valuable books. Mr. Cadigan of Brentano’s After you have passed the stairway in Brentano’s leading to the basement and properly admired the framed autographs and signed portraits which cover the walls, you will pass the gate that leads into the kingdom of Mr. Cadigan, another dealer in literary property but of quite a different type. Mr. Cadigan is the head of Brentano’s periodical department. He knows the development of the American magazine better than anybody else living. For a score of years he has watched successes and failures, but nearest to his heart are the magazines of those men who have had the courage to stand up for their own ideas and their own conception of the world. Some of the most pathetic figures in American letters have founded magazines of their own; they would not follow the example of their contemporaries or submit to the wishes of their publishers and to the presumed desires of the reading public. Mr. Cadigan knows them all. He recommends them if he thinks them commendable. While the gigantic trusts of our American news companies afford them very little or no chances for circulation, Mr. Cadigan adopts them and presents them for sale on his table next to the full-fledged product of the capitalistic press. I get more satisfaction and pleasure out of Brentano’s basement devoted to periodicals than out of all the periodical reading rooms of all our public libraries combined, with the Carnegie institutions thrown in. To be able to look over the current issues of magazines and to take home just the interesting ones carries with it an intimate satisfaction.

Happy Hits Excerpts from recent online book descriptions. -Very Good. Dust Jacket Condition: Acceptable. Heavy edge and cover wear, some faux stains, inside great!! -Corners bumped, Spine worn at top and bottom with teat at center. -Book Condition: Good. No Jacket. 4to – over 9 3/4″ – 12″ Tall. 407 pp. For years 1907, 1908, 1909. All the main color plates have been cut out of book; also, a few pages are loose from binding. Spine cocked, some soil to covers; edge & corner wear. Ex-lib w/stamps to front & rear endpapers. -At some point in book’s peregrinations, a phoney three dollar bill was laid-in. -Included are a bit of ephemera: A page from the magazine Tops, advertising the 1940 P. C. A. M. Convention July 21 to 27, 1940 (Pacific Coast Assoc. of Magicians?). an unidentified snapshot of two males who one must but asume are muscians and an 8 by 10 sepia half-tone photograph inscribed To Bob Hammer with best wishes from Oscar and his stooge George “Quiver Lip” McAthy, 1944. Book ‘em, Danno Ioba is one of the 45 provinces of Burkina Faso in West Africa. The capital of Ioba is Dano, almost as in “Book ‘em, Danno” from the classic TV series Hawaii Five-O. IOBA, the Independent Online Booksellers Association, sells books. Coincidence? Probably. Blurbettes Notorious C.O.P. by Derrick Parker with Matt Diehl (NY: St. Martin’s Press, 2006) features a simulated bullet hole on the front panel of the dust jacket. The entry point is very smooth, but the automobile or recording studio glass it penetrated feels fractured to the touch, like it was real. The three brownish blood drops are also embossed. I contacted St. Martin’s Press with some questions about the process involved, the design spec language used, and the additional printing cost, but nobody got back to me. “As head of the first special force unit devoted exclusively to the investigation of hip-hop crime, first-grade [that seems awfully young] detective Derrick Parker worked on some of the biggest criminal cases in rap history. From the shooting at Club New York to the murder of Tupac Shakur, Derrick was on the inside of hip-hop’s most notorious crimes. “Always straddling the fence between “po-po” [gangsta slang for cop] and NYPD outsider, Derrick threatened police tradition to try to get the cases solved. He was the first New York detective on the Biggie Smalls’ [why the apostrophe?] murder and discovered shocking and never-before-revealed information from an unlikely informant. He protected one of the only surviving eyewitnesses to the Jam Master Jay murder and knows the identities of the killers as well as the motivation behind the shooting. “Notorious C.O.P. reveals hip-hop crimes that never made the papers—like the robbing of Foxy Brown [hold the press!] and the first Hot 97 shooting—and answers some lingering questions about murders that have remained unsolved. “The book that both the NYPD and the hip-hop community don’t want you to read, Notorious C.O.P. is the first insider look at the real links between crime and hip-hop and the inefficiencies that have left some of the most widely publicized murders in entertainment history unsolved.” From the rear inside flap. “Derrick Parker is a twenty-year veteran of the NYPD who headed the first special force unit dedicated to the investigation of hip-hop-related crime. Now off the force, Parker serves as the media’s rap-related crime expert, appearing in Rolling Stone, New York magazine, Vibe, Blender, The New York Times, Newsday, and dozens of other magazines and newspapers as well as on Unsolved Mysteries and shows on MTV, Fox, VH1, and Court TV. “Matt Diehl is a journalist whose work has appeared in Rolling Stone, The New York Times, The Washington Post, GQ, VIBE [they went with all caps in this second mention of Vibe, probably under the influence ofGQ’s caps], Spin, The Village Voice, and Blender [not to be confused with Spin]. He served as the music columnist for Elle magazine for four years and now serves as the music editor-at-large for Interviewmagazine. His first book was No-Fall Snowboarding.” From the rear panel (busy cop’s desk motif, blurbs on typescript sheet with coffee cup and stain rings, crumpled up piece of yellow legal paper, folders and pads underneath). “Yeah, you know me. I’m the guy The Miami Herald called the ‘hip-hop cop’ when they ran a story about the [really big] binder I’d compiled for the NYPD detailing the criminal history of over nine hundred hip-hop artists and associates. Yeah, that was me. “In my duties as NYPD’s hip-hop cop, I investigated some of the biggest names in music. The Club New York shooting involving Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs, Shyne, and Jennifer Lopez, I was there. The Hot 97 shooting that Lil’ Kim is now serving time for—who do you think they called on? [The hip-hop cop?] Cases involving the Wu-Tang Clan, 50 Cent, Nas, DMX, Foxy Brown—I worked them all. [Foxy Brown’s Wikipedia entry includes eight “Legal run-ins” for such offenses as spitting on two hotel workers in Raleigh who could or would not provide an iron; crashing her Range Rover; an altercation with an airport policewoman in Jamaica; attacking two manicurists in Chelsea over a disputed bill; getting handcuffed to a bench for fifteen minutes on order of a Manhattan judge until she agreed to apologize to the court for sticking her tongue out when asked to stop chewing gum; throwing hair glue at and spitting on a Broward County beauty parlor employee who told her it was closing time, and swatting at the arms of the police officer who tried to escort her from the shopping plaza back to the salon; and a couple of minor court violations.] “As a rookie detective, I patrolled the mean streets of Brooklyn and Queens. I was involved in one of the first cases that would bust drug impresarios Kenneth ‘Supreme’ McGriff, Lorenzo ‘Fat Cat’ Nichols, and Howard ‘Pappy’ Mason. “I spent years learning and investigating hip-hop on both sides of the fence. [Several paragraphs ago he said he was “straddling” the fence—two different things.] I know the people behind the music and the people they mythologize. There have been numerous books exploring the murders of Tupac, Biggie, and now Jam Master Jay, but as I am the original ‘hip-hop cop,’ no one has ever been where I’ve been, seen what I’ve seen, or knows what I know—and now I’m laying it all out on the line.” At the end of the day, I am confused by this dust jacket. Is glorified crime and violence good or bad? If the author knows who was behind big unsolved hip-hop murders, why are they still unsolved? Is Fox News more righteous than the NYPD? Maybe it’s a good book and an important contribution to the history of rap, and the author had nothing to do with all this hype. Either way, that’s what libraries are for. Book Blogs The Blog of Brian Cassidy, Bookseller http://briancassidy.net/blog/?s Posted 6/6/2007 “24 Hours in the Life of a Used Book” I always have mixed feelings when a book I care about is chosen by Oprah for her book club (The Corrections, House of Sand and Fog, Night, East of Eden, Light in August…). On the one hand, I like that good books get read and that reading as a pastime is endorsed on such a mass level. These are undeniably good things. At the same time, I always fear some author debacle (see James Frey or Jonathan Franzen) or worry that in the meeting of mass culture and fine literature, the latter ends up the loser. I’m thinking of moments like when on an early Oprah book club episode one woman complained to Toni Morrison that she had trouble understanding some passages and found herself needing to review. “Yes, my dear,” Morrison replied in her imperious tone, “We call that READING.” And now, on the day she snagged Cormac McCarthy’s only TV interview ever, Oprah had anointed Jeffrey Eugenides’ Pulitzer-winning novel, Middlesex. I had a couple copies in stock at the shop, so when I heard of the selection I headed over to Amazon to see what was happening with the online price and decide if I should bother listing my copies. Though at first it appeared not much was going on, as the above chart demonstrates (click to enlarge), the power of Oprah is not to be underestimated. Oprah single-handedly cut the number of available used copies by more than half (from 375 to about 160) and nearly tripled the asking price (from $2.88 to $7.50), all in a scant 24 hours. A few clarifications: First, this data is for the “old” trade paperback edition only (as opposed to the new “Oprah” edition). Second, that plummeting price for new copies represents the fact that Amazon sold out of the “old” edition (demonstrated by the fact they say copies will ship in “1-3 weeks”). Third, note the impressive jump in sales rank (500 or so to 17). Oprah, we bow before your mighty influence. Made in IOBA Elizabeth Svendsen of Blue Jacket Books is co-author, with her father (and under her maiden name) of The Sorcerer’s Companion, A Guide to the Magical World of Harry Potter(NY: Broadway Books, 2001; 2004 second edition), by Allan Zola Kronzek and Elizabeth Kronzek. The Dignity of the Bookseller’s Calling Submitted by Rockford E. Toews (http://www.backcreekbooks.com) Block and Tackle I seem to have the only online copy of the improbably titled Nine Lives on Four Coasts: Autobiography/Confession/Love Story of an Educational Administrator, by Byron F. Evans (Urbana, IL: Prairie Publications, 2004 first edition. Signed and warmly inscribed by the author. $35.00). I received the following IOBAbooks query about this offering. -3/16/2007 12:10 A.M. Customer inquiry: Hi, How are you today? and how are you doing? I am interested in this book, let me know the last price you are willing to sell it, and also let me know if you accept check as form of payment, I could have called you but it was unfortunate that I’m hearing Impaired. I am looking forward to read from you, David Block.david_block1@yahoo.com -3/16/2007 1:28 A.M. If you would like to order this book, I accept payment by check, money order, PayPal, or credit card. The total comes to $38.00, to include Media Mail shipping. If you email me your confirmation and method of payment now, I can prepare the book for shipping. -3/16/2007 10:11 A.M. Hi Shawn, Thanks for your email, I am okay with your price, please let me know if pickup is acceptable. I am looking forward to read from you. -3/16/2007 12:07 P.M. Sorry but pickup is not convenient for me. [At this point, somebody on the IOBA Discuss list mentioned a similar scam, and we all learned that this same technique was previously attempted against Biblio booksellers. What makes this a bit different is that he chooses titles you actually own, and then sets up a transaction where you get a bogus check for a larger amount and must send him a refund before his “shipper” comes to your business or home in order to pick the book up. It is clumsy, but particularly offensive enough for me to respond, as he had my email address anyway.] -3/18/2007 11:21 A.M. Sorry but it looks like the book you ordered is out of stock. I thought you might be interested in an alternative to this work. It is titled A Biographical Encyclopedia of Pathetic Lowlifes. Just send me a check for a larger amount, and I will send a refund to wherever you say. -3/19/2007 6:20 A.M. Thanks for your email, I am okay with your price, please let me know if pickup is acceptable. I am looking forward to read from you. -3/19/2007 4:49 P.M. Read my previous message again, moron. -3/20/2007 5:29 A.M. Yes, I know. I am intersted in the Biographical Encyclopedia of Pathetic Lowlifes. I just want to know if pickup is acceptable. I am looking forward to read from you, Thank You. -3/20/2007 8:21 P.M. Yes, pickup is acceptable. The total is $38.00. Do you live near me? -3/20/2007 9:55 P.M. Hi. The check I’ll send you will be in excess amount, the amount I’ll write on the check will be higher than the amount to demand for, so the amount written on the check will contains my shipper’s funds. So when it clears your bank deduct your funds, and wire the balance to my shipper to enable him pickup the book from your territory. If