The Future of Used Bookselling – An Observation

The world of the used bookseller has gone through radical and sometimes painful changes over the last few years. Many people have commented on the changes brought about by the Internet and online book purchasing. No one can doubt the profound effect the evolution of online book databases such as Interloc/Alibris and the Advance Book Exchange have had on booksellers. And let’s not forget that pesky little dot.com startup company — I think it’s called Amazon.com? That these changes get a lot of attention from booksellers and book buyers isn’t surprising; they are having a huge affect on what is happening in the used book market today. But there are other technological and business changes going on in the book world that will have an even greater effect on booksellers in the not-to-distant future. Changes that will affect how books are bought, produced, marketed and distributed.

Three key trends in book publishing that will significantly alter the future of bookselling are Print on Demand (POD) publishing, eBooks and Audiobooks and changes in the publishing marketplace. To put these trends in proper perspective it is useful to categorize used book buyers as either collectors or readers. Admittedly there is some overlap and a number of subcategories in each of these groups1, but most book purchases can be classified as a sale to a collector or a reader. This distinction is an important one; although most booksellers cater to both groups, some specialize and serve mostly collectors while others tend to target the much larger group of readers. It this latter group of booksellers whose future is at risk.

Let’s start by looking at collectors. Collectors are by nature a difficult lot. They want a very specific book. They care about true first editions (first printings), signed copies, etc. They want the proper edition of a book in a particular condition at a reasonable price. They demand assurances on these points; direct interaction with the bookseller is often desired and sometimes required. Booksellers may have to spend more time to make the sale, but collectors are usually willing to pay a bit more to get what they want. The good news is that no matter what happens in the future, there will always be collectors and a market for collectable books, although what makes a book collectable may change in the future. It’s when you look at readers that the future of used bookselling looks hazy. By volume most of the used books sold today are reading copies of one sort or another. This creates a potential problem for booksellers as, unlike collectors, these customers aren’t looking for a specific copy of a book, only a way to gain access to the content. So long as all the words and/or pictures are there the form and condition of this content is of lesser importance.2 There are many reasons why a reader will look for a used book; the two most obvious ones are availability and cost. There are thousands of new books published each year, and thousands of books go out of print to make room for them. Even if a book is still in print, for more common non-collectable titles a used book is often much less expensive.3 As readers aren’t as particular about form, they can be seduced by new alternatives as they appear.

Print on Demand Publishing

POD books are generally looked down upon by “real” book people. Many dismiss them because of the perceived high price and low quality of these books. I suspect most of this distain for POD books comes from early attempts that produced books using crude and expensive photocopying techniques. Times have changed. In larger quantities modern POD books still cost more per copy to produce than traditionally published books, but costs are not as high as they once were. The rise of POD printers like Lightning Source (owned by Ingrams) and subsidy publishing houses such as iUniverse and Xlibris have made POD printing much easier to do and much less expensive. Many small presses today use POD technology exclusively to produce their titles. Even major NY publishers are starting to use it to augment their normal printing processes; they are also looking at utilizing POD technology as a way to keep slow but steadily selling books in print (much to the dismay of authors who would like them to go out of print so they can get the rights back, either to resell it to another publisher or to arrange their own POD versions4). As for quality, most books printed using current POD technology are nearly indistinguishable by most buyers from the trade paper and hardcover books being produced by Big Publishers today (which are admittedly inferior to those produced in the past).

There are also publishers who specialize in reprints using POD technology; a good example of this is John Betancourt’s Wildside Press (http://www.wildsidepress.com/). They currently have over 500 titles available, many of them in several formats including hardcover and eBook. According to their website they only need to sell 6-8 copies of any title in a given year to make a profit on that title.5 Looking at their catalog prices, trade hardcover editions run from $24 to $49; trade paperbacks run from $5 to $24. These prices may be slightly higher than traditionally published books, but certainly not excessive or unreasonable.

What does this mean to used booksellers? The ability to bring an out of print book back into print at a reasonable price effectively removes most readers from the marketplace for rare books; if all they are interested in is a reading copy a POD produced copy will be more than adequate. For collectors POD technology adds some interesting twists to the notion of a “first printing.”

eBooks and Audio Books

I’m sure most used booksellers are laughing at the notion that eBooks are a threat to their business. After all, eBooks have been touted as the future of books for years and so far have made few inroads. But that will change. One of the things I’ve learned during my 20 years working in the high tech world is that some changes require a lot of massaging before they take hold. Apple tried to create a market for handheld computers with the Newton which was hailed by pundits are being the next big thing. But it didn’t happen then; the Newton was a failure and it wasn’t until several years later that Palm got it right and the PDA was born. Right now eBooks are still in the not-ready for-prime-time phase, but that will soon change.

What makes eBooks attractive? From the publisher’s perspective it’s the production/distribution costs. Once the content is prepared electronically you’re done. No printing costs. No shipping expenses. No distribution warehouses to stock. You can keep a title in print indefinitely with a minimal maintenance cost. And you have the opportunity to cut out some or all of the middlemen; it is easy to sell direct to the customer.6 From the readers perspective it’s instant availability; once they decide they want a title all they need to do is go to a website, provide payment information and download it. Instant gratification.

