The first SF convention was held in 1936 in the United States (New York City), or in 1937 in England (Leeds) – a matter of debate that hinges on the definition of “convention”. At any rate, more than seventy-five years later, SF conventions are Big Business, with events held every weekend of the year around the globe. Nearly every convention has a Dealer’s (Huckster’s) Room. Typical merchandise for sale includes jewelry, artwork, clothing, toys, games, weapons … and books. For dealers, the great thing about genre conventions is that they provide a tightly focused customer base that is highly motivated to spend money. And while it is true that in the last decade or so more and more of the money spent in the Dealer’s Room has been going to non-book merchandise, reading is still the core of most genre conventions and books remain a very strong seller. Upcomingcons.com/science-fiction-conventions is a good resource for finding information on a variety of upcoming conventions. Once you’ve located a con in your area, check out its website. Look for the email for the Dealer’s Room contact, but carefully read any information that might be available. For example, if the Dealer’s Room contact specifies no inquiries before a certain date, then you should pay attention. A large number of SF conventions are run by volunteers, and irritating someone who is doing a difficult task without getting paid is a bad way to introduce yourself. This article is mainly based on my experience selling at the past nine Balticons, with a couple smaller cons thrown in over the years. Balticon is a four day SF and Fantasy convention held annually on Memorial Day weekend. It is the largest convention of its kind in the Baltimore, MD area, with approximately 1500 registered members. It is not my intent to push the idea of selling at genre conventions as a viable option for all online sellers. But even if con selling isn’t right for you, this article should help demonstrate that there are alternative selling venues for online sellers. These alternative face to face sales venues represent an opportunity to make some profit, generate contacts, and have fun selling books. To be sure, SF convention selling is not for everyone. For example, you need to have a strong knowledge of the genre. Genre readers love to talk about what they’ve read and are always looking for recommendations for new books and authors, so you need to be able to at least hold your own in conversation. You can’t expect to make money if you know nothing about the genre, and show up cold with some boxes of SF paperback tat that you’ve randomly accumulated. In the nine years I’ve been selling at Balticon, I’ve established relationships with a number of repeat customers. For example, one woman likes omnibus editions, and spent nearly $300 at this year’s con because I scout inventory with her in mind. Space in the Dealer’s Room is usually sold by the table. You should check to see if the con provides the tables, or if you need to bring your own. Spaces are limited, and routinely sell out early for the mid-size and bigger conventions. When you email the Dealer’s Room coordinator make it clear that you will be selling books. Some conventions are having trouble getting as many book dealers as they would like, and so might give you preference in getting a space. However, preference is also given to veteran dealers so don’t be surprised if they tell you there is no room left. Ask to be put on the wait list, and you might get in if another dealer drops out. This will also give you a head start for the following year. Costs will vary, mainly depending on the size of the convention. Balticon currently charges $150 per table, and includes a convention registration with each of the first two tables. You might have to purchase con registrations separately from the spaces in the Dealer’s Room, or you might need additional registrations if you have people helping you. If you do, be aware that most cons raise the registration prices as the event date gets closer. Overhead costs will certainly be a major consideration in deciding if convention selling will work for you. As with book fairs, you will have to figure travel, food and lodging into your expenses. In my case, the site for Balticon is only about 30 miles from my house, so not having to pay for a hotel lowers my overhead considerably. I have thought about doing large conventions that are further away, such as Philcon in Philadelphia, but have not taken that step yet mainly because of the added overhead. Some of the dealers I know do six or more conventions each year. Be very picky when acquiring stock. Don’t worry about having enough stock to fill up your space – your problem will be having enough space to show all your stock. In general, don’t waste time, money or space on anything less than Very Good condition. A worn paperback with spine creasing just takes up the place of a better condition book, which has a much better chance of selling. My minimum selling price is $3 for paperbacks, and $8 for hardbacks – though I carry many books that well exceed those minimums. For that amount I think the customer deserves a very good or better book. Obviously, exceptions apply – some books are so scarce that the price goes up no matter what the condition. When selling at an SF convention, take advantage of the face-to-face situation. Talk to the customers, find out what authors or books they’ve read and liked. Using your knowledge of the genre, recommend other books or authors – ideally, ones that you just happen to have in stock. Of course, I will make recommendations of titles that I do not have in stock, even to the point of directing them to another dealer in the room that I know has a copy. These customers come back to the con year after year after year, and something like that will stick in their memory. I have one customer who was really pleased with some books I picked out for him several years ago. He now comes back every year, trusting me to make recommendations on what he should buy next based on what I know about his reading likes and dislikes. He spent nearly $200 this year alone. Speaking of the repeat customers, you should periodically “freshen up” your inventory. Part of this will happen naturally as you add new stock to replace that which has sold. My experience has been approximately 15 to 20 percent turn rate on my stock for one convention. But as part of your inventory catalog you should note when a particular book was added, and consider removing certain books after some arbitrary number of years without selling. I bought a couple of big SF collections this past year, so pulled nearly 50 percent of the bottom end of my old inventory and replaced it with all new stock – and my gross revenue went up by nearly the same percentage compared to the previous year. Now I just have to figure out what to do with the books that I pulled… box lots on eBay, garage sale with ads on Craigslist, trade in for store credit at a local used bookstore? Another tip – know your inventory. One customer wanted to buy a $3 paperback, which I noticed was the first book in a trilogy. I showed her a trade paperback omnibus edition that had all three books, which she bought for $10. Another customer was wearing a Pink Floyd concert shirt, and I showed him a hardback book on the history of the band (one of the many non-genre books that I like to stock – see below) that he bought for $20. Which leads to my biggest secret for success in selling books at a science fiction convention: bring lots of interesting non-genre books, or “specials” as I refer to them. The non-genre books that I like to stock can cover any number of subjects. For many fans, costuming is a big component of the science fiction convention experience, and books about vintage clothing and jewelry, hair styles, hat making, military uniforms, and makeup and costuming for the stage all sell well. I’ve sold coffee table books on the history of Halloween costumes, on the world’s most elaborate tree houses, on 1960’s concert posters and rock album covers, on Japanese woodblock prints, on roadside Americana, on European and Oriental arms and armor, on Dr Seuss’s war time cartoons, and blue prints of homes from classic TV series. Collections of Pogo, Dick Tracy, Little Nemo, Tin Tin, and Betty Boop all sell. With the sub-genre interest in Steampunk (google it, if this is not a familiar term) almost anything related to Victoriana could sell. Non-genre writings from well-known authors like CS Lewis or JRR Tolkien are also in demand. Describing how to pick what non-genre books will be of interest is difficult. It