you are okay by this arrangement, kindly get back to me with your name, address and phone number so that I can write the check asap. Thank You. -3/20/2007 10:00 P.M. How much higher than $38.00 will your check be? -3/29/2007 9:39 P.M. Hello Shawn, Have you received the check? -3/29/2007 9:57 P.M. Hi again David. I haven’t been to the Post Office recently, as it is a long journey from my village, but plan to do so shortly. Please let me know how much over $38.00 it is. What amount did you write the check for? Thanks. -4/19/2007 12:41 A.M. I have been to my post office and there is no check there from you. Do you still want to order this book? If not, I would like to take it off hold in case anybody else wants it. Please let me know as soon as possible. Thank you. -4/19/2007 8:28 P.M. I am sorry for the late response, I was not filling fine, but I am okay now. please I would need a mailing address, rather than post office box. I will send the check first thing tomorrow morning. I am looking forward to read from you. -4/19/2007 8:28 P.M. Sorry but we only have a Post Office box. -4/19/2007 8:46 P.M. Okay I’ll send it there tomorrow morning. Thank You. -4/28/2007 12:12 P.M. Hi, have you received the check? -5/2/2007 8:37 P.M. No. Does your mother know what you do for a living? -5/3/2007 12:06 A.M. why do you said so? -5/3/2007 12:41 A.M. Because you (“David Block/Tom Grant”) are a well known scammer who cheats people out of their hard-earned money by lying to them. Most Biblio and IOBAbooks booksellers know better than to send you payment for the “shipper’s funds” difference between the actual cost of the book and the big bad check you send them. First of all this is a really stupid way to try and cheat people, though apparently some are fooled or you wouldn’t still be doing it, and secondly we have all shared your emails and discussed your methods. Chances are your mother would be ashamed of this behavior. Get a real and honest job, before it is too late. [At this point, our online correspondence comes to an end.] Pub Sale Tale by Bruce Tober I’ve become something of a hermit in the past couple of months. Takes all I can do to leave the flat and usually only manage to do so 2 or 3 times a week for a couple or 3 hours each. Today was one of those days. Took til about 10am to force myself out the door. While walking to the bus tried to decide on where to go. Finally got to the bus stop and decided on taking the 451 route. That left me with 3 choices, village 1, town or village 2. By the time we got to village 1 I decided I’d not been there in quite a while so might as well. Stopped in at each of the 4 or 5 charity shops and found nothing (not surprising, they’ve had nothing but pretty new take on holiday books for a couple of years). So I stopped for a Guinness (hadn’t had breakfast, let alone lunch yet). I immediately recognised the pub. It was where I bought a load of books (from one of their rooms, the decor of which is Edwardian library) last year. I talked to the manager and made the arrangements, which he was totally amenable to. I walked out having finished my Guinness, with about 30 books. I gave the manager £20 (later found out that I’d actually given him a £10 by mistake) which he was more than happy with. I’ve only checked two of the books so far (each bought for about £0.30) and one’s going to list for £60 (first edition of a physics book by the 1924 Nobel Prize for Physics recipient) and the other one’s going to list for about £40 (a Mrs Beeton’s Every-Day Cookery from the 1930s). And many of the others look likely to make a very nice price. Damn! I love this business. Submitted by Bruce Tober (http://www.star-dot-star.net) Book Fallouts New, Voyager My 1997 Plymouth Grand Voyager ceased to exist a couple months back, at least in the form I was familiar with. We were having overheating problems with both vehicles, and the original dealership thought the Voyager only needed a new thermostat and water pump. Monroe Muffler (our garage of choice) previously detected the need for a vastly more expensive head gasket job, but they are not allowed to work on engines. When the repair did not solve the overheating problem, I just took it easy on the van for a few days, topping it off with coolant between eruptions until we had the time and funds to deal with this. The Subaru going to my daughter just received a new head gasket of its own, plus all new brakes and tires, and we were in the process of buying a new vehicle to replace it, so the timing was not good. The Number 10 Filet-O-Fish sandwich meal comes with a big ass Coke, which I carefully poured down on the conflagration, and although it was largely quelled, it’s pretty hard to put out burning rubber and oily engine parts, and it licked back up again right quick. Mom’s smaller Coke and two bottles of spring water were also put to use, to no avail. I considered driving my flaming van back to McDonald’s in order to borrow their fire extinguisher, but saving Mom’s life and calling 911 seemed the better plan. Beating on the now fully involved engine with a wet packing sheet while waiting for the police and fire trucks, I realized that emptying the vehicle of anything I ever wanted to see again probably made more sense, and when that was done we waited pretty far away in case it blew. Long story short, it took two police extinguishers and a fire pumper to cool things off, and we had a nice quiet five minutes to eat our cold food (with no drinks) between the departure of the authorities and the arrival of the wife and tow truck. The Allstate adjustor was sympathetic to my plight, but he could not help prove that faulty repairs led to the fire, as all the evidence was in one molten mass. The dealership was very quick to deny any culpability, though they were kind enough to let it sit there for a few days earning storage fees. $2,500 plus change was the best he could do, which is not that bad for a 1997 with 130,000 miles. I visited the old girl a few days later to drop off the seats (an extra $150 for that) and to pick up a parking lot hang tag missed in the sweep, and they actually had to cut a rectangle in the hood in order to gain access. All this was sad, as we’d spent so much time together. So I halfheartedly looked for a replacement until a Monday morning was coming up where three of us would need to go to work in three different directions with one vehicle. I’d been holding out for a slightly newer model of the same van. The Plymouth Grand Voyager and her sister the Dodge Grand Caravan were the bookseller’s vehicle of choice for awhile there. I remember doing book shows where the parking lot during setup looked like a Plymouth dealership. The sliding doors are great, it can hold an enormous amount of books, and if you do antiques as well it will accommodate a ten foot dining room table and still close in the back. I even wanted the same color, metallic pearl green with the grey interior. After several weeks of near misses and jamming book call booty and large items like a free roadside down-filled sofa worth $500 into the small Subaru, I finally found one online, though the dealership was about ninety miles away in Brattleboro, VT. It was a 1999 with only 84,000 miles, and it even had a CD player! They wanted $5,000 and settled for $4,500. The closest I came to that was several 1999s and 2000s with about 120,000 miles in the $3,000-$4,000 range, so the price seemed pretty good. We were also rafting the Upper Delaware River and bringing my daughter to Longwood Gardens in PA for a year long paid internship all in a five day period, so time was short. Route 9 through the Green Mountains of Vermont is spectacular, and although we couldn’t peruse a great looking bookstore in Wilmington, we did take a lemonade moment to look down from the bridge at a couple of large trout patrolling crystal clear waters, one on each side, unless it was a single example just messing with our heads, though I would be the last to ascribe certain human qualities to beasts, be they rough or smooth. I had the assurance of Mark’s Motors that this van was in great shape, that it would pass a routine day-of-sale internal inspection with no problems, and that the entire transaction would only take twenty minutes. Needless to say, it didn’t go down quite that way. Their small service department found it needed rear brakes and a new tire (no extra charge), and there were other inefficiencies. We killed time by having a wonderful marina lunch under bright blue skies, and then fully exploring progressive downtown Brattleboro (funniest sight: a children’s store T-shirt with the image of Bush and the caption “President Poopy Head”). From the low parking space we found, I looked upward toward the fringing mountains and saw a large yellow banner way up on the back of a building that read, “75,000 Used Books,” so bingo off we went scaling the sidewalk heights of lower Brattleboro off on our own quests. A few twists and turns later I entered Brattleboro Books, which I now know to be the largest used bookstore in southern Vermont. I spent a half hour poking around, and would have needed another to look for the modest topics and authors I collect in such stores (turn-of-the-century journalism, Harry A. Franck upgrades, etc.); or those that I can easily resell locally if the price is right (Catskill Mountain railroad lines, etc.). It has just the right combination of jumble, organization, coziness, and what appears to be new arrivals in boxes. Serendipity too. Down in the basement, a big red copy of Marlboro Music Programs 1951-1984 caught my eye, and a perfectly pressed Monarch butterfly was laid inside. The highlight of the visit was a chat with co-proprietor Ellen Tenney. We shared some booksellerish sentiments and she allowed me to take a few pictures. I told her about my green Voyager and she pointed to hers parked right outside. I would link to a very nice article on the Tenneys that appeared in the 1/1/2007 Vermont Business Magazine, but it pulsates with too much garish advertising, so google it if you want. I see Rachel Ray slurping a Dunkin’ Donuts iced coffee in one of those ads, by the way. She got her start in my area with little food spots on the local news, and Ellen mentioned that the now famous Rachel Ray did a piece from Brattleboro Books for her show. I apologized for not buying anything, though I did pick up a small photography book on Vermont dogs in one of the other three local bookstores Brattleboro strongly supports. I’d like to say the Plymouth Grand Voyager saga ended well, but I don’t know yet. We had lots to do at home before the close of the business day, so I made the unorthodox arrangement of making the return trip the actual test drive. Some things don’t feel quite right, like the brakes, the two back seats shake more than they should (though they will rarely be in anyway), and I’m hoping the smell I detect is only Armor All and not cigarettes. I usually buy new, to avoid cooties and the time and expense of constant repairs. The CARFAX report they coughed up shows this started off as a rental in Michigan, and I am the fourth owner, which is not the uncheckered past I envisioned when chatting with the sales rep on the phone. It looks great (nearly new) for its age though, the CD player is sweet, and it’s so nice to see the temperature gauge right in the middle where it belongs. (When A. J.’s SUV caught on fire in the recent series finale of The Sopranos I had a bad flashback, and I don’t think a Filet-O-Fish will ever taste the same again either, though that might be a good thing.) Next week’s inspection will reveal more, though I wouldn’t mind investing another grand or three sooner or later if that what it takes to Voyager again. It isn’t so much about the make and model, however, as the vast cargo space . . . its five year mission: to explore strange new lands, to seek out new books and new antiques, to boldly go where no van of mine has gone before. I plan to run it into the ground doing my thing and trade it in for a new one some day if my thing goes well. Maybe there will be a good hybrid van by then. Images of Brattleboro Books Brattleboro Books, Brattleboro, VT (brattleborobooks@verizon.net) Book Store Labels: Peabody Book Shop, Baltimore, MD Found on the extreme lower right inside cover of The O’Donoghue; A Tale of Ireland Fifty Years Ago by Charles Lever (Dublin: William Curry, Jun. and Company, 1845). Solicitations The Standard can always use interesting, well-written articles on subjects of interest to the bookselling trade. Please query first, however, to editor@ioba.org. You will be supplied with submission guidelines, but to summarize, the material should be original, it is subject to editing, you retain copyright, and of course there is no payment other than most everyone’s satisfaction. You do not need to be a member of IOBA, except for the IOBA Bookseller Profiles section, though we would surely like you to join. We are very interested in the book trade outside the U.S. as well. Currently we are seeking short pieces for the following self-explanatory columns. House Calls; Garage/Estate/Library Sale Tales; Auction Action; Book Show Impressions; Book Store Lore; and Library File. Booku Blue Rum by Ernest Souza, down and out expatriate in Portugal, deep blue boards, top edges dark blue, “blue tobacco smoke,” “hideous blue jardinieres,” “blue as blue glass,” blue rum running and “Blue Sleep” addicts, hazy azul oscuro permeates, 1930 blue. Comic Books From the comic section of the New York Journal American dated 4/8/1945, the third panel of “Bringing Up Father” by Geo. McManus. IOBA Standard, Summer Edition 2007, Volume 8, No. 3.

Table of Contents from the Editor From the President Interview with Paul Mills of AuctionExplorerBooks Book-Buying in Middle America, or, A New York Dealer’s Visits to Three Middle American Cities Ephemeral Assays: Jumpin’ Jehovah Book review: Bookstore: The Life and Times of Jeannette Watson and Books & Co Anyone for the Forsythe Saga? Cathy Graham and Serena Wyckoff of Copperfish Books, LLC Pros and Cons of AbeBooks.com for Buyers and Sellers Paul Mills of Clarke’s Africana & Rare Books Tami W. Zawistowski of Resource Books, LLC addendum

Most of us love books for much more than their commercial value, but how did we go from appreciating them to selling them? In many cases, collectors simply decided to specialize, weed, or trade up, and reselling is a logical way to make room and raise funds. In my case, mother ran a weekend barn sale in rural upstate New York in the 1980s. The rest of us avoided this in one way or another, most notably my dad who didn’t like strangers on the property all that much and retreated to his huge sloping garden. Antiques were easily had back then, and Mom had an especially good eye. I did a lot of wood chopping at the back corner of this rambling barn, which now looked out on waving fields of hay rather than hops, and would slink up into the rafters of an adjoining room on occasion to eavesdrop on the transactions. Once a troupe of uninhibited theatrical types tried on lots of vintage clothing, which was great fun for everyone involved. Anyway, it fell on me to price her books, and the whole process was something of a mystery. There were no booksellers around, no local libraries carried large sets that reported on prices realized at auction (not that these would have helped with this kind of stock), and no instant expertise courtesy of the internet. One day a rare treasure came in though, and I pictured it financing future college educations. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman, signed, and probably a first edition. I was crestfallen several years later to learn that it was a cheap reprint with a facsimile signature, and in particularly bad condition to boot. The other funny thing I know now is that even the best signed Whitman won’t pay for all that much college. It has a loving place on my shelf though, as a reminder of the first bibliohieroglyph I ever cracked, valuation-wise, and the shaky ladder between the love of books and making a living off same. So, how did you get started, in one long paragraph or less? We will run some of these tales in a future issue. And on that subject, this is the fourth number of the Standard under my editorship, and I could use some help with content. If you look under Addenda/Solicitations at the rear pages of our online journal, the begging is more detailed there. You know you’re getting old when you bend down for something and think if there’s anything else you need to do while you’re down there, as the joke goes, so as long as I am begging about submissions, please consider joining IOBA if you don’t belong already. In IOBA news, we have a new slate of officers and board members girding their loins for exciting progress. Thanks to outgoing President David Friedman of Bibliotique, and best wishes to new President Michael Watson of 20 Ants. Michael gets top spot in our membership directory as part of his extensive compensation package (don’t tell him he was at the top anyway because of the “20”). And check out the powerful new “Search Journal Archives” feature, which will find any word in all past issues of the Standard. President Watson leads things off with an introduction. This is followed by an interview with one of the guides leading AuctionExplorerBooks out of South Africa; and a Joe Perlman expedition to the interior. The Reference Desk holds an ephemeral assay on high flying fliers and an artsy-smartsy bookselling book review. The Tool Box clanks with advice on how to improve your online sales; and the first (AbeBooks) in an important series of search service Pros and Cons from Chris Volk. The IOBA Bookseller Profiles feature fun in the sun, a serious case of building envy, and more Africana. Addenda ends. The next issue of the IOBA Standard will be so great that it will be celebrated by fireworks, though it will probably take everyone about four days to organize that.

Change, Challenge, and Response I had an article nearly finished for this edition of the Standard, and took the article to my “day job” today to finish the last ten percent. Today turned into an exercise in how to make smooth transitions between crises and the article went unfinished. After dragging myself back home I reflected on the day and found that it illustrated some things that I was struggling to explain in my article. Following one of my numerous credos—“never be afraid to throw it away and start again”—I did exactly that and wrote a new article based on my day. At first glance it may not seem related to bookselling or the IOBA, but, if you’ll indulge my rambling, the meaning may be clear to you by the last word. My favorite author is Dr. Seuss, and just as his Cat In The Hat introduced you to Thing One and Thing Two, I’ll do the same. Thing One: I have a day job. Like many of your day jobs, mine has nothing to do with bookselling. While acclimated to bookselling by temperament, previous ownership of an open shop, an illogical affinity for the general public, and simple desire, my financial situation doesn’t allow full-time participation. Life dealt me some cards, some I chose, but it all adds up to the hand that I hold and it doesn’t allow me to have an open shop for the foreseeable future. If you get a daytime missive from me it’s because I’m leaned over the keyboard and a plastic tray of Lean Cuisine’s finest during my lunch break at the job that pays the bills. Like being a full-time owner of a bookstore, my situation is tenuous. I’m a contractor who manages IT projects for one of the largest hospital systems in the US, but being a contractor I’m always “on the bubble” of being bumped out of my current situation if my work is done, or I’m not needed, or any number of other reasons. Thing Two: My day job was one long series of crises today. Just when it seemed like things were getting under control, a car hit a utility pole a block away and cut off power to our office where all IT operations occur. On emergency power only, with no lights in a generally windowless building, and late in the afternoon, it was rational for me to just give up and go home. I was certainly willing to do so, since my day had consumed most of my energy and good will. At that point my pager produced its hysterical beep and suggested that I bring my laptop computer to the café down the street. I did so and met my boss and his boss, not to partake of the specialty of the house, but to continue the workday. We logged into the house’s free wireless Internet service, hopped from there to our own network via a secure connection, and continued the day’s efforts. Undisturbed, we produced a rough draft of a plan we’d been working on. It was easily the most productive 1 ½ hours of our day. So what on earth does any of this have to do with bookselling or the Independent Online Booksellers Association? Thing One: The odds are good that I’m like you, given that most online booksellers have a primary job unrelated to bookselling and are part-time booksellers. As the incoming president I represent not just the majority of IOBA members, but the majority of online booksellers. I have experience that enables me to understand the needs of the high and low ends of the trade, but I’m working in the same manner as the majority and that majority is the group that drives and directs the trade. I see my presidential task as a project management task, specifically to support the full spectrum of online sellers while strengthening the part-time majority that may feel threatened by changes to the trade. Thing Two: I’m familiar with change on short notice. When circumstances turn for the worse I’m as adept as anyone at wringing my hands and emitting whining noises, but that doesn’t make anything better. When electric power went away there was still a way to change how I worked and made progress. When the IOBA is faced with change and crisis there is still a way to navigate through it and find an appropriate direction. 2007 is a year that will bring questions and decisions. The IOBA faces change. How might we offer more tangible benefits? How can we increase membership? What kind of organization are we today? More importantly, what kind of organization should we be today and what kind should we be in five years? The long-range answer will give us a definite direction for our short-term decisions. I appreciate the opportunity to work beside a capable, energized board of directors and appreciate the responsibility of improving our members’ collective lot. Let’s get busy. Best regards, Michael Watson president@ioba.org Michael Watson operates 20 Ants out of Indianapolis, IN and can be contacted at http://www.20ants.com.

What is AuctionExplorerBooks, in a nutshell? AuctionExplorerBooks is an on-line auction site dedicated to the sale of rare and out-of-print books. Only booksellers who are members of the major trade associations may become sellers. This is to give buyers confidence in the accuracy of the descriptions when bidding. Fees are low: $1 per lot to list and 5% commission on successful sales. There is no buyer’s premium. Sales are held monthly running for a week at a time. Viewing and bidding takes place throughout the week. In the nature of the internet it is truly international. The site’s servers are in Germany, the programming and support is done in South Africa where costs are competitive, and we are represented in Britain by Richard Sawyer. We presently have dealers from around the world listing, including the United Kingdom and the USA. We will soon announce a fixed price database site to be called “Book Shop” to complement the “Auction House.” This will be a no-frills site to which dealers can upload at very low cost—the equivalent of $5 per 1000 books per month. No commission will be charged on the sale of books listed in the Book Shop section nor will there be credit card charges or other interfaces. The buyers deal directly with the seller. We are a web based business built by booksellers for booksellers. -Who are the founders, and how many people are presently involved? James Findlay (37), a South African bookseller, was the founder. Finding sales reducing on ABE and other sites he conceived the auction site as a way of providing himself and other dealers with an additional selling tool in changed times. Starting in a modest way in Johannesburg six years ago he developed the concept and the sophisticated software needed to run an efficient and user-friendly auction site. James is now based in Edinburgh, Scotland but travels extensively. I purchased a half share in the business in 2003. My own business, Clarke’s Rare Books, was founded in the 1950s and I have been involved with it for thirty years. We are general antiquarian dealers but with a specialty in African material. We are members of the British Antiquarian Booksellers Association (celebrating its centenary this year), SABDA (the South African Bookdealers Association), and of course IOBA. Our chief programmer is Pablo Casado who is assisted by Billy Einkamerer. Recently my son Tony (21) who is studying commerce and IT at university has become involved on the development and promotional side. -Where did the idea come from? James, realizing the effect of the internet on our trade, is the originator of the idea. ABE, Biblio and other sites have shown precisely which books are scarce and which are not. Books previously thought of as quite rare now appear on the sites in multiple copies. In effect what could be called “static auctions” are held on these sites with numerous copies of a title being offered at different prices. James’s solution was to formalize this into an internet auction venue run by booksellers for booksellers, collectors and librarians. Today, we have over 60 registered sellers and our extensive mailings of registered buyers reach thousands of bibliophiles for each auction. -When did you start? The software development started in 2000 and the first auction took place in March 2001. The sales were held locally in South Africa with James as the only seller. It took some time to develop the concept and the software and to iron out all the bugs. In early 2004 we converted the site to US dollars, and from Auction 25 we invited qualifying booksellers from around the world to become sellers. -How many auctions have you had, how long do they last, and how often are they held? We have just concluded Auction 48. Sales are presently held every five weeks with the auction running for a week—so a six-week cycle. From the fall this year we intend to run them monthly with an auction ending on the first Thursday of every month. -I imagine the numbers go up a bit each time, in terms of participants, sold versus unsold, average price realized, etc. The number of registered buyers goes up steadily. From our statistics we know there are many more people who watch the auctions and then register and bid once they see books which interest them. At present about half the items listed sell on each auction—this is comparable to other online auctions. The percentage is rising. We encourage our sellers to set reasonable reserves. -What criteria do you use for allowing booksellers to list on the site? Our aim is to provide a site where bidders can buy with confidence knowing that the books offered are properly described by professional book people, and that there will be after-sale service and active assistance provided with any problems. Our criterion is to allow only booksellers who are members of the major trade associations to become sellers—groups such as the ABA, ABAA, ANZAAB, IOBA, PBFA, and the various trade associations affiliated to ILAB. This vetting process is fundamental to our business model. -Is special software required? Yes, our user-friendly software is downloadable, but dealers with broadband can upload on-line directly to the server and in that way there is no need to use our software. We have also built conversion programs that automatically convert for example a HomeBase file into our format. In that way the seller does not duplicate cataloging. -Can anyone register as a buyer? Yes, anybody who has a functioning email address can register. Should a buyer default on a sale he is immediately removed from the system. -Is this strictly for books, or is there room for other paper items? We encourage sellers to list anything that is related to the field of books—pamphlets, maps, and other paper ephemera—but there are no restrictions. Medals, stamps and watercolors have sold quite successfully on past auctions. -What are the essential differences between AEB and, say, eBay? We are a site dedicated solely to rare and out-of-print books. The