really comes down to a gut feeling – if it interests me and I am a science fiction fan, then I assume it will interest other SF fans. I would not bother with a glossy picture book on Porsche sports cars, but if I found a similar book on the history of the Delorean (think Back to the Future) for a couple dollars, I might try it. The beauty of books like these is that even if there are six other book dealers in the room with you, the odds of any of them having those particular non-genre books is vanishingly small. And because these types of books are so interesting and have such great visual appeal, they can move to my antique mall space after the con is over and work the whole year round. To make setting up and tearing down more efficient, I’ve come up with a simple system. Paperbacks are stored in alphabetical order in flat plastic tubs, and set up is as simple as placing the tubs in order on the tables and pulling the lids off. Hardbacks and trade paperbacks are stored in alphabetical order in long boxes, just as they would appear on the shelves. Ideally, for setup the books come straight out of the boxes and on to the IKEA book shelves, with everything then in order and ready to go. Tear down is just the reverse, and just as easy. You’ll also notice in the picture below that I put a lot of the large format “specials” (described above) in face-out display, using the paperback bins. Face-out display is absolutely critical in maximizing sales: for one thing, it capitalizes on the work that the publisher put in to designing an attractive or compelling cover. Face out covers will catch the eye of someone passing by, and draw them in to look more closely. My reasons for selling at Balticon are varied. To begin with, I make a very good profit for a weekend of work. Of course, there is time spent over the year prepping for the con. Some of this is time spent scouting, which I would still be doing as part of my online business. I do have to clean, price, catalog and organize the stock. There was a one-time initial outlay for the IKEA shelving and the plastic bins that I use. And storing the part of the inventory that I don’t use at the antique mall or online (see below) does take up some room for most of the year. Selling at Balticon complements my online and antique mall selling. Balticon and the antique mall provide a nice outlet for good books I encounter while scouting, that are too low value to list online. The antique mall is a good place to put some of the books that I also sell at Balticon (the interesting non-genre “specials” I talk about above), so that they work for the whole year and not just one weekend. And I can list my high end SF books online, and pull them to bring to Balticon. SF conventions will usually have at least one major Guest of Honor (GOH), typically a big name author. Balticon has both an author and an artist GOH, and there are always other well-known authors and artists who show up for the fun. The GOH is announced well in advance, which gives you time to stock up on the author’s works. These will of course sell very well at the con, and you can also get books signed. This has obvious implications in terms of adding value to your stock, and to books in your personal collection if you so choose. And when all is said and done … I really enjoy selling at the cons. I’ve been a big SF fan all my life, and I really enjoy meeting and talking with other fans and the pros. I supplied a blurb for Bud Webster’s book on SF convention selling (The Joy of Booking, Merry Blacksmith Press, ISBN 0615523439) in which I said “… he has found a way to take something he would do anyway – press a book into someone’s hand and force them to read it – and make a little money doing it.” This neatly sums up how I feel about selling at Balticon. I don’t make a fortune. But it consistently generates a nice profit, has helped to grow my business, and is a lot of fun. Timothy Doyle Bayside Books of Maryland, IOBA 6285 Oakland Mills Rd Sykesville, MD, 21784

The IOBA Scholarship Committee reviewed a number of worthy applications this year, and we have two very deserving winners.  Before getting to that, though, just a few words about the scholarships. As those who have been keeping up with announcements on the IOBA lists know, our organization offers two scholarships each year. The first is for the Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar, held in Colorado Springs in August each year. The second is an open scholarship which can be used for a number of educational opportunities (e.g., the University of Virginia Rare Book School). These scholarships are an important aspect of IOBA’s overall mission to strengthen the book trade, and a valuable benefit for members who want to take the next step in developing their skills as booksellers. A scholarship allows a member to continue his/her education and establish lasting relationships with other members of the trade, without the financial burden of tuition, travel and living expenses. I believe this is one of the most important benefits IOBA offers as an organization, because it allows members to do things that would otherwise be difficult, if not impossible. The winner of the 2013 IOBA Scholarship to the Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar: Marc Kuritz of Churchill Book Collector As his business name indicates, Marc specializes in material relating to Winston S. Churchill. He has been in business for over five years, and has an impressive catalog of material within his area of specialty. His depth of knowledge about the content, edition points, relative scarcity, and even writing style, of various Churchill titles is the result of careful research, patience, and a genuine connection with the material. Marc’s application was very well-written, showing both a command of language and a professional approach to his work. This came as no surprise to me – my experiences doing business with Marc has shown that he exemplifies the ethical behavior we as an organization expect from our members. There were other things that were impressive about Marc’s submission – future applicants, take note! For example, he laid out very clearly where his business is now, and where he hopes to take his business using the knowledge gained at CABS. He exhibited, through a series of vignettes from his time in the book world (both as a collector and a bookseller), that he has the capacity and the drive to establish himself as a leader within the trade. Finally, Marc indicated a desire to contribute not only to his own personal success, but to the health of the trade in general. The winner of the 2013 IOBA open scholarship: Andrea Tomberg of Tomberg Rare Books Andrea quickly established herself in my mind as one to watch. While she did not ask questions or add comments every day, when she did they were carefully crafted and based on a solid knowledge of the book trade and her place in it. This is even more impressive upon realizing that Andrea reached this level of business sense without the years of mistakes so many of us seem to go through. Lorne Bair was on the faculty at CABS that year, and obviously took notice as well. He supplied a glowing recommendation letter to go with Andrea’s application for the 2013 open scholarship. It is worth noting that Lorne specializes in material related to the history of social movements, and Andrea specializes in counterculture material. This shows that in the two years since CABS, Andrea has established and maintained connections with, and earned the respect of, top dealers in her particular niche of the book trade. It also shows that she fully understands the power of a properly used reference, which as we all know is quite important in our line of work. Andrea plans to use the open scholarship to attend Rare Book School’s course Developing Collections: Donors, Librarians & Booksellers. Her application, more than any of the others submitted, showed laser focus, and clearly explained exactly what skills she expected to learn, how she planned to use those skills, and why they were particularly important given her area of specialty. I am proud to have served as chair for the committee this year. I would like to thank the committee members for taking time out of their schedules to carefully review and discuss each application, and cast their votes, especially given the limited timeframe. I would also like to congratulate our membership for encouraging fellow members to apply. The level of interest we saw in scholarships this year was excellent, and I hope this will continue. Congratulations to both our winners, and thank you to everyone who participated.