fundamental difference is that professional booksellers stand behind the site both as the owners and sellers. We manage it in a hands-on fashion, are passionate about books and are independent and intend to remain so. If a buyer or seller needs help there are real people at hand to assist. -What is the fee structure? For the Auction House the fees are $1 per lot listed and 5% commission on successful sales. If a lot does not sell, then the fee is only the $1. The minimum reserve price is $20. For the Book Shop there is a monthly fee of $0.005 per book. This is the equivalent of $5 for 1000 books per month. We believe in only paying for what you use, so if a customer uploads 250 books, then for that month the fee is just (250 x $0.005) $1.25. How the billing works is much like a mobile phone “top up as you go” system. The sellers will debit their credit cards for say $20 or $50 on our secure paygate site (this is a banking site and we never see the credit card details at all). All Book Shop fees and auction charges and commissions will automatically be deducted from the credit. A detailed account page will be provided for each seller. -How can the buyer pay? The buyer deals directly with the seller. AuctionExplorerBooks.com does not get involved in the sale in any way. It is important to note that before buyers bid they must check at the bottom of the bidding page for what forms of payment the seller accepts. Usually credit cards are preferred but PayPal and other methods are accepted by some sellers. -What kinds of problems have you had so far? People think that the site is specifically for travel books due to the “Explorer” part in our domain name “AuctionExplorerBooks.com.” A problem, if the term is correct, is that we find the established dealers are very slow to see the advantage of what we offer. Many dealers, particularly in Britain, consign books to auctions paying up to 30% in commissions and buyer’s premiums to do so. We offer a site where for 5% the dealer can auction his books himself and in so doing meet new customers. In changed times dealers must endeavor to expand the scope of their businesses. We offer them a way to do so. We all have slow moving books on our shelves or items outside our fields of specialization. When offered on ABE and other database sites these items may take years to sell. If auctioned at reasonable reserves they will sell. In my case the auctions have become important as they allow us to take in on commission many items we might reject in the normal course of buying or which we may have directed to the conventional auctioneers. The important point is that we offer dealers an entirely new way to sell and to promote themselves. -Have you had to mediate any disputes? Happily we have not had any disputes so far. Should something arise we would involve the seller’s trade association in the resolution of any issue. -What part of the auction process is the most labor intensive for you at this stage? Technical support for first time sellers can take an hour over the phone, however we encourage customers to contact us and we are more than willing to talk them through the process. We pride ourselves on maintaining the personal touch, much like a traditional bookshop. Whilst extensive technical expertise is not required it does need some practice and the correct software to take good pictures of books, to size them appropriately and to upload them to the site. Our mantra is “the better the pictures which are uploaded the better the chance of achieving good prices.” -Are you profitable yet? All running costs are now covered as well as development expenditure. -Can you share some auction offerings that surprised you for one reason or another? On Auction Number 47 In Darkest Africa by Henry Morton Stanley sold for $6000 when the seller was expecting only $3000. However, this is a very scare set, being a signed deluxe edition. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck attracted 38 bids on the last auction, reaching a hammer price of $1103. On Auction 42 an album of autographed photos and autographs of famous entertainers was reserved at $120. After enthusiastic bidding the hammer price was $1691. It is this sort of unique material that works best on the site. In this case bids came in from all over the world. We find that where practical when a seller lists a low reserve, the bidding gets stimulated and more attention is drawn to the lot than normal. The reason for this is that the lot will appear in the featured section on our home page under the “most visited lots” and the “highest bidding activity” sections. Some sellers use this as a tactic to maximize exposure to a lot. On Auction 31 African Scenery and Animals by Samuel Daniell sold for $63,000. This was our highest hammer price so far and is a clear indication that very rare material such as this can be successfully sold on AuctionExplorerBooks.com.  On Auction 35 Live and Let Die (First State) by Ian Fleming was reserved for $2500 and ended going for $4416 because it was, as the seller described, “in first issue dustjacket identifiable by not stating ‘jacket devised by the author and executed by Kenneth Lewis’ on the front flap.” This lot drew 193 visits. -It’s hard to start up against an eBay, ABE, or Amazon, and if you make it really big they just buy you out. Are there any other good bookseller-run online auction start- ups out there you are aware of? Yes, you are correct. But we do not see ourselves as direct competitors to these huge general sites. We seek a niche market for old books, where collectors, librarians and dealers can focus and search for items of interest without all the clutter. As far as I know we are unique. I do not know of any other bookseller-run online auction site. -You provide additional increments of time at the end of the auction to safeguard against last second sniping, which tends to favor the seller. Buyers might argue that one’s maximum bid is as subject to late bids as it is to sniping, and hammer times are final in traditional auction settings. So, while this feature is genteel in keeping with your philosophy, it could alienate buyers a bit. This is a long way of asking how firm your policies are, as things evolve and you receive customer feedback. All bids placed in the last five minutes of an auction will be extended for a further three minutes to encourage a counter bid. Usually around 5% of the lots go into extended time. We find that this is the fairest system and it’s in keeping with the traditional auctioneering model that we are all used to. In the conventional auction room an auctioneer will usually call for “any more bids” before the hammer falls. We find that most of our users like the extended bidding system. Buyers who bid according to a budget now have the opportunity to place a bid on another item if they have been outbid (in the final minutes) on their first choice of book. -All property on AuctionExplorerBooks is sold as is, where is, as the saying goes. How does this policy coexist with the unconditional satisfaction guaranteed returns policy most professional booksellers live by? Because we only have professional sellers from accredited trade associations, mistakes are easily resolved. If a buyer is not happy with a description, they would simply send the book back to the seller and request a refund. It is in everybody’s interest to run everything ethically. -Are you AuctionExplorer (as it appears sometimes), AuctionExplorerBooks, or both? Two URLs lead to your home page (www.auctionexplorerbooks.com and www.auctionexplorer.biz). Auction Explorer, “the first and only Internet Explorer add-on for eBay,” is a fairly well-known downloadable software product (www.auction-explorer.com). And www.auctionexplorer.com (without the hyphen) is a whole different company that points to all kinds of ongoing auctions. When one Googles “Auction Explorer” as one word or two you seem to come right up at the top, but do you have any concerns about branding? Yes, we evolved and merged to www.auctionexplorerbooks.com from the .biz domain name. There are so many suffixes these days that it would be an impractical exercise to try and secure branding via a domain name. -Right now, your functional and friendly home page features a list of results from the previous auction, with the highest winning bids at the top. This includes the hammer price, reserve price, number of views and bids, and the seller’s name. There are links to log in, and to review your profile and bids, but naturally one must register first. Details and tips can be had in your Help pages. There is a keyword search box for previous auctions, as well as an archival categorical breakdown of prices realized on the far left. There is an informative and highly reassuring list of sellers for the upcoming auction; as well as a preview of that auction, with images, reserve prices, and estimated prices, though sellers and their offerings are not matched up until the auction begins. What website enhancements do you have in the works? Thank you for these compliments. Music to my ears. We have worked very hard to make the site intuitive and easy to use. We do need to improve our help pages although we try, where possible, to speak to anyone experiencing difficulties—a few words of explanation can save many pages of help! As to enhancements to the site, I mentioned earlier that we are soon to announce the addition of a no-frills database to be called simply “Book Shop” to complement the Auction House. Our site attracts a growing amount of traffic but as the auctions happen only monthly this traffic is highly cyclical—very busy during an auction and dropping off between sales. We think the Book Shop will take advantage of the auction traffic and lead buyers to the fixed price books between the sales. Buyers will be able to contact sellers directly from the Book Shop. As a dealer myself this is what I want—simply to meet customers directly without any interference from the listing site. -I became aware of your site a year or so ago, but must confess that I thought it was strictly for South African material. I know better now, but on reflection, perhaps this was a good way to get some experience and some traction. What will you do to internationalize AuctionExplorerBooks? We started out in South Africa, and thus became known as a venue for rare Africana material. Even our overseas sellers used to list a lot of books relating to Africa. However, now most of the traffic to the site comes from the USA, then Australia, then after the UK is South Africa. So in terms of that exposure we aren’t parochial any more. Word of mouth is still the greatest contributor to the growth of the business. We plan on doing book fairs in various countries starting later in the year. We look forward to this as it takes us back full circle to how books have traditionally been traded. This is a symbiosis for us, for we strongly believe that the essence of book selling has not changed with the internet and that is what we want to encourage. We stand for specialists, ethical dealers who are bibliophiles before being businessmen. That’s what we try to do, use these traditional methods of selling to shape the operating model of AuctionExplorerBooks.com. -As a buyer, I would be drawn to your site because the owners and sellers are professional and trustworthy, and because there may be some good bargains there. As a seller, however, I might think twice about whether eBay can deliver lots more eyeballs, and money is money no matter who pays me. Buyers get cheated on eBay a lot more than sellers do. Although your highly reasonable fee structure in combination with a judicious reserve provides a nice margin of safety for sellers, is it fair to say that this is one of your greatest challenges? We believe that buyers are returning to the trusted way of transacting with booksellers. All our sellers are vetted dealers who have proven their honourable track record. Likewise one wants serious buyers, and we know that many top international book collectors have registered on AuctionExplorerBooks.com. That is what we are after, not the quantity of viewing. Yes, we would like more dealers as sellers, but not to the detriment of the system. We have turned down many sellers. One must remember that with other generalized sites, rare books can end up being lost as there are search and cataloging constraints. Our target market is the rare and collectable book market only. With the massive number of general online sellers, we believe that more and more people are gravitating towards specialized sites such as ours. Many of our buyers wait for our auctions and have told us that they spend most of their budget for books on AuctionExplorerBooks.com. It must be noted that if a buyer does not follow through with a sale, the seller does not get charged for the commission and the buyer is barred from participating in future auctions. This is the extreme and has only happened twice since 2003. The point is, we protect our sellers just as much as we advocate a secure and reliable site to the buyers. -Common books that used to do well on eBay (and ABE et al) die there now, so rare and collectible are the watchwords with online book auctions these days. I like your $20 minimum reserve, everything is well organized and transparent, and the site in general is like stumbling across a bookish oasis. Looking back, what has surprised you the most about this venture? What has surprised us is how much images contribute to the successful sale of a book. In the past catalogues were issued as text only. These days a lot will draw very little attention if a digital image is not added to the text description. The internet is international. An auction can be run from anywhere in the world. Our server is in Germany, Paul is based in Cape Town and James travels a lot. Provided there’s a reliable internet connection we can respond to customers from a Melbourne internet café or from a hotel in Dubai. -AuctionExplorerBooks shares two main goals with IOBA—a concern for professional standards, and wresting back some control. I think it’s great you are a member of IOBA, by the way, and wish more ABA, ABAA, and ILAB level members who do online business would enlist. On behalf of the entire professional bookselling community, Paul, I would like to thank you and your cohorts for your stellar efforts, and wish you great success with AuctionExplorerBooks in the years to come. Thank you. Very much appreciated. We see our goals as very similar to those of IOBA. We seek to improve the standard and ethics of online book dealing. Several members are already sellers on AuctionExplorerBooks and we hope many more will sign up in the future. I look forward to chatting with them and to helping them make AuctionExplorer a profitable and pleasant bookselling experience. Paul Mills operates Clarke’s Africana & Rare Books out of Constantia, South Africa and can be contacted at http://www.clarkes.co.za. AuctionExplorerBooks queries to support@auctionexplorerbooks.com.