I was always an avid reader: fiction, science fiction, natural history, dinosaurs, and on and on. I grew up in a dirty and dull steel mill town in southern Illinois, and was an introverted nerd with my nose usually stuck in a book. On Saturdays my mom would sometimes drop me off at the public library, where I’d spend hours reading, browsing, and wandering through the stacks. I do have the collector gene, but its early manifestations focused on stamps, coins, seashells, and even rocks. At that time I did not accumulate books, other than a long shelf of the Hardy Boys mysteries. However, a high school graduation present was prescient: a framed print of “The Bookworm” (painted in 1850 by Carl Spitzweg), that now hangs on the wall at Squid Ink Books. I went off to college, eventually receiving a degree in meteorology, and started working for the U.S. Weather Bureau. Then, after only a few months, an Army draft notice came in the mail, motivating me to enlist in the Air Force. This was in the mid-1960s when the Vietnam War was heating up. As a military weather forecaster, I spent all of my eight years of service here on the mainland. Two tours of duty at the weather center near Omaha, Nebraska, were separated by 18 months when the Air Force sent me to Colorado State University for graduate studies. Eventually I earned both an M.S. and a Ph.D. in Atmospheric Science and worked at NOAA Research Laboratories in Boulder, Colorado, and Norman, Oklahoma. I spent most of my Federal career as a severe storm researcher, but there was a decade lost to mind-numbing administration. Beginnings of Squid Ink Squid Ink had its beginnings in Norman, Oklahoma, in the summer of 1994. It was a hobby business that my wife and I started in rented space at an antique mall. We hoped to sell off some of the many antiques we’d accumulated over the years, along with some primitive oil paintings and several hundred “old books” that I’d picked up while antique hunting. I knew far more about antique furniture at that time than I did about books. Our first sales tax permit was for, “SQUID INK – Antiques – Art – Collectible Books”. My wife had been diagnosed with advanced breast cancer, and our shared business venture served, at times, as a welcome distraction from the grim medical situation. You might be wondering, as have many of our customers, where the Squid Ink business name came from — especially since neither Oklahoma nor Arizona are very close to an ocean. It’s pretty simple: during the 1990s our oldest son was doing intricate drawings of various marine creatures, and we were inspired by his vivid drawing of a squid. It was a good choice, since it catches people’s interest and they tend to remember it. During 1995, as my wife’s medical situation worsened, we lived part-time in Arlington, Texas, in order to be near a well-known cancer clinic. I remember quite specifically that it was April 4th, 1995, a Tuesday, when I heard author and bookseller John Dunning being interviewed on “Good Morning America.” He was promoting his second Cliff Janeway mystery, The Bookman’s Wake, and I listened to him with fascination, my interest especially aroused by his mention of many titles that I had bought and read over the years. Of course, I had always purchased cheap, BOMC copies and recycled them to other readers, but Dunning was saying that the first editions of these books had real collector’s value. Naturally, I went right out and bought both of the Janeway books and read them through. When there were breaks in my wife’s medical treatments, I started browsing and studying the books in used bookstores around the Dallas-Ft. Worth area. Sadly, my wife lost her battle with cancer, and I became a grieving and lost soul — my grieving, for better or worse, channeled itself into the world of books. They say a person should avoid making major decisions too soon after losing a loved one, but this is easier said than done. Feeling that I couldn’t deal with my mind-numbing administrative position anymore, I put in my paperwork for retirement, and proceeded to shift the focus of Squid Ink from antiques to books, which became a way of helping me through this time of personal and family tragedy. Before long, I was acquiring hundreds, and then thousands, of books, which accumulated throughout the house, in boxes and piles and stacks. Then, in what I can only explain now as the manifestation of some form of temporary insanity, I purchased the entire inventory of a fantasy, science fiction, and horror bookstore that was closing its storefront. I had never read fantasy and had only read a couple of horror novels, but I became a kind of instant specialist. An internet romance Eventually, I met a new love, Katie Hirschboeck, a professor in the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona, in Tucson. We shared a love of weather and climate, and most importantly, books. Following a long-distance internet romance (we may have been pioneers in that regard) I moved to Tucson, along with my now thousands of first editions, and Katie and I were married in the Fall of 1997. The Mayflower movers who packed up my house in Oklahoma were amazed at the boxes and boxes of books they were loading. Then I directed them to my full-sized storage garage, which was completely filled with still more books. When I raised the overhead door, the two movers just stood and stared until one finally said, “My God, man, you must really read a lot!” We had an authentic mud adobe house built and modified the plans so that what had been designed as a separate garage became our book casita — the home of Squid Ink Books. Not surprisingly, the space in the casita (Spanish for “little house”) proved inadequate, and the books spilled over into the main house. So, as part of our settling in, I had to wholesale several thousand books to Bookman’s (a local version of Half Price Books). How the business evolved Inspired by the Dunning books, I began studying first editions, collectible books, book terminology, etc. I subscribed to AB Bookman’s Weekly and Firsts. I ordered booksellers’ catalogs and pored over them. Of course, I continued to buy books. When AB would come in the mail I’d rush through the ads and get on the phone to various dealers, hoping to be the first to claim some desired item. In retrospect, I feel lucky to have jumped into bookselling at the tail end of its classic period, as some traditions were coming to an end and new ones (courtesy of the internet) were starting to develop. For most of Squid Ink’s history I have focused on modern first editions by authors that I had read and enjoyed – with the notable exception of that crazy purchase in Oklahoma. When I began trying to sell some of the books I’d accumulated, I would send out price lists to dealers who advertised in AB Bookman’s. My first catalog was patched and pieced together — literally cut, pasted, and Xeroxed. As I look at it now, I see that it was frighteningly naive, almost embarrassing. But, it was a start and an important part of my learning the trade, which of course has continued right through to today. One thing I learned from sending out catalogs was that I needed to pay closer attention to my pricing. This happened when Malcolm Bell, of Mystery & Imagination Bookstore, called one day and said, “I’ll take everything on your list.” That’s a lesson I can’t forget! After we were married, Katie pitched in to help me and Squid Ink join the digital revolution. She is technically adept, while I am a plodding dinosaur who does not take naturally to technology. We signed up with ABE during the Spring of 1999, and I’ve been uploading books ever since. I tried buying and selling some on eBay, but always ended up angry. I’ve been a member of IOBA since its early days, except for a self-imposed hiatus in reaction to the presence of Flatsigned as a member. (When he vanished, I returned.) We now list books at ABE, Biblio, IOBA, and on our own website (www.squidinkbooks.com), which was designed and is maintained by Katie. I compose a couple of catalogs each year and mail them out directly to folks on our customer list. Although stuffing envelopes is even more of a drag than uploading new books, direct sales amount to more than 60% of our business each year, so I’ll continue with catalogs, though it might seem old-fashioned to many. For the last several years I have been trying to cull low-priced books and focus on higher priced, more collectible books. This has resulted in significant donations to the local Friends of the Library. Perhaps the biggest mistake I made during earlier times was buying signed mysteries. There are a couple of mystery bookstores in Arizona, and I bought numerous brand-new books that had been signed by their authors. This made sense because these could be sold, at a reasonable profit, to folks in the hinterlands who didn’t have easy access to signed books. However, I did not keep close track of what was happening online, and that market changed significantly as mystery bookstores across the country began advertising signed stock at flap price. Squid Ink ended up with hundreds of new books that couldn’t be sold at a profit. Would I do it all again? Definitely! But of course I’d do it better, and concentrate right from the start on higher-end, more collectible books. And maybe not pick up quite so many of those brand-new signed mysteries. Bob Maddox Squid Ink Books 2979 E. Placita Santa Lucia Tucson, AZ 85716 squidinkbooks.com

I fell into bookselling quite by accident. I had been a bartender in Toronto during the 80’s, but relocated to Southern California in the early 90’s when my dad became ill. I took a job at a Crown Books retail store as a stopgap until I could find a suitable bartending position. Little did I know at the time there was no turning back. I think bookselling appealed to me in part because my fellow employees at Crown were an amazingly eccentric and brutally funny bunch — one of those mixed groups of wannabe screenwriters, actors, and the usual migratory folks that help make SoCal a very stimulating place. It didn’t help that the original store manager was seriously injured in a motorcycle accident before the store was set to open, thereby allowing the inmates to run the asylum for what seemed like the better part of a year. Bookselling struck me as a glorious clusterfuck thanks to my first experience with it, and aside from a brief few months reading electric meters and dodging pit bulls, I’ve done nothing else for the last 20+ years. My wife and I attended the Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar in 2000. Later that year we purchased the inventory of a modern firsts mail order dealer. My wife has since decided that antiquarian bookselling isn’t for her, but she still puts on a mean Brodart. In addition to IOBA, I’m a member of the Rocky Mountain Antiquarian Booksellers Association (RMABA), and the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America (ABAA). Beginning in 2003, my wife and I began planning our Great California Escape. We lived in a nice neighborhood, but my wife had this silly idea that a house should be where people lived, rather than a warehouse for books. So we started to look for a place where we could afford larger living quarters, and Southern California didn’t fit the bill. We looked at places we had visited previously, like Oregon and Ohio, but neither was quite right for us. We recalled enjoying our time in Colorado Springs when we attended CABS in 2000, so we started doing some research. We liked what we saw, and my wife flew out to Colorado to meet a realtor, who took her around Colorado Springs. Afterwards they went to Pueblo, which is about 40 miles south of Colorado Springs, or just “the Springs” as the locals call it. My wife fell in love with Pueblo’s old architecture, the area was more affordable than the Springs, and voila! Our mid-life adventures began in 2008 in Southern Colorado. I could ramble on indefinitely about what a great place Pueblo is, especially for a bookseller like me, but if readers have gotten this far I don’t want to punish them unnecessarily. I’ve been very fortunate along the way to have met a number of great booksellers, and I can share a couple of anecdotes that have guided me in this business. There was a bookseller in Southern California with an open shop that my wife and I visited quite frequently. No doubt I made a pest of myself, but he was a very patient man. He said there are two things a bookseller never asks a colleague. One, who his customers are, and two, where he gets his books. Most anything else is up for discussion. He also mentioned that a courtesy discount is up to the seller to offer, not for the buyer to ask. At one of my first book fairs where I was exhibiting, I got to chat with a very knowledgeable bookseller from Northern California. I must have been lamenting my sales, or lack of sales, and I think my lament might have sounded like belly-aching. “Son”, he said to me not unkindly, “you can always buy your way out of a bad fair….but it takes nerves of steel!” Advice that I try to remember, especially when sales are slow. I can’t sit here and claim that my nerves are any steelier today, but I do try to practice the flip side of bookselling, and that’s book buying. It strikes me that being a good online bookseller requires a different skill set than working in an open shop. Some booksellers are good at both, but one skill that seems essential for all booksellers is the ability to buy intelligently. As one of my colleagues puts it, any knucklehead can sell online. The major online bookselling venues make it reasonably easy to sell. More than one of my generous mentors has told me that the skill, or the art, or the simple difference between profit and loss comes from knowing what to buy, and how much to pay for it. I’d also say that in my experience the only thing a bookseller likes more than selling books is buying books. So rejoice, brother and sister booksellers! After all, didn’t we get into this business in part because we love to buy books? Mike Tuck Bungalow Books P.O. Box 369 Pueblo CO 81002-0369 bungalowbooks.com

Being around books, and buying and selling them, makes me happy. I sometimes try to enumerate the reasons why. There are the obvious explanations, like loving books both as physical objects and as embodiments of information and world views; getting satisfaction from pairing a particular book with a person who wants it; respecting and perpetuating our literary heritage; enjoying scavenging; appreciating the freedom and responsibility that comes from being my own boss in a field that chose me, delight when the hunt goes to new neighborhoods or through new landscapes; stimulation from constantly having to learn new things; and the great satisfaction of being able to earn an income from such commonplace items (which sometimes makes me feel like a magician, plucking money out of thin air). There are also more elusive and personal reasons. I constantly see books by writers I knew or worked with in my earlier career, so book scouting sometimes seems very social. At book sales I am transported to a zone of deep concentration: I lose track of time and worries, and emerge at the end as if from a short vacation. I’ve made friends with other book dealers out in the book-buying jungle and enjoy our obsessive discussions about the minutiae of the business. There’s also the special sense of self-validation that comes from a long shot that pays off—in fact, each sale feels like a validation (“I chose this book and now someone is willing to pay more for it than I did to get it!”). I love the sense of preserving the past that comes along with neatening up a book and dust jacket with eraser and alcohol and protecting it in Mylar. Even something as simple as using a single-edged razor blade and metal ruler to neatly trim a mailing label connects me with my art student days and makes me feel as if my life has a logical narrative, a coherent thread running through it. But somehow a list, no matter how detailed, fails to capture the pleasurable essence of my online bookselling business, which until very recently I conducted out of my house (and garage and and basement) on Warwick Place in South Pasadena, California. I started Warwick Books in 2002. I began tentatively and moved ahead slowly. I thought I knew books pretty well when I began: I had handled books my whole life, and handling books is how the pros tell you you get better and better at bookselling. For years, by the very nature of my jobs, I was the daily recipient of myriad shiny new review copies. For most of my working life books just came to me; I couldn’t escape them even when I wanted to, and whatever office I occupied always ended up with stacks of books on shelves and floor. And because the books came so easily, I gave them away readily: family, friends, and casual acquaintances were the recipients of volumes I knew they would like or hoped they would be interested in. David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, for instance, went straight to a friend who liked to keep up with current fiction. Number lines? They were not something I paid attention to. All the books that passed my desk were first editions. Author’s signatures? Publication parties were routine after-work events, and though I enjoyed going to them, I seldom bothered to get an author to sign his or her book for me. Eleven years down the road, I am amazed at how much I’ve learned—and how little I knew when I started. I am also amazed to find that I am the envy of many of my non-bookselling friends because I am doing something so meaningful to me. Not only that: I’ve gained admiration and respect for carving out a niche, sticking with it, making it into something viable. Making a business. I’ve begun to see that this is no small feat. I still have a fair number of books from my early inventory, and sometimes when an order comes in for one of them I cringe a little: my standards in the beginning had yet to be formed, really, and who knows what I meant back then by “fine” or “very good”? I certainly don’t trust my earlier self. Now, I’ll seldom pass up the chance to buy a signed book, no matter what it is. I might not have cared back then, but now I do. A signed book is special, and in my experience will always sell. And though unsigned books obviously sell too, they seem less complete than a signed book, undressed, naked. But it wasn’t until last year, when a colleague and I bought a vast private library of books on military history—a subject totally alien to me—that I began to understand what the market is capable of. There are serious collectors out there for books relating to war—not e-books, not trade books aimed at a broad audience, but highly specific accounts of very specific things: a general’s strategies in World War II, memoirs by decorated ace flyers, books depicting uniforms, insignia, airplane nose art, and the like. My most surprising sale to date from this collection was a U.S. Security Forces telephone directory for the Army, Navy, and Air Force personnel in the area of Kanto, Japan, published in 1956. My business has perked