Born in New England, and a New Yorker by adoption, I have lived all of my life on the northeastern coast. I have flown across the country numerous times, both for business and for pleasure, but until recently I have rarely set foot in that vast tract known as “Middle America.” In the past few months I have made brief forays to three non-coastal, Middle American cities. Each time I was there for a purpose other than book-buying, but I did try to carve out some time to scout the local bookshops, both used and new. The first city that I visited was Dallas, Texas. I flew into Dallas in early December, and had one long afternoon at leisure. I had hoped to have the opportunity to visit some bookstores, or book-related places of interest, so I put out a query or two on the bookseller listservs. It was disheartening to learn that the only used bookstores of possible interest were at least an hour’s drive from downtown. Since I did not have a car at my disposal, I arrived at the hotel and hoped to place myself in the capable hands of the hotel concierge. I told him I was interested in bookstores in Dallas, and he sighed and said that there were none. When I told him that I had finished my book on the plane ride down, he recommended the hotel gift shop which it turned out carried only the latest Grisham, Patterson and some paperback romances. The closest bookstore to downtown was a branch of one of the two major chains, and it was a 20-30 minute trip via public transportation. He pulled out a map and circled the major downtown attractions that were within walking distance of the hotel. The first stop on his tour was the original Neiman Marcus store. It was so close to the hotel that I decided it was worth a look. When I walked in, I felt like I had entered a movie set. It was only a few weeks before Christmas, but there was nobody in the store. I needed some shaving cream, because the baggage scanners strictly enforced the three ounce limit and tossed out the tube in my carry-on bag. I had three sales clerks helping me with one small purchase and I think it was their major sale of the day. Needless to say, there was no book department. I left the store and headed over to the main tourist attraction in downtown Dallas, the Sixth Floor Museum. This museum is dedicated to the Kennedy assassination and is located on the actual sixth floor of the former Texas Book Depository where the shots were fired from. The exhibition hall looks like an expansive SoHo loft with large blown up photographs and video monitors playing newsreels from that weekend in November, 1963. I was 12 years old then and remember that Friday vividly. It was an eerie feeling to walk around the museum. About a ten foot by ten foot area near the window overlooking the grassy knoll has been preserved with the original flooring and stacks of textbook boxes. It is sealed off by a glass wall. I watched the old newsreels of the early years of the Kennedy administration, the Pablo Casals state dinner, Carolyn playing in the Oval Office, and Jackie speaking Spanish in Mexico. Then I stared out the window and saw that the traffic pattern and that grassy expanse have remained pretty much the same as they were that day. It must be sad for a city to become known for such a tragic event. If I was a poet, I would write a haiku about Dallas. Something like . . . The Texas Book Depository The musty book boxes stand like gargoyle scaring the book people away. Shortly after I returned, I received a call from a new customer who wanted me to overnight a book to someone in the New York area, who for a fee would go to a reading and have the book signed. This customer was willing to spend $20 to have a $16 book sent by Federal Express to someone else who would charge a substantial amount to have the book signed and then mail it to him. As it turned out, this customer was from Dallas. “We don’t get many authors to come down here to read,” he lamented. I was not surprised. Two weeks later, I found myself in Kansas City, another Middle American metropolis. This time I made sure that I had a rental car at my disposal, and I had done some research on the internet and found a used bookshop not far from downtown that specialized in Irish books. I was excited because in addition to being a book dealer, I am also a Joyce collector. This shop was in an upscale strip mall that was both clean and well lit. The Irish offerings, however, were scanty and disappointing. I did manage to find a small carton of items that I was interested in purchasing for resale. The proprietor gave me a nice discount, and we had an interesting conversation about the book business. He also mentioned that there was one other used bookstore in town that was a “must stop.” He gave me the directions and I hurried uptown to arrive before closing time. This shop, Spiveys, is not in an upscale strip mall. The building is at the intersection of two narrow streets, and one must search for a place to park. It is neither clean nor well lit. It smells of tobacco, and cat and dog and dust. What it has is books, thousands and thousands of them on two huge floors. They are stacked from floor to ceiling, in alcoves and under tables. There are old books, newer books, common books, and scarce books. It reminded me of the last of the stores on Fourth Avenue in Manhattan that I used to frequent when I first moved to New York, and alas have all closed down. This is one of the great old-fashioned used bookshops left in the United States. I could have easily spent several days there. They graciously stayed open while I, the last customer of the day, browsed around. I ended up shipping back both a very large carton of items for resale, and for myself, one very nice first American edition ofFinnegan’s Wake which had just come into the shop. I also had a nice conversation with the owner, Mr. Spivey, who is quite elderly but as sharp as a tack. We talked about New York City bookshops closing, and he had read in The New York Times about the two bookstores on the Upper West Side that were about to close. He had been astonished when he read the rents they were paying. He told me a number of stores in Kansas City had closed also, but that it was good for his business. Since he was one of the last venues people had for selling their used books, he was able to acquire some really good ones. His shop certainly attested to this. Again, if I were a poet, I would write a haiku, something like . . . Spivey’s Kansas City Gateways to the west know books are necessary for the long journey. The day after New Year’s I found myself in Minneapolis, another Middle American city this time way up in the northern part of the country. Minneapolis in January is only for the hardy traveler, unless one keeps to the downtown area where all of the buildings are connected by a second floor skyway. If you stay in a downtown hotel you can manage to wander around without ever having to go outside. There is one used bookstore right in the heart of the city. They were in the midst of a winter sale, which was rather unusual. The cheaper the book, the bigger the percentage discount. When I questioned the clerk, he rightly told me that it was much harder to find a good $100 book than to find a good $20 or $30 book. I readily agreed. The pricing structure was such that it was hard to find much that I could re-sell at a profit despite the sale prices, but I did find a few obscure academic Joyce books for my own collection. There is a “funkier” neighborhood containing several used bookstores a few miles out of the downtown area. It is called “Uptown” even though it is actually south of the center of the city. It is more like the Greenwich Village of Minneapolis, with low buildings, ethnic restaurants and cafés. There are no indoor concourses or skyways. One walks on the street like in most other American cities. I easily hailed a cab from a downtown street corner and reached the area with the bookshops after a short but expensive ten minute ride. As I exited the cab a bitterly cold wind blew into my face, so I hurried across the street and into a warm, welcoming bookshop. The rents must be cheaper here, because the stores were much larger than the one downtown, and I managed to find a number of books for re-sale at both of the shops in this area, even though they were much less generous with their dealer discount policies, and arranged to have the boxes shipped back home. The only problem arose when it was time to leave. I walked over to the corner to hail a taxi back to my downtown hotel. I stood there in the wind for a good ten minutes and not one taxi passed by, with or without a passenger. So, I went back to the store across the street and was told that in this neighborhood one had to call a taxi company and order a cab over the telephone. I called a local number, and was redirected twice to other companies before I was told that a car would be there shortly. For forty minutes I kept going from the shop to the street corner and back, afraid that I would miss my last chance for a ride back downtown. Eventually a taxi cab did pull up and I arrived back at the hotel with a lot of good books and only a little bit of frostbite. The next day I decided to go book shopping like the rest of the city, so I took the light rail, a commuter train from downtown to the Mall of America. This forty minute ride costs all of $1.50 each way ($2.00 during rush hour). The famous Mall of America is like every other mall in America only more so. It is four stories high, with a giant indoor amusement park in the middle. I think it contains a branch of every single chain store in America except for Borders books, which is strangely absent. At present there are three bookshops in the mall: Steven Covey, Barnes & Noble, and Atlantic Books. I go out of my way to avoid anything with the name Covey on it, ever since I received one of his business self-help books as a Christmas gift from a clueless department head many years ago. We all got one and were supposed to read and be prepared to discuss a chapter at the beginning of every departmental staff meeting. I read four pages, and immediately listed it as new on Half.com. I priced it cheaper than the current lowest price and it sold in half an hour. Over the next year, I found several copies abandoned by employees who left the firm, and proceeded to sell them all, but I would walk a plank before I purchased anything that he has published. One can’t miss the Barnes & Noble, as it is on the first floor right next to one of the main entrances to the mall. It is quite large with a coffee bar and a respectable local interest section with a large selection of small press books about Minnesota and some rather obscure books by famous local authors. The third shop, Atlantic Books, is a part of a smaller chain, and is located way up on the third floor at the opposite end of the mall from Barnes & Noble. I had never heard of this chain, so I hiked the mile or so it took to reach it, passing a branch of every chain restaurant in America. This store was in the process of going out of business, so they were having a liquidation sale of 40% on all new and remainder books. I bought some quality remainders (without remainder marks) for very cheap prices, as well as a couple of new books. If they had been willing to ship from the store I would have bought quite a few more. The clerk told me that several of the staff were banding together to open a new independent store, not in that mall where the rents were astronomical but in a small suburban area nearby. They had submitted a business plan and customer base list to a local bank and were expecting to receive the financing by the end of the month. I boarded the light rail and headed back downtown, encouraged. If I were a poet I would write one last haiku. Atlantic Books Even Arctic air can’t keep the bookstores hidden behind a mall’s doors. Joe Perlman operates Mostly Useful Fictions out of East Northport, NY and can be contacted at http://www.mostlyusefulfictions.com.