up since I started adding these books to my inventory. I had no idea when we bought this collection how transformative an experience it would be. (We estimate there were between 20,000 and 30,000 books, though we never calculated precisely; we do know it filled nearly 900 file boxes and took three men about five days to pack the books from the three-story condo they were housed in, all neatly stored on floor-to-ceiling shelving deep enough to allow for rows double and sometimes triple deep.) The first step was just to come to grips with the sheer volume of the collection: our interim solution was to rent a large storage unit, but it soon became obvious that we were going to need a more accessible space and a person to handle order fulfillment, so that we could reserve enough of our time to be able to actually catalogue and list the books. This has led us to lease a huge warehouse space in nearby Los Angeles and to hire a helper. It’s not just about the scale of the collection. It’s about the man who amassed it. He was a truly outstanding collector—limitless in his dedication and passion, shrewd in his buying habits, and willing and patient enough to get what he wanted. As we work through the boxes it is not unusual for us to find an ex-library copy of a scarce title, then a later printing, then a first edition without a dust jacket, then the first with a tattered or clipped jacket, then a fine copy in fine condition and, finally, a signed copy. (Sometimes he went above and beyond and found laid-in correspondence from the principals involved, or a signature not only from the author but also or instead of from the subject of the book.) And while the presence of so many duplicates might pose a problem in a lesser collection, in this case it’s a bonus: because he was collecting books that were hard to find in the first place, even his “inferior” copies find eager buyers. He would only buy a paperback when no hardcover edition was available, and he kept his collection in great condition by putting Mylar on many of the books. I am in awe of this gentleman’s collecting prowess, and enjoy being in his presence through working with his books. Being surrounded by this kind of passion is exciting and contagious, and has added to my daily pleasure. People from all over the globe get in touch about books from the collection, and the boundaries of my world have expanded. I really can’t ask for anything more than this, but who knows? Maybe there’s another collection of even better quality out there somewhere in my bookselling future. I ardently hope so. Suzanne Mantell Warwick Books 101 Warwick Place South Pasadena, CA 91030

Less than three weeks after assuming the position of Editor, I am pleased to present the first issue of The Standard for 2013, and to rededicate it as the voice of IOBA. This is meant in a dual sense: as our “house organ,” The Standard serves to represent our organization’s values, goals and concerns; but more than that, it should also provide an outlet for individual IOBA members to share their experience and knowledge with both colleagues and interested readers. Part of what made it possible to bring this issue together in such a short time was a significant change to our editorial structure and management. At the instigation of IOBA’s new President, Chris Volk, the Board of Directors has decided to transfer some of the technical/production responsibilities to the newly-created domain of a Managing Editor. Joyce Godsey, an experienced bookseller and the proprietor of Sicpress.com (well known to many as a premier source for book repair supplies), has been engaged as our Managing Editor, and we’re very glad to have her on board. Although I didn’t approach the assembling of this issue with any particular theme in mind, in looking over the contributions it seems that we have one anyway. There is a common thread that unites all the articles, one to which I think almost any IOBA member can relate: the sense of discovery, which is one of the constants of the bookselling experience. The longer pieces, by Greg Gibson and Chris Volk, relate their personal journeys: Greg’s somewhat quixotic passage from unpublished poet (with intermittent employment history) to experienced specialist bookseller, and Chris’s diversionary adventure as she unleashed her “inner collector” in pursuit of the books of a favorite author. Standing in contrast to Chris’s tale of her Internet-scouring quest, Tim Doyle’s tightly-focused account of how he solved a small biblio-mystery provides a perfect example of the kind of thing that can so easily fascinate or even obsess us….and that any one of us might find at any time, inside the cover of the very next book we handle. Finally, William Knox’s tale of establishing his thriving book business in Penang, Malaysia, provides a particularly interesting example of the diverse (and sometimes peculiar) ways that we have all come to bookselling. For the time being I find myself planted in the Editor’s chair, but I don’t regard it as either a throne or a bully pulpit. I see myself rather as sitting at a very large table, with enough room for as many others as care to join me. It is, as I said above, both the organization’s voice and your voice as individuals — although truly, the two are inseparable. The IOBA is its members. Together, let’s make The Standard everything it can be and should be. Howard Prouty ReadInk 2261 West 21st Street Los Angeles, California

Editor’s note: My first encounter with this article was actually at its debut, as a talk delivered by Greg to the Class of 2009 (of which I was a member) at the Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar. I thought it was brilliant then, and my opinion hasn’t changed. In fact, it’s only improved with age — like a fine wine, or a good book, or, heck, like Greg himself — and I’m pleased to be able to bring it to The Standard’s readers. Enjoy! — H.P. Greg Gibson, Ten Pound Island Book Company I. In the spring of 1975 I went to work for a genius who made his living rebuilding the old fishing wharves that lined the harbor in Gloucester, Massachusetts. This man understood everything about the internal combustion engine, radio waves and electricity. He was a Leonardo of the lever, a master of everything inorganic. Like many geniuses, however, his preternatural intelligence was limited in scope. Organic life forms baffled him. He couldn’t relate to his helpers. He couldn’t even order lunch. So my job, when I wasn’t placing fulcrums under levers or boring bolt holes, was ordering lunch for him, and running around making sure he didn’t forget things. I’d like to say I learned something from that brilliant eccentric, but I didn’t. The early mornings on the harbor, in secret places under the docks, were unforgettably radiant and beautiful. The rest of the day was long and hard. After a year of this routine it began to dawn on me that rebuilding wharves was not going to be my life’s work. That was when my friend Jean opened an art gallery and found me a profession. “You’ve always liked books.” she said, “Why don’t you start a little shop and sell old books in my gallery?” That was all I needed. I’d gotten out of the Navy as the Vietnam War was winding down, and had spent the years before my marriage producing an unpublishable novel and bales of incomprehensible poetry. The demands of married life had forced me into gainful employment, but chainsaws and crowbars were driving me crazy. Here was a chance to work with words, at least. I quit my job with the wharf man, and built some shelves in Jean’s gallery. Jean fronted me $100, and we set up as business partners. One hundred dollars bought a lot of used books in 1976. A kindly old lady who eked out small change quoting the “books wanted” ads gave me some copies of AB Magazine and through them I learned the rudiments of the trade. When it was time to price my wares the range was 50¢ to $2 (which appeared to be the upper limit of what the market would bear). Jean opened her gallery and a few people came through. I had an epiphany. Even now I can see the flash of light that accompanied it. I was reading AB and I realized that, between gallery sales and quoting books, I could make as much as $50 a week at this. $50 seemed like plenty. Soon I was making that $50 a week, but I discovered I’d been wrong. $50 was not plenty. Jean folded up her art gallery and we moved the books into a building that had been an old fish market. The place was right on the tourist route and our retail business saw a healthy increase. Even better, we began to get more house calls. About that time I had another epiphany – it was all about location. If we could bump up our sales and buying opportunities by moving to the fish market, I reasoned, we should be able to do even better by moving onto Main Street. This, in fact, was an imbecilic error in judgment that held me in thrall for far too many years. The old real estate mantra about “location, location, location” might have been true in downtown Boston or one of the crowded, bustling suburbs that surrounded it, but Gloucester was surrounded by nothing but water. Only 35,000 people lived there, and that simply was not a large enough population base to sustain a retail used book business throughout the year. It felt grand in the summer when tourists poured through like spawning shad, but each year there was a day in October when everything stopped. You could almost hear it – a grinding, crunching sound that meant seven months of anxiety and poverty. There was no location that would propel us past the limits imposed by