Organizations often produce very dry and seemingly worthless records and publications. I remember an early book show where my young daughter and I felt sorry for the woman next to our four table spread, as she only filled up part of a single table with a handful of Alcoholics Anonymous books. It really looked pretty pathetic until she sold the first one for $15,000 or so. One of the biggest surprises I have had in what might be called the “organizational ephemera” market is the value of early Jehovah’s Witnesses material, as the literature they currently push falls somewhere on the paper food chain between scented cards that fall out of magazines and last year’s phone book, and it didn’t seem like aging would help all that much. I almost recycled a few boxes of it, as there was little pricing information out there, even utilizing eBay’s market research feature where you pay more to look back further at the record of completed auctions. I floated some test pieces but instead of sinking they walked on the water, with most averaging over $25 and some going in the hundreds. The Jehovah’s Witnesses have a nice website, but I will reprint the first three paragraphs of the Wikipedia entry, without all the hyperlinks. “Jehovah’s Witnesses are an international Christian denomination which originated in the United States with the 19th century Bible Student movement. They adopted their present name in 1931 under the leadership of Joseph Franklin Rutherford. Believing that all other religions are false, Jehovah’s Witnesses reject traditional Christian doctrines such as the Trinity, eternal torment in hell and the immortality of the soul. The central theme of their preaching is God’s Kingdom (that is, God’s rule over the Earth) with Jesus Christ as its king. The Witnesses believe this rule began with the Second Coming or presence of Christ. Originally, this was believed to have occurred invisibly in 1874, but this date was later revised to 1914. “Witnesses believe that their faith is the restoration of first-century Christianity. In areas where they are active, they are commonly known for their door-to-door preaching and their objection to blood transfusions, and for not celebrating birthdays or holidays. Their most widely-known publications are the religious magazines The Watchtower and Awake!. Official membership of the organization, counted as those who preach each month, is 6.7 million as of August 2006. “Other Witness teachings include the recognition and use of a personal name for God, translated as Jehovah in English, as vital for acceptable worship. They believe that Jesus’ death was necessary to atone for the sin brought into the world by the first man, Adam, thus opening the way for the hope of everlasting life for mankind. It is also taught that 144,000 people will receive immortal life in heaven with Jesus Christ as co-rulers guiding the rest of humankind to perfection on a paradise earth during the 1000 year reign. More specifically, Witnesses believe that in the war of Armageddon, which they believe to be imminent, the wicked will be destroyed. The survivors of this event, along with individuals deemed worthy of resurrection, will form a new society ruled by a heavenly government and have the possibility of living forever in an earthly paradise.” Anyway, most of this material was from the 1930s through the 1940s. It included broadside sheets titled Informant, Bulletin for Jehovah’s Witnesses, Kingdom News, and the apparently very rare Director for Field Publishers; periodicals such as The Scope and The Golden Age; interesting foreign material including issues of the large format German language Trost magazine from 1940 that was probably not tolerated much after that date; annual worldwide assembly programs and convention reports; JW examinations and applications; printed songs of praise; little solicitation and testimony cards they used to hand out; instructions on how to behave while being arrested; fliers for radio broadcasts; letterhead correspondence; and all kinds of printed matter. “Riches of Jehovah’s Kingdom,” for example, was described as follows. “Four page pamphlet, does not give the dates (just days), but looks late 1930s or so, measures 4.25″ by 5.75″ closed, inside is a list of Nassau County towns and the times and home addresses of study meetings, one in Freeport for ‘Colored’ members, list of five minute Judge Rutherford radio lectures by radio station.” This nondescript little thing went for $169.49. The jewel in the crown was an original linen cloth banner used at the August, 1944 St. Louis Assembly where Judge Rutherford made one of his earthly appearances. On the down side, anything after the 1940s got low or no bids. Buyers of organizational ephemera are typically nice paper people. They tend to be focused, knowledgeable in their field, prompt in all dealings, and polite (though chances are some of them don’t like each other). The JW buyers were especially swell. Some of these items went into private collections (which will perhaps be made more public some day), some went to institutions (including a donation I made), and others were headed for display cases in new Assembly Halls. All that collection and construction makes one feel a little better about the nearness of Armageddon. In the meantime, always check on the collectibility and value of these kinds of things before discarding or passing them on. Especially early 1900s stuff, which was truly ephemeral, and not really meant to be witnessed again. Shawn Purcell operates Balopticon Books & Ephemera and can be contacted at http://www.balopticon.com #ephemera

Bookstore: The Life and Times of Jeannette Watson and Books & Co., by Lynne Tillman. NY: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1999. Books & Co. was situated in a wonderful location on the Upper East Side of Manhattan not far from the Whitney Museum. It was the kind of place where you’d see somebody like Woody Allen browsing the shelves, as he fondly recalls doing in his foreword. Allen even included the shop in one of his later films. An excerpt from the author’s introduction follows. “Bookstore is the history of Jeannette Watson and Books & Co., the independent bookstore she owned that opened its doors in 1978 and shut them in 1997. Closing the century, Books & Co.’s near-twenty years represent a significant sample of this country’s literary, social, and cultural life. It is a history rich in books and people, in the lives of writers and readers. It is a story representative of its period, of issues germane to writing and publishing, to bookselling generally, and to independent bookstores specifically. “The genesis of bookstores and of writers, editors, and readers is shared. Why people love books, why they write or publish them, why they read or sell them spring from related interests, needs, and desires. Books & Co. was a nexus for literary achievements and hopes, for readerly proclivities, for human interactions—from a child’s love of writing to a novelist’s debut, a chance encounter to a love affair, from a casual comment to a book deal, a book’s indelible effect on a reader to a memorial reading for its author. “While histories are subject to contestation and elaboration, they are essentially stories. ‘Story’ lives inside ‘history,’ and both share an etymological root with ‘store.’ Not coincidentally, what’s in a bookstore is not only books on shelves, but also the stories of those who enter—customers, staff, editors, browsers, publishers, publicists, writers. Books & Co. was literally, and virtually, filled with stories. “Readers and writers met and embraced there. It was a lover’s embrace, usually metaphorical, and, in a powerful sense, Bookstore is a love story. Book lovers often love bookstores and are faithful to them. They discover their tunnel of love in a bookstore. It’s their clubhouse, too, and, since bookstore lovers are a floating group, happy to discover a good one anywhere, the club can meet anywhere.” From here, Ms. Tillman provides a quite good summary of American bookselling from its earliest days to its late 1990s incarnation. This in turn is followed by a description of how she tackled this project, which involved numerous interviews, as well as delving into diary entries, scrapbooks, and old correspondence, programs, fliers, and publications. The result is half biography and half cultural history, and it all works very well. The format of the book follows the form of the project. Jeannette Watson speaks in the first person, interspersed with hundreds of indented related commentaries from those who knew and worked with her. She explains that she could never address people by their first names, for example, such as director/screenwriter Robert Benton, and in the next passage Benton himself says the only thing he didn’t like about going into the shop was being called Mr. Benton, as it made him feel so old. There is much of interest between these covers. Jeannette considered her privileged upbringing a hindrance—from which reading books was the principle escape—and her father was the powerful and charismatic Tom Watson of IBM fame. Adrift and uncertain in life, the bookstore plan came firmly to mind during a long recovery from surgery. A good friend of her father’s, the seemingly ever-present Brendan Gill, became the reassuring godfather of the new bookstore. Jeannette took a crash course in the profession, wooed noted bookman Burt Britton away from the Strand, and found a suitable location at 939 Madison Avenue. This was a fixer-upper, on two floors, but was soon fitted out with nice traditional bookcases and famous features like the Wall, the island horseshoe counter, and the upstairs deep green leather couch. It was to be part literary salon and part bookstore, with an emphasis on poetry, fiction, and signed works. Britton knew absolutely everyone, and fashionable blonde Jeannette had the vision and the financial resources, so off they were on a bold adventure. Soon enough there was trouble in paradise, however. Bookkeeping methods were lax, there was no room for the overstock, staff turnover was high, Madison Avenue rent and piles of bills kept them in the red, and Jeannette was relegated to the cash register while Burt held court. “When Paul Goldberger’s article appeared in the New York Times on the architecture of the bookstore, he called it Burt Britton’s bookstore. I wasn’t mentioned.” Things came to a boil, and Britton left the concern in 1980. A triumvirate of talented clerks was promoted, there was lots of money around in the go-go ‘80s, and Books & Co. made a nice recovery from the brink of ruin. Jeannette somehow found time to marry Alexander Sanger, the president of Planned Parenthood NYC, raise three sons, and read voraciously. “I’m scuba diving with Ralph,” says Alex, “and she’s polished off all of Proust, on a six-day vacation.” As Jeannette found her footing, Books & Co. became a Mecca for serious book lovers in search of the important and unusual. The philosophy section became the jewel in the crown, poetry flourished, the classics survived, and great works on art, photography and erotica helped support some of the more esoteric inventory. Books were hand sold, which is fast becoming a lost art. The store wasn’t simply stocked—it was curated. Writers received strong support, most notably through a reading series breathtaking for the number of events held (often several per week) and the authors involved (a complete list is provided at the rear). Many of them went on to true fame. Books on bookselling should give lots of details, and here we are privy to Watson’s initial investment, annual expenditures and income, lease agreements, profit margins, return rates, wages, floor space measurements, and all kinds of good solid data. There are funny anecdotes throughout. A young Fran Lebowitz recalls paying her rent by selling review copies to the Strand. “It was the only experience I’ve ever had in life where I got more than I thought I was going to get.” Roy Blount, Jr. inscribed a book for Jeannette, “This is my favorite copy. I sewed the binding myself.” Calvin Trillin weighs in. Scandalous literary gossip abounds. There’s lots on everyday operations too, like dealing with reps and returns, decorating windows, and telling grateful customers like Susan Sontag what they should be reading. Jeannette had dinner with the legendary Frances Steloff of the Gotham Book Mart, then in her nineties, who confided she could still stand on her head. She reminisced about paying clerks thirty-five cents an hour, and firing Tennessee Williams for being late his first day on the job. Steloff advised, “You never say to customers you’re out of a book; you walk them to the section. Even if you don’t have the book, they may see something else they like.” Celebrity shoppers included Jackie Onassis, Kurt Vonnegut, Neil Simon, Robin Williams, John F. Kennedy, Jr., Edward Albee, Romare Bearden, John Cleese, Elmore Leonard, Candice Bergen, Jacques Derrida, and many others. General William Westmoreland was in griping about a Viet Nam book the same week Michael Jackson picked up a British import on skinhead photography and Aesop’s Fables. Margaux and Mariel Hemingway popped in for a Sagan novel. Truman Capote would whisk Jeannette away to the Carlyle for a Tab. Sam Shepard and Jessica Lange smooch in the back of the store, a smiling James Baldwin is outside looking in at a window of his works, and John and Yoko walk their Great Danes past in the middle of the night. Like so many other idealistic 1970s endeavors, Jeannette’s unique combination of nineteenth century salon and cutting edge literary modernism struggled to survive in more dire times. After the stock market crash and amid the rise of chain stores and the advent of deep discounts, revenues dropped, and key staff departed for greener pastures. Books & Co. had enjoyed a fruitful relationship with the nearby Whitney Museum, but they bought up the block, and would not come to terms on a new lease agreement. All of this played out in the media, with much wailing and finger pointing. One observer likened it to a cultural institution acting like a business against a business that was serving as a cultural institution, but the Whitney had problems of its own, in part due to less governmental support. Hundreds of independent bookstores were closing their doors, but this time around others did not spring up to replace them. Fran Lebowitz in particular rails against the Disneyfication of Times Square and the disappearance of iconic oddities in favor of bland, tourist-friendly, profit-driven homogenization. Jeannette let Fran smoke in her office too! There’s an eight page photo section, and the index is very functional. In a nice afterword, Jeannette Watson lets us know what she’s been up to. She thanks Lynne Tillman for her splendidly woven account, and we even learn the small town library in Maine where Books & Co.’s famous green leather couch ended up. Excerpts follow, from Jeannette unless otherwise noted. “Jeannette talked to a lot of the bookshop owners, and I remember that a couple of them weren’t that nice to her. They thought, She’s a dilettante. She’s the daughter of so-and-so . . . They didn’t take her very seriously. But Jeannette was serious. She is a person who is very low key, but very intense underneath it all. When she wants to do something, there isn’t anything that’s going to stop her, and she wanted a bookstore.” – Jane Stanton Hitchcock “Burt selected most of the books, some of which went on the Wall. The Wall was his invention. It was intended to represent a complete spectrum of hardcover books, with as many translations as possible, of the great works of literature from Shakespeare to living writers. When you entered the bookstore, it was on the left. The entire left wall consisted of important works of literature.” “All of Burt’s favorite writers would be on that wall, contemporary writers along with the good classics. Some of these were very popular writers—John Cheever was a big favorite of his. He knew all of these people from the Strand over the years, and they would come in, and in a matter of less than two months, the bookstore was a hit.” – Albert Murray “The image of the store was essential, and the window was an important part of it. We had a point of view, we were a curatorial eye focused on books, a gallery of books. The first window featured Barry Hannah’sAirships, and in July 1978, a beautiful edition of a Colette book filled the window. Lee Radziwill came in to buy it.” “It was still a very heady moment in the cultural world. There were bookstores on Fourth Avenue, there was Max’s Kansas City, there were still salons where the art world went. There was certainly nothing like Books & Co. when she started it. The last bookstore like it was Haywood Wakefield, on Madison Avenue and Sixty-fifth Street, started in the early forties by Betty Parsons, Ila McDermott, and Marian Willard. It closed in the mid-sixties. What Jeannette created was an instant salon. She provided a meeting place for writers, where writers felt nurtured.” – Alexandra Anderson-Spivy “I had been in love with Books & Co. from the very first time I came to New York with my college girlfriend, Dara. I was in graduate school, in Iowa, in the MFA program, and it was 1979. We wandered around the city all day in a sort of combined fit of ecstasy and terror. We went to the Whitney and stumbled back out; we’d been out on the sidewalks by then for about fifteen hours, and I said, ‘Look, there’s a bookstore.’ We walked in, and I knew immediately. You can just tell when you cross the threshold that there’s something profound there. That it’s more than just a bookstore. I don’t know what it is. I think all those great books must actually exhale into the ether. Dara and I looked through the books and went upstairs and realized there was a big sofa up there, just sat on it, and no one was going to tell you to get out, no one was going to tell you to buy anything, you could just sit on the sofa. I felt like a refugee who had suddenly been picked up by a boat. We sat on that sofa for an hour, reading books of poetry we couldn’t believe she had. Dara picked up books from the philosophy section. Jeannette has stuff that you could find other places, but you’d have to really search for it. I was just starting to write and sitting on that sofa with Madison Avenue roaring around below through the glass, all these books around us, I kept thinking, This is that thing that’s been in the cartoon balloon over my head. This is what I’m sitting in my shitty little apartment in Iowa City trying to create and get to.” – Michael Cunningham “Over 70 percent of the people who came into the store didn’t want to be helped. We recognized that by the way they walked in. They moved purposefully past the register, didn’t make eye contact, and didn’t want to be greeted. For them the bookstore was a solitary experience, and they wanted to make their voyage alone.” “Readings were not my cup of tea. Usually it was an overexposure to the author’s ego. It was as often as not a disappointment to meet an author—you’d have read wonderful prose for a long time only to find out that the author was sort of a jerk. The readings were often difficult from the standpoint of watching the hungry arrive. Everybody involved was hungry. The author involved had such a hungry ego, and a certain segment of the public was so hungry for the author, for the fame and all of that stuff, that it was hard to watch after a while.” – Susan Scott “You always feel like a fraud as a writer. It’s such an ephemeral art. You never feel quite real. It helps to make you feel real and part of a community and part of an ancient tradition when you’re reading aloud.” – Barbara Lazear Ascher “When Gary Snyder read, in a tribute to North Point Press, Allen Ginsberg introduced him. During the reading, little white things flew across the room. I thought, What are they? I looked around. Ginsberg was sitting next to me, using a Swiss Army knife to clip his nails. Very peculiar. When Ginsberg spoke about Snyder, he referred to him as ‘an antenna of his race’ and then eloquently quoted Shelley, who called poets ‘the unacknowledged legislators.’” “I could always remember the stock really well, how many copies we had. This is why people—now that computers came in—can’t really understand how people could keep all this information in their head. It was always pretty easy. I knew every book we had in the store. I think it was almost a visual memory. I remembered what a book looked like, what the spine looked like, and all that.” – Peter Philbrook “I believe that prices have to be protected. Price controls are the only thing that can save independent bookstores. No discounts. No underselling to drive the little guy out of business. One standard, fixed price for every book—period. Some other countries have done this, and it works. We’ve done it with milk. Why can’t we do it with books?” – Paul Auster “One of the wonderful things about being in the used-book business is that you’re constantly putting out odd things. You watch how quickly the odd thing sells, and you always say, ‘Jesus, I never would have thought there would have been a market in Portland for a book on Cleveland, or a book on nuclear physics.’ We were much more willing to broaden the selection, because we had the experience of what could sell as a used book. We didn’t go into it with a prejudice that Americans are dumb and stupid.” – Michael Powell “When Arthur left, Steven Varni stepped in or up, to become our buyer. Our buyers or employees usually emerged organically. Steven had been trained from our Dante’s inferno, the basement, up through to the celestial harmony of the philosophy section on the second floor.” “But I’m hopeful that what will happen is there will be a kind of countervailing feeling, which will drive people to more original, idiosyncratic places. Ray Oldenburg wrote a book, The Great Good Place, about great good places that help weave a community together. People are going to be searching and yearning for this sense of an essential experience, not a manufactured experience. I think reading gives that to you, when you’re sitting alone with a book, and I think going into a weird, unusual bookstore does that to you as well.” – Mitchell Kaplan “For obvious reasons, one might expect New York to have more enlightened bookstores than any other city in America. But no, I can think of four or five cities that are better for book buying than here. And what New York has isn’t much—certainly there’s nothing now like what Books & Co. was—and that’s a major handicap for lives in which reading plays a large part. I don’t want to buy only the books I already know I want to acquire. I want to discover books and writers I don’t know about. That happens in a great bookstore. On-line ordering can never match the informativeness of being able to browse.” – Susan Sontag “Though I loved meeting writers and being surprised when they came by, I was sustained, as was Books & Co., by the weekly and daily customers, the regulars, and the beauty of daily life in the store. It was through the bookstore that I learned to enjoy people and to be easy talking with them. It was the bookstore’s gift to me.” “I’d hit my stride, been in the business twenty years, knew something about it, knew the writers, and knew the ropes. I could do an even better job if I could continue. If I couldn’t be a world traveler, rock star, ethnobotanist, or live with some tribe in the Amazon, I could sell books and publish them. I wanted to continue, but the climate was undermining. There was turmoil and fear in the industry. My fiery determination was burning low. Structural and other changes were affecting all of us, booksellers, publishers, writers, editors—everyone.” “I returned to the podium and gave my last speech at the store. It was a singular moment. It was the store’s swan song. But I was a bookseller to the end. I thanked the audience for coming, thanked Edna [O’Brien] for her reading and gracious remarks, and then encouraged everyone to buy a copy of her book and get it signed. Edna had ended the evening just the way I liked it—on a hopeful note. I did hope that Books & Co., and what it stood for, would live on in people’s hearts and minds.” Shawn Purcell operates Balopticon Books & Ephemera and can be contacted at http://www.balopticon.com.

This is the first in a series of proposed articles taking a brief look at the pros and cons of the various multi-dealer book listing databases. The three largest of these databases—AbeBooks.com, Alibris.com and Amazon.com’s Marketplace—all have two things in common. So far, at least, they have the most traffic, the most books listed, and they generate the most sales; and they are also the sites which have changed the most over the past 11 years, for better or for worse, and they are continuing to change the most dramatically. AbeBooks.com was originally started as a simple, traditional multi-dealer listing site. Most of the original dealers on the site were experienced professionals, the majority of the customers on the site were collectors or experienced buyers of used books, and even after all of the changes, the bones of this simple listing service still remain. However, as other database services like Bibliofind and Bibliocity were bought out and shut down by the new owners, AbeBooks grew significantly in size, and that growth brought both benefits and problems. FOR BUYERS: PROS – Possibly the largest database. AbeBooks now states that it has over 100 million listings from over 13,500 dealers, and it is definitely the easiest database to search. No restrictions on prices of listings (other than a $1 minimum) and no requirements that books fit into an existing database, so ephemera, manuscripts and many unique items can be listed and found here. – A “keyword” search which is in reality an “almost any word” search (searches title, author, description, publisher information and actual keywords). If you are looking for a book about the Andersonville Prison and the author’s name was “Robert something” and you know it was published before 1880, a search on AbeBooks will give you the title (only one in this case, but sometimes there might be a few different results to choose from). This is a great feature and surprisingly one that AbeBooks does not seem to promote. – Simple “all in one” search results, easily modifiable. Of the three largest databases, AbeBooks is the only site where all of the results are returned at one time. In other words, there is no need to select several variants of the title or author and click on each one to see 25 books here, or 10 books with this variant. The entire list of 5, 10 or even 10,000 books will be returned, sorted according to your preference. While getting an extremely long list of books might also be a “con,” the fact that you can modify or narrow your searches in so many different ways (including using optional Boolean searches) means that AbeBooks is the most efficient and fastest database to search. – Ability to save your search preferences. While this is rather limited, you can save the default order for results (highest price, lowest, newest listing, alpha by author or title), Boolean search on or off, etc. – Want matches. AbeBooks will store want matches indefinitely based on many different criteria, from a simple author’s name or keyword to a want for a signed first edition in dust jacket of a specific title. This was a feature of AbeBooks from its inception, and unfortunately, recent changes reduced its utility. Email notifications are only sent out once a day, increasing the possibility that you will miss a “hot” match, the full description of the books is no longer included, and the all of the books are not shown—just the lowest priced and most expensively priced. In addition, wants are no longer matched on “edits” so if a seller listed a book with an error in the author or title or reduces the price of the book by 50% you will not see a match when the spelling is corrected, or the price discounted. The plus side of these changes is that a buyer no longer gets so many matching emails, or such long ones. In addition, AbeBooks added a feature where you can click on see all listings matching your criteria by newest first. Despite the changes, this remains the most effective want-matching search of any database. – Easy contact with booksellers. While not as easy as it used to be, it is still the most friendly in terms of direct contact, either through the AbeBooks system (which retains a copy, and sends you a copy of your inquiry) or by bypassing the system and emailing them directly. The “ask a bookseller a question” link is displayed with each book on the “first” results page, and if a buyer clicks on that, the email address is open and available. In addition, there is a link to the bookseller’s homepage (either an AbeBooks homepage or the seller’s own website) under “bookseller and payment information.” – An international site. While North American dealers predominate, AbeBooks has a significant number of dealers from other countries, and all of their books can be searched at one time in one place. FOR BUYERS: CONS – Possibly the largest database. Unfortunately, among the 100 million listings are many repetitive listings, “re-listings” of books not actually in the possession of the seller, listings of photocopies, print-on-demand books and e-books with sometimes inaccurate information, books inadequately described (“unknown binding”) or with little or no condition descriptions. – Lack of quality control. If a bookseller calls a book club edition a first edition or uses “autograph” to mean that the previous owner wrote his/her name in the book, then these books will be included in the search results for “first edition” or “signed” books respectively. AbeBooks takes a “hands-off” approach when it comes to dealers’ pricing and descriptions, which means that the buyer must exercise due diligence, read descriptions carefully and ask questions before purchasing. AbeBooks has taken some steps recently to clear up some of the most egregious offenses: it added a quantity field so no longer will 20 identical copies be shown individually, and it removed some “booksellers” whose listings consisted of nothing but hundreds of thousands or even millions of books they did not possess. Nevertheless, dealers on AbeBooks are still permitted to upload long lists of new books, where wholesalers or publishers will do fulfillment. – No ratings or other indication of the reliability of a bookseller. This has been proposed for years now, and it will eventually be put into place. – Inaccurate search results, when modifying factors are selected. The problem of non-qualifying books has already been mentioned, but it is also true that books which do meet the search criteria are sometimes screened out. – Inaccurate help fields. Even though it has been almost 3 years since the “keyword search” changed from a keyword only search to one which searches author title and description as well as keywords, this information was changed in the “top 5 search tips” link (which appears only on the advanced search page), but not in the much longer and more detailed “search tips” shown at the bottom of every results page. The same is true of punctuation in searches: the top 5 tips warn you that apostrophes do affect the search results; the search tips tell you that punctuation does not count. – Shipping rates shown for the country of the bookseller only. This should be a buyer-centric field. After all, a US customer wants to know how much a German seller will charge to ship the book to the US, not how much he charges to ship a book in Germany. – Changes that are often cosmetic and not clearly thought through and navigational quirks. For example, for many users, the “back key” in search results will bring you back to a blank screen or back two screens instead of one, so in order to modify the search, “more search options” at the top of the page must be clicked. The search results pages were recently changed: the attributes and seller locations became pull-down menus, and were placed at the top of the page (a good change), but the blank field to type in additional criteria became “keyword” only instead of author, title, publisher or keyword (less precise and useful) and the link to the subsequent pages is only at the bottom of the page, necessitating scrolling up and down. Similarly a buyer can now “save” items in the shopping cart, but this can only be done one item at a time, and so is slow and cumbrous. FOR SELLERS: PROS (Note: The comparisons below are to the other major sites: Alibris.com and Amazon’s Marketplace. In most cases, the traditional smaller independent databases offer sellers significantly more freedom and flexibility than any of the large ones do.) – Permits the most direct contact between buyers and sellers of all the major sites, including links to your own website. – Gives sellers the most freedom to set their own shipping rates and policies, to describe books briefly or at length, and to price books as they wish. Other than the credit card processing fee, all of the shipping fees go to the seller. – Accepts seller databases in virtually any format, and will customize the upload. Also provides a free database program called HomeBase for booksellers to use. – Permits other forms of payment in addition to the MasterCard and Visa, which AbeBooks processes. – Appears to still have a substantial customer base of collectors and frequent buyers, but also has an increasing visible affiliate program with links on many internet sites and appears to be increasing its advertising and publicity. According to AbeBooks, the overall sales on the site are increasing, but these increases are outpaced by the number of books being listed. – Telephone customer support, including a toll free number. – A relatively short holding period on AbeBooks ecommerce sales where they processed the payments, paid weekly with a holding period of from 8 days to 15 days for most booksellers. – An active and often informative bookseller forum. FOR SELLERS: CONS – The cost of listing and selling. Depending on the number of sales, the average dollar value of each sale, and the number of listings, AbeBooks is arguably the most expensive site to list on, because the fees are a combination of flat monthly fee, commissions and credit card processing fee (charged on both the price of the book and shipping). Although the nominal 8% commission and 5.5% credit card processing fee is at 13.5% theoretically less than the 15% charged by Alibris and Amazon, the addition of 5.5 % on shipping, the higher flat monthly fees and the minimum fees on inexpensive books can push the total monthly bill higher. – The “clutter” and “junk” in the database and the lack of quality control both in terms of sellers and inventory. – Continuing move away from the traditional strong base of “frequent buyers” in an attempt to broaden its appeal—thus the addition of stock publisher photos, “BookHints” and many other features implemented in ways that disregard the traditional buyers and sellers. – Mandatory use of AbeBooks’ credit card processing facilities at a high fee. What had been a convenience and an optional service for booksellers has become a profit center. – Limited ability to charge sales tax, to modify shipping fees and even to reduce the price of the book. While at least there is some provision to do so, requesting sales taxes is combined under the term “requesting additional shipping” and there is no way to reduce the price of the book before you accept an order. (These were not an issue before AbeBooks took over all processing of Visa and MasterCard orders.) – Glacial pace of change. Not entirely a “con” since often AbeBooks’ changes are not positive ones. Nevertheless among the promised features for over a year—and in some cases, many years—are a customer loyalty program for discount certificates on additional purchases, gift certificates, a seller-rating system, and an upgrade to the often-inadequate HomeBase system. – A tendency to act as if AbeBooks is the only place sellers list books. For example, to opt out of isbn matching and the added muse information, sellers are instructed to use “noisbn” in the keyword field, yet most sellers upload keywords to other listing sites, and some of these other sites display the keywords. – Sellers must be pro-active on AbeBooks. Often it is booksellers who first identify the problems and malfunctioning on the site, and even when these problems are called to AbeBooks’ attention, sellers are often not notified or the notice only appears on the booksellers’ forum (which not all dealers use). Sellers need to periodically check that their listings are showing up properly both on AbeBooks itself (especially when attributes like “first edition” are selected) and on the meta-listing sites like BookFinder.com and AddAll.com. – No automatic link for PayPal payments. – Inadequate follow-up when a credit card cannot be processed. Instead of the order remaining open while AbeBooks follows up with the customer, the order is immediately cancelled. – For those who use the ISBN lookup to populate fields, there is inaccurate information, especially the use of the “warehouse” location as the place of publication. Chris Volk operates Bookfever along with Shep Iiams out of the Sierra foothills of Amador County, CA and can be contacted at http://www.bookfever.com.