Gloucester’s demographics. Jean wisely moved out of town and left me on my own. I was so busy chasing down my fantasy of the perfect location – I went through six different shops in my career – that I failed to take full advantage of my earliest opportunities for true enlightenment. As in a Greek myth, these Godly offerings were delivered in human form. Chief among them was Matthew Needle, a legend in the bookselling trade. I hadn’t been open for more than a month in my first shop with Jean when he appeared in his shiny Mercedes, genial and encouraging. He removed some of the $2 books from my shelves, put some cash in my hand, and made me feel like a real bookseller. He was back nearly every month after that, and eventually I tumbled to the fact that he wasn’t a collector. In fact, I was rather shocked to discover that he was buying books from me and selling them to other dealers. I suppose I understood the process in a literal sense, but I failed to grasp its deeper implications. Then, some time after we’d moved to the fish market, a fellow named John Thomson and his girlfriend Karen Griffin appeared at my shop in a Datsun pickup. The bed of the truck was covered with a cap and was full of books. John and Karen were traveling across the country in this vehicle, often sleeping in the back among the books. We all hit it off, and they wound up staying with my family and me for a few days, in the course of which he shared a secret. He was buying books he found in his travels and selling them to other dealers along the way. This was mind-boggling to me. Then I connected the dots and realized that was essentially what Matty Needle had been doing all along. These guys were book scouts. Thus I discovered one of the major engines of our trade. Often, on the heels of this enlightenment, I’d watch Matty’s Mercedes pull away and wonder, “Where’s he going?” Over the years, as my own experience increased, I learned that the answer was “Everywhere.” Matty worked tirelessly, combing the countryside for dealers with a good eye and a reasonable understanding of the fact that books were meant to be sold, not hoarded. I was sitting in the fish market one lovely spring day, pondering all this, when in walked a slender well-spoken gent in blue shirt, khaki pants, and Docksiders – sans socks. I made him for Yankee gentry right away, and figured he was probably a yachtsman, since the fish market backed up on Alexander’s Yacht Basin. But as soon as we started talking I realized something else. He was a book scout, too. Not only that, he was looking for books that pertained to a single subject area. I had just met my first specialist dealer. Matty Needle, John Thomson and Louie Howland soon became my friends and mentors, but it took a long while for me to absorb what they had to teach me. This was probably because their approaches seemed so disparate at first. John and Karen forged their encyclopedic knowledge into Bartleby’s Books, which would become one of the finest general used and antiquarian open shops in the east. Matty Needle, by contrast, sold only to the trade. “Less hassle,”” he told me. “You always know who you’re dealing with and their checks don’t bounce.” Louie Howland schooled me in maritime books and got me interested in maritime history. Part of this, I fully understood, was for selfish reasons. The more I knew about maritime history the better I’’d be at finding good books for him. Each of these dealers introduced me to an important aspect of the specialist book trade, but it wasn’t until I closed shop number Five that I fully realized the error of my ways and gave up my quest for the perfect location. Seventeen years had elapsed. To call me a slow learner would be an understatement. II. Still, a lot had happened between shops One and Five. Much of what I learned about old books was delivered by my colleagues, and by books and magazines about the trade. However, a surprising amount came from my customers – not the hordes of tourists, but those serious and learned collectors who always knew more about their areas of interest than I did. I listened carefully to these people, and asked questions. They pointed me to the bibliographies, histories, and reference books that became the foundation of my knowledge, such as it was, of my trade. Their motivation was the same as Louie Howland’s. They were educating me so that I’d be better at finding books for them, and that was fine by me. For whatever reason, it seemed that my most serious customers were seeking books about local history, about art and antiques and, because we were a waterfront town, about ships and the sea. I began reading the “books for sale” section in AB, in search of desirable titles for my customers. At the same time I started scouting others dealers’ shops ala Needle. Then came my first book fair. I forget exactly how we found out about it – this was the late 70s and Jean and I were still partners. The venue was an armory in Cambridge, Mass. And I made the happy discovery that, just as Willie Sutton had said about banks and money, book fairs were where the books were. We sold a few of the books we’d brought, but mainly we purchased books from other exhibitors – books about the fisheries and our local granite industry, and a stack of big, hefty Abrams art books, all of which we sold to our customers over the next few weeks. Not only that, but we met some new customers who were interested in art and antiques and local history. We took their names and telephone numbers and tried to call them whenever we found something we thought they’d like. The idea that we could have customers outside of Gloucester was an intoxicating one. About this time, with John Thomson very much in mind, I took my first road trip. Things were really opening up for me now. I remember patiently working all the junky antique shops along route 1, where Scott Nason would later find that rare first edition of “Tamerlane” – I wouldn’t have recognized it if they’d put it in my hands – and as far into the wilds of New Hampshire as the White Mountains. I forget where I slept that first night, but it was all terribly exciting. Here I was, out on the road! A couple of days later I was exhausted, beaten down and nearly broke, having spent my pathetic allotment on I knew not what, when I stumbled into Jack Hanrahan’s place in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, poked disconsolately through a huge pile of books that had somehow landed on his floor, and announced that I was sorry I could not find a single thing to buy from him. To my considerable surprise he upbraided me. He told me it was nonsense to say I couldn’t find any books to buy, and more or less intimated that I was a namby-pamby quitter. ““You can find books anywhere,” he said. “And I know you haven’t been through that whole pile. Now get back to work. This is a business, not a hobby.” Sure enough, I went back and found two books on local history that were quite desirable at the time. Jack probably knew they were there all along, but just to reinforce his lecture he practically gave them to me. I use the phrase “quite desirable at the time” because of a change that took place in my world during my first seventeen years in the trade. In the seventies and early eighties, while I was learning my way about, Gloucester had a core of cultivated, intelligent and (mostly) interesting men and women who actively collected books. But then, somewhere between stores number Three and number Five, many of them disappeared. Some of them got old and died off, but more of them simply stopped collecting. They bought all the books they wanted or could afford, and then their interests turned to gardening or fly fishing or fountain pens or scotch whiskey. It came as a shock, but it was a fact I’d see repeated again and again. And eventually it led to another epiphany. Most collectors have a limited shelf life, and it is our job to service their wants as diligently as we can during their active phase. This demise of my clientele necessitated a change in strategy. I started trying to gather the names and addresses of strangers who visited the shop and I redoubled my efforts at book fairs. Rather than quoting these people books by telephone I sent them short mimeographed lists of books in my three areas of specialty. The lists were never rousing successes, but I could feel my business escaping the confines of Gloucester. Then the crash of the eighties came along and the bottom fell out of the arts and antiques markets. Those lovely Abrams books turned into doorstops for the most part, and my local history collectors disappeared as well, no doubt shocked to their senses by the shortage of cash. I was sent scrambling again. Of my three main areas of endeavor, only maritime books survived. As I contemplated this troubling fact I realized that the fisheries, which I had formerly categorized as local history, were an important component of maritime studies. Furthermore, many of the artists mentioned in those Abrams books were quite fond of painting ships and the sea. Then there was yachting, which had always had a strong presence in Gloucester, and Pirates, irresistible to all – Yarr! – not to mention the naval heroes who were continually bringing them to justice or the bold explorers who for centuries sailed into unknown waters. With a little serious thought, the world of maritime history opened up and came to seem as boundless as the oceans themselves. At Louie Howland’s urging I began doing the Wooden Boat Show in Newport, Rhode Island. Then I tried exhibiting at conferences of specialty groups such as ship modelers. I searched out periodicals like “Sea History, “Wooden Boat Magazine,” “American Neptune,” and “Nautical Research Journal,” and ran ads in them. I made the acquaintance of the local print shop and started cranking out five page Xeroxed lists of maritime books – just light enough to send with a single first class stamp – to my hundred or so maritime customers. All this proceeded by trial and error. If I got multiple orders for a title, I’d know it was a good one. Suddenly Gloucester was only the place where I kept my books. My ““shop” was open to customers everywhere. Sometime in the late eighties computers came into the picture and my catalog business improved incrementally. The mailing list and want lists became a snap to manage, and my cataloged descriptions of books moved from file cards that had to be re-typed each time I listed a particular title, to a database in which that title resided for ever, ready to be summoned up at the push of a button. I used the computer to compile a proprietary database of maritime book values gleaned from booksellers’ catalogs, and used this database in conjunction with my wants lists to guide my purchases. In a way, it was a golden age for me. I met my specialist colleagues and found my place among them – certainly not at the top, but very comfortably in the middle. Occasionally a rare voyage or whaling log would come my way, but in general I was happy to specialize in standard out of print reference books. If a ship modeler or an amateur historian needed a good copy of, say, Howard Chapelle’s Search for Speed Under Sail, I was the go-to guy. My mailing list grew to over five hundred names and I had several thousand modestly priced maritime books, easy enough to find with a little work, and easier still to sell. Then the computer took away everything it had brought. I’m speaking, of course, of the introduction of internet databases. By this time I’d closed shop number Five and moved to my house, where I intended to pursue my mail order business supplemented by frequent book and trade show appearances. Of course I needed a place to keep my books, so I bought the shack across the street from my house. Originally it had been a florist’’s shop but it was too far out in the sticks to thrive as a retail location. Just by luck the owner needed cash, and I was able to purchase the shop for a fair price. I used it as a warehouse at first, but when Interloc came along the guy who worked for me was in there all the time putting books online. And as long as he was there, it seemed we might as well open the doors to people who might want to buy our books in person. Hence shop number Six. The retail trade was welcome enough, but it was Interloc, then ABE, that boosted our revenues. We’d buy whole collections of general books and throw them online. We’d issue a catalog to our specialist customers, then take the books that hadn’t sold, cut the prices, and put them on line too. For a few years it was easy money. Then more people entered the fray and pricing became competitive, engendering the classic “race to the bottom.” In the old days if someone needed a copy of Search for Speed Under Sail they’d come to me and I’d provide the book for $25. There were hundreds of titles like that. I kept multiple copies, and I would buy, for $3 or $5 or $10, every copy I came across, knowing that I had a certain and steady market. But as internet databases blossomed that $25 book began appearing for $20, $15, $10, $5 or even just a few bucks, offered for sale by some high school kid who’d gotten it free from his grandfather, or from that grandfather himself, who got it for twenty-five cents at a yard sale and wasn’t particularly in it for the money, or from the dreaded “penny seller,” giving the book away and making profit on the postage. Search for Speed Under Sail, which had seemed a scarce and desirable title, was revealed by the internet to be common. At any given time twenty or even fifty copies might be on line, at prices as low as a dollar. Because of the economics of my scale I needed to make $10 or $15 on each transaction. My $25 copy didn’t stand a chance. The corollary of this distressing situation was that I could no longer buy those standard books in great numbers. The grieving widow of an old customer would call me in to look at her husband’s collection and be shocked and angered to learn that I was not interested in purchasing books that had cost her husband $25 or $50 apiece. I had already accumulated six thousand volumes of essentially dead inventory and was not eager to add to that total. The party was over. III. All this while, of course, I’d been dabbling in higher priced maritime books. If the “race to the bottom” tended to drive the price of common books down, my intellectual curiosity was propelling me in the opposite direction. I grew weary of handling the same books over and over; I began to seek the exotic. In time, the simple fact that I’d never seen a certain title before became a good reason for buying it. This turned out to be an excellent response to the dreary physics of the internet marketplace. The only book not subject to the general downward pricing trend was a book that was not listed online. I began trying to fill my maritime catalogs with such items. While it was difficult finding this kind of book, it was comparatively easy to discover manuscript items about ships and the sea that were not listed on the internet. Indeed, by definition, most manuscript items are unique – written by a particular person at a particular time for a particular reason. I began buying and listing logbooks, journals, diaries, letters and archives pertaining to maritime history. Because each item had to be understood and described in its uniqueness, these items required more work to catalog, but at least I could be certain nobody was going to undersell me on the internet. From there, the hunt expanded to photographs, documents, charts and printed ephemera, none of them unique by nature, but scarce enough to have little internet competition. By this time – in the mid-90s — my catalogs had evolved into their present 6 x 9 inch 32-page format. This allowed me to list 100 to 300 maritime items in a package that I could mail for the cheapest first class rate. As computer technology evolved typesetting and illustration became possible on my desktop. Ultimately, I’d send a PDF file to my local job printer and get my catalogs back a week later. Email was another technological evolution of the 90s that had a radical effect on my business. Email catalogs and quotes were instantaneous and free. My hard copy mailing list shrank back under five hundred. My email mailing list expanded to nearly two thousand addresses. Nowadays I assemble sufficient material for six to eight maritime catalogs a year. These are composed in part of items that are sufficiently rare not to be listed on internet databases, but I always include a number of more common books to encourage beginners and people of limited means. Some of my most loyal customers have been buying $25 books for decades, and I’m happy to try to keep them happy. The four or five hundred hard copy catalogs are sent out in staggered mailings – sorted geographically – and the catalog is posted on our website, usually in a more lavishly illustrated form. After the hard copies have had a chance to land, I email my customers and let them know that they can view the new catalog online. When the hard copy and electronic versions have run their course I list the remaining books on ABE, ABAA/ILAB, and similar internet databases. If a collection of cheap books happens to come in between catalogs, I’ll send out a quick “email only” list, which costs me nothing and keeps my bottom feeders fed. Two years ago I sold my six thousand low-end books at enormously discounted prices. I took the money and used it to fix the shop up, and my wife and a friend of hers opened an art gallery in it, thirty-one years after my old pal Jean opened hers and drew me in to the world of antiquarian books. Jean died a while ago, but I imagine she’s amused, looking down on us now, to see that we’ve come full circle. IV. I have written this narrative in hopes of providing you with a sort of road map of how a late 20th century individual evolved from a guy who’d ““always liked books” to a specialist dealer. The path was long and fraught with missteps. I’m sure it would have been shorter if I’d been able to apprentice with an established dealer, as was the practice in earlier times, or if I’d had the advantage of attending an in-depth seminar such as this one. Still, it is tempting to see my career as a felicitous journey from chaos into order, from trial and error into smooth efficiency, from darkness into light. I want to caution you in the strongest possible terms that nothing could be farther from the truth. In fact, I have been driven from pillar to post by a chaotic marketplace, itself driven by technological and economic forces that I am powerless to alter or withstand. I have “evolved” from being a gentlemanly practitioner of a civilized trade – a man who served his community from a place on its main street – to a marginalized, obsolescent outcast, a desperate survivor of a bygone world. While I sometimes see myself as a wily small mammal dodging my way among dinosaur legs, I feel more often like an Indian on his pony on the ridge, looking down at the Iron Horse steaming through his hunting grounds, wondering where all the buffalo have gone. Think I’m being too dramatic? Let’s look at the numbers. V. Say