Hi, we are Cathy Graham and Serena Wyckoff, owners of Copperfish Books, LLC, in sunny southwest Florida. Before going full time in January 2006, we had “real” jobs and sold books online as a hobby. Well, as often happens in this business, the hobby grew and we said a not-so-tearful goodbye to the time clock. Becoming Booksellers We have both always loved books—reading them, looking at them, touching them, collecting them, and just having them around. And yes, hanging out in libraries and bookstores has been one source of fun. So the book connection is easy to see. But online retail? At first glance, our professional backgrounds don’t seem directly connected. But maybe they are in a round-about way. Publishing, teaching, social work, languages, and communications all have elements of sales, business and books. And our histories of constantly seeking to learn and to change—these are qualities of the online retailing industry. Still, neither of us had imagined that we would be selling books online today. Cathy had early interests in language arts. After serving in the US Air Force as a foreign language analyst, she completed her undergraduate degree and became a secondary school language teacher. Eventually, Cathy moved on from teaching to a corporate sales job in telecommunications. The sales job blossomed into personnel management and training, which she enjoyed for several years. Then Cathy returned to school to earn a graduate degree and struck out on her own as a training and development consultant. The creative freedom of freelancing was intoxicating and a major motivator for maintaining an entrepreneurial work life. During this time she started selling books online, listing those from her own collection that she no longer wanted. After the thrill of her first sale, Cathy was hooked. Once she finished selling her own, she started hunting elsewhere for more books she could sell. She started building an inventory—shelves and piles of books everywhere. And it was fun! Bookselling began to replace Cathy’s work as a consultant. Serena came into bookselling from another angle. With a BA in English, she had planned a career in book publishing. After graduation, Serena attended the University of Denver Publishing Institute, an intensive graduate-level course that focused on all aspects of book publishing. She worked as a clerk in a bookstore and a freelance proofreader, and took a job in the permissions department for a publishing firm. But her interest in publishing waned. Serena decided she wanted to help older people and so got a job at a retirement home. She went back to school for a master’s degree and spent several years as a geriatric social worker. Serena left social work, ready for change once again. She did general office work before landing a job with a nonprofit. She transitioned from a help desk position to one in web services, where she developed and maintained the organization’s web sites. The job was pretty cool; she learned a lot and felt that she made a difference in helping the organization improve communications both within and to the outside world. A few years ago, Serena started selling books online as a hobby with Cathy. That’s how she got hooked. Eventually, she decided to leave the 9-to-5 world and start Copperfish Books with Cathy. She feels that it was one of the best decisions she had ever made. About Our Company Copperfish Books, LLC, sells all kinds of books: fiction and nonfiction, current and out-of-print, books for adults and youth, audio books, books in English and in other languages. We also sell CDs, DVDs, videos, and even a few maps. Our sales are worldwide through Alibris, Amazon, Biblio, Buy Bundle, and Half. At this point, we don’t sell directly through our website (www.CopperfishBooks.com), but plan to do so in the future. While specialization is encouraged by many in the industry, we have not yet developed our own. Nonfiction titles are our most profitable and interesting offerings. Our personal preferences also color our inventory. Serena likes books about unusual crafts, film, nature, and out-of-print biographies of people not generally well-known. Cathy likes translations, first novels, small hardbacks, and unusual or attractively bound or printed old books in foreign languages (like the two boxes of Russian books stashed in the garage). Out of our varied interests we hope someday to develop a specialty or two. At this point, however, we try to stock whatever we think will sell. When someone buys one of our books, we want them to be delighted with their experience. We make sure our packaging, shipping, and communication is just what we would want as buyers. Every so often we’ll get an email (not just feedback) from a buyer telling us what our book has meant to them. One woman was thrilled with the book about growing giant pumpkins that she bought for her husband. She wrote us several times to let us know how his pumpkin was coming along! We love to hear stories like that. Satisfying Work Copperfish Books is a great source of satisfaction for both of us. When we clean and repair books, it feels like we give them new life; when we sell them, we give them new homes. Books are something you can’t help but love! Having our own business is both fun and demanding. The independence is great and the lack of office politics is so refreshing. We work longer and harder than when we worked for someone else. But we really enjoy the work and are excited about building and improving our business. Online bookselling is fast-growing, ever-changing, and challenging. We both like having work that we can “sink our teeth into” and that allows us to be creative and to learn. And learning is such a big part of having a successful business. We constantly educate ourselves about online retailing, bookselling, book repair, inventory management, publishing, and so much more. Online bookselling is neither easy nor a way to a fast buck. But it is truly satisfying work. Running our own business, being around books, feeling satisfied with our work—what more could we ask for? Cathy Graham and Serena Wyckoff operate Copperfish Books, LLC, out of Port Charlotte, FL and can be contacted at http://www.CopperfishBooks.com.

Booksellers in America sometimes ask me how we run a successful antiquarian and secondhand book business in “darkest Africa.” I usually reply that the cleft-stick is a remarkably efficient way of distributing letters, and porters with boxes on their heads can be as reliable as the USPS in delivering parcels of books in good condition to far-flung outposts at very reasonable cost. Now, as I answer my last email for the day, close our on-line auction site after another successful sale, upload a new catalogue to our website and pay my annual subscription to IOBA (always right on time) by PayPal, I wonder if bookselling in the days of the cleft-stick was probably not a more leisured and, dare I say, profitable experience. Clarke opened his shop in 1958 in Long Street, then something of a Charing Cross Road when there were (and still remain) a number of dealers in the same street. Over the years he produced a series of 50 scholarly catalogues which make wonderful reading today as one marvels at the steady flow of fine books which passed through his hands. South Africa, first colonized by the Dutch in 1652, attracted a steady inflow of immigrants from all over Europe and they brought with them many printed treasures. With the discovery of gold and diamonds in the late 19th century large fortunes were made and for a number of years these nabobs, or Rand Lords as they were called, bought art and books with a gusto that was only later to be exceeded by the makers of the great American fortunes. So South Africa is something of a repository of interesting books and libraries. I joined Clarke in the late 1970s as a very junior partner and learned happily at the foot of the master for a couple years when tragically he was overcome with pancreatic cancer. Finding myself in control of the business I continued through what are now thought of as the darkest years of South Africa’s history—the 1980s. During this time we moved temporarily into new bookselling as this was one outlet for political expression at the time and, whilst not claiming to be in any way heroic, we did have our moments with the apartheid regime during its dying days. Nelson Mandela, a person of enormous magnanimity, was released and the Internet arrived almost at the same time. Mandela returned us to normality and the mainstream of the world and enabled us to hold our heads high again at book fairs around the world. The Internet turned bookselling on its head forever. Eventually this, and the stress of commuting for twenty five years, persuaded me to move from a B & M store (if this jargon is correct) and to work from home in the peaceful suburb of Constantia amidst the vineyards which were first planted in the 1680s. Here we continue to welcome customers, to issue catalogues in a New Series, now mostly produced in electronic form only, and, latterly, to run our online rare book auction business AuctionExplorerBooks.com. Whilst Anthony Clarke was a scholar bookseller—a sadly dying or dead breed—I consider myself as more of a journeyman: jack-of-all-trades and master of only a very few. My path to bookselling was as varied as many of my colleagues. I was educated at South African and British schools and at university in New England (at a small college in Hartford, Connecticut) and Cape Town, and then, in an attempt to avoid a serious career for as long as possible, I traveled and did odd-jobs in the way of many of us of the late 1960s. I eventually landed in publishing for a couple of years. Being temperamentally unable to work in a larger organization, and without any capital, I found antiquarian bookselling the perfect place of self-employment where I have cheerfully maintained myself ever since. Bookselling in South Africa, which is a country that exhibits the characteristics of both the first and third worlds, has always had something of a missionary feel about it. In a country where many people cannot afford shoes, books may seem to be a luxury, but reading is the way upwards for many, and selling books at affordable prices was always one of our goals in the general bookshop. When I was buying books recently, a middle-aged lady, after showing me her own modest collection, said that her son had some books to sell. Leading me down a passage to a bedroom formerly used by the long-flown son, and pointing to a small bookcase, she said without irony, “These are my son’s books. He is forty now, long past the reading stage.” I hope that we, as members of IOBA, will never reach this stage. Despite all the electronic wizardry which we employ these days, it is the books which remain important, and our skill and passion must be to move them to readers and scholars where they can be used, valued and cherished. Paul Mills operates Clarke’s Africana & Rare Books in Constantia, South Africa and can be contacted at http://www.clarkes.co.za.