I issue six catalogs a year, each containing $100,000 retail worth of maritime books and manuscripts. In the old days one might have hoped to have spent $35,000 or less on such material. But now, because of the prevalence of pricing information on the internet, those goods might cost me closer to $60,000. (This almost ruined Matthew Needle. Any boob who can fire up a computer has immediate access to the knowledge Matty spent decades of hard labor accumulating. It’s no surprise that he’s moved more into manuscript material, and now makes a good part of his living performing appraisals.) My catalogs have a healthy sellthrough; I’ll do 50% or better in the first weeks of any catalog’s appearance. Then the remainder will go online and sell another 10%. So, shortly after my catalog appears I’ll have $60,000 in receivables, representing a profit of $24,000 on sold items, with another $40,000 in unsold books on my shelves as equity. That sounds tidy enough. Multiply $24,000 by six catalogs and you’re making $144,000 a year. In the harsh reality of cash flow, however, I’m just breaking even. Worse still, before that money starts trickling in (I bill net 30 days, terms for which many institutions and more than a few big-shot customers have little regard) I’’ve got to go out and spend another $60,000 on the next catalog. So I run around to book fairs and specialist venues, trying to fob off my back stock, often at reduced prices – at least 20% to the trade – and then wait 30 more days for that to come in, and hope, in the interim, that dealers and customers stop by shop number Six – now an art gallery as well as a book shop – and drop some bucks on items that need to be seen to be appreciated, waiting all the while for the occasional, random internet sale of a big book that’s been in stock for far too long. Meanwhile, of course, I’m hemorrhaging overhead. (An entire book could be written on this topic, and I am always happy to discuss the manifold ways in which, despite the absurdity of my “location” fantasy, I am still in the real estate business.) So I borrow some money to cover my purchases until my receivables come in. If I’m lucky enough to find a collection with high-profit, quick-turnover items, I can keep my business debt manageable by flipping the most saleable goods to recover my costs. Otherwise, I’m facing a financially stressful situation. Now, it is a fact that people are drawn in some mysterious but undeniable way to fresh material. If you want to keep selling, you have to keep buying. From a cold-eyed business standpoint this may be as fallacious as my delusion about the perfect location, but you’d be surprised how many dealers behave that way; certainly I do. Most of us, I suspect, are simply addicted to the buzz of the buy. The only hope for us is a perpetual state of financial readiness which, for the reasons under discussion here, is nearly impossible to attain – at least for financial maladroits like me. Aside from buying addiction, overhead, and constantly lagging receivables, cash flow problems are likely to result from expensive items that do not sell quickly. At any given time a good portion of my cash and credit are likely to be tied up in inventory. This is equity of a sort, but it’s damned difficult to liquidate. If it were easy, I’d have done so. Sounds desperate, doesn’t it? And yet, here I am, more than three decades into my career, still having fun. I’ve paid mortgages, put kids through college, bought cars and so far avoided bankruptcy. In that time I’ve had many wonderful adventures and enjoyed the company of some unique and remarkable people. I used to think they were simply colleagues. I now realize they are the best friends a man could want. How have I managed to survive all these years? I don’t know, really. I’ve improvised a lot, and faced more than a few dark nights and desperate passages. But I think I’ve learned a few things, and I’d like to share them with you now. If you are contemplating a first or second career as a specialist dealer, here is some advice. A good deal of it, obviously, has been lost on me: 1. Don’t do it. Don’t even think about it. It’s too hard. 2. If you’re sufficiently pigheaded or romantic enough not to heed #1, the least you can do is LEARN YOUR SUBJECT AREA. It is not enough to “love” travel books, or to be “interested in” birds. You have to study, and study hard. 3. FIND THE NICHE. This does not refer to a choice of specialty, but to the kinds of materials you buy and sell. You can get a very good start in your specialty by assembling a collection of relatively inexpensive but well chosen books in one subject area. The value of the sum of such a collection is always more than its parts. This, I believe, was how Dan DeSimone got started in his specialty. Or you might skip the bound, printed tome all together and (my favorite…) 4. THINK OUTSIDE THE BOOK. Look for photographs, ephemera and especially manuscripts. You probably won’t be able to cough up twenty grand for Borget’s beautiful and rare book “Sketches of China,” 1842, but you may, as I have done, discover an illustrated journal that turned out to be the logbook of the captain of an opium ship from about the same time period. And guess what? While dozens of libraries may own the Borget, not a single one has that illustrated logbook, because as a manuscript item, it is unique. There are other advantages to manuscripts. You have to read them, and bring your knowledge to bear in order to understand them. Hence, lazy people do not like to work with them. Hence you can often buy manuscripts at great advantage. 5. If Steve tells us, rightly, to ““listen to the book,” we specialists must, equally LISTEN TO THE CUSTOMER. In our limited, highly concentrated fields, advanced collectors and dedicated librarians almost always have knowledge that we do not. Usually, they’re happy to share such knowledge for the same reason Louie Howland first tutored me in maritime books. The more I know, the better I’ll be at getting books for him. I can’t stress enough the importance Kevin’s remarks on repeat customers. They are the life blood of a specialty business. Along with my books, that customer list is my true equity…. Did you ever do a book fair and not sell anything? Happens to me with some regularity. But if, as a result of doing that fair, I meet one or two new people who are truly interested in my subject area, that fair has been a success. 6. So, the Customer is important, and the Book is important. But the description of the book, especially the narrative part, is also of critical importance. Whether you’re doing catalogs, quoting on the phone by email or letter, THE BOOK DESCRIPTION VALIDATES THE IMPORTANCE OF THAT BOOK. IT IS THE LINK BETWEEN THE CUSTOMER AND THE BOOK. 7. EXPAND YOUR VIEW OF WHAT THE JOB ENTAILS. Consider Matty Needle. He works every connection, every angle, every chance encounter or journey, from breakfast at one joint to after-dinner drinks at another. He always seems to be out and about and he’s never not ready to buy a book. I’’m told the great Larry McMurtry was that way too in his heyday. Hogs after truffles. 8. THINK ALONG THE SAME EXPANSIVE LINES ABOUT THE BOUNDARIES OF YOUR SPECIALTY. Just recently I sent out an “email only” list of 19th century stereo views of waterfront scenes. The list sold out. Shortly thereafter I got a standing order from a successful marine architect who wants marine stereos in his office for the amusement of his clients. Now stereo views have become a part of my maritime specialty. You might even think of supplementing your stock with in-print books in your subject, or by sponsoring lectures, or by publishing books yourself. I’ve published about two dozen titles, many of them reference books that were assured of a ready market among my customers. 9. THINK CREATIVELY ABOUT USING EVERY ASPECT OF THE TECHNOLOGY AVAILABLE TO YOU. Those stereo cards sold because when you clicked on the thumbnail illustration in the description, it filled the computer screen with glorious 19th century detail. Pure eye candy. And if something like Google Books sounds threatening, think of it from the other direction. Every item in every one of my catalogs is searchable by Google’s spiders. This yields many inquiries a week. The book may have sold years ago, but now I have the name and address of a person who was demonstrably ready to pay me money. This has been vastly more effective than magazine advertising, and it’s free. 10. And last (there’s much more, but ten is a good number to stop at) LEARN FROM THE PEOPLE WHO ARE ESTABLISHED IN YOUR SPECIALTY. Figure out the things they’re doing right and emulate them in your own fashion. Even more importantly, reach out to them, and to the trade at large. They are not your competition, they are your allies. Furthermore, they have survived. You have a lot to learn from them and they, more likely than not, need all the help they can get. In the final analysis, it is only the windfalls that separate success from failure in the specialist trade, and the troughs between windfalls can last for months or even years. It sounds desperate, and often it is. Do you really want to go there? If so, give me a call. Maybe we can do some business. Greg  Gibson Ten Pound Island Book Company 76 Langsford St. Gloucester Ma 01930

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

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

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

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

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