What is preventing widespread acceptance of eBooks? The first and most important reason is the need for a usable and affordable handheld viewer. There have been several proprietary attempts made to develop such a viewer, but with limited success. The hardware has tended to be bulky, fragile and expensive. But help is on the horizon. There already is a viable platform out there; the PDA. I have read two novels on my HP Jornada 548, including Michael Crichton’s Timeline. While the displayed page size is small (2 1/8 by 3 inches) making this book over 2000 pages long (compared to about 500 pages for the mass market paperback edition) the Microsoft Reader Font technology makes reading relatively easy on the eyes. And the thumbwheel that the Jornada has on the side allows me to hold the PDA in my left hand and change pages with a simple flick of the thumb. I can read the “book” and change pages with one hand; I can’t do that easily with a paperback. With a 128 Mbyte CompactFlash Card ($50 at Costco) I could carry about 200 books the size of Timeline with me. Even if you want a dedicated book viewer, the proliferation of PDAs and cell phones with displays are making the cost of the electronics and LCD displays for small devices drop significantly; I expect to see several new and inexpensive viewers on the market in the next few years.

Of course there are those who just like the feel of a book. But there is a technological solution for them as well — electronic paper. Several companies are working on this right now; for a peek at one you can see the work being done at Xerox Parc by going to http://www2.parc.com/dhl/projects/gyricon/.7 This technology provides the potential for something very much like a conventional book, but with pages that can be filled and refilled electronically. This will help placate older readers who have grown up with books; I suspect as the computer generation matures there will be less need for such a substitute.

There is also the issue of copyright protection. Initially publishers were hesitant to release eBooks on any platform that might allow the user to make an illegal copy. This created a Catch-22 for publishers; release on a proprietary dedicated platform and maintain control with a limited market, or release on a PC/Mac platform where users can easily make illegal copies. The major players are attempting to resolve this issue by adding digital rights management (DRM) to their players, restricting where and how a title can be played. This satisfies the publisher’s needs, but has not been universally accepted by users.8 This issue is much broader than just eBooks; it affects the music and video industries to an even greater extent. Publishers of the latter will either be successful in forcing acceptance of the current DRM solutions or will come up with some kind of compromise; whatever solution is accepted is likely to be mimicked by eBook publishers.

Finally there is the issue of price. Initially publishers were very cautious and greedy, charging the same price for eBooks as they were for hardcover editions. At the moment most seem to be pricing eBooks the same as mass market paperbacks. This is still high, but because of the vastly lower overhead there is opportunity for publishers to price eBooks even lower and still make more money per copy than they do for a printed book. They’ll be reluctant to do this, but doing so will help speed along acceptance.

On the surface it would appear that Audio Books are very different than eBooks; after all they are currently packaged and sold in the same way as printed books. However it is very easy to distribute these electronically, and they have the extra added advantage that inexpensive and widely-used platforms already exist for “reading” them. Audible.Com seems to be the leader here, and they have very shrewdly priced their services so they are significantly less expensive than the corresponding tape or CD versions. And for most titles they give you the option of burning them to CD as well. I expect the acceptance by audio book customers of the Audible.com solution will be quick, and may even provide a model for eBook publishers to follow.

How will this affect used booksellers? Like POD technology, eBooks and Audio books provide an easy and even less expensive way for publishers to keep books in print and reprint older works. But subtler is the effect on the sales of future titles; as more and more copies of books are sold electronically, there are less printed copies available. This reduces the supply of used books which will have two contrary effects; it will reduce supply which on the surface would appear to make these printed copies more valuable on the used book market. But with this comes a decreasing demand for such books on the part of readers; as they adopt eBooks they won’t want to buy printed copies, especially if prices go up because of limited supply. So you have fewer and more collectable copies of a title, but also fewer customers for those copies.

As for the eBooks themselves, DRM technology makes the concept of a “used” copy obsolete. They can’t be resold. In essence you’ve moved from owning a book to licensing one. Collectors obviously won’t go for this, but the much larger reader base will find this less onerous – especially if the price is right. And just as Audible.com provides the ability to “burn” a copy to CD, I expect similar technology will arise for eBooks as they sort through and resolve the DRM issues.

Changes in the Publishing Marketplace

The consolidation of major publishers into a few mega-conglomerates and the resulting mass market mentality will also have a profound effect on future titles. The trend in Big Publishing today is towards selling more copies of fewer titles. Like the movie industry, Big Publishing is only interested in Blockbusters. Yes, they’ll take on new authors, but if they aren’t on their way to becoming bestsellers after a few books they’re unceremoniously dropped. Mid-list publishing by the Big Publishers is rapidly disappearing. We’ve all seen the effect such publishing strategies have on the used book market; several million copies of the latest Tom Clancy or John Grisham title that are barely worth using as birdcage liner.

So what happens to the mid-list writers? In the film industry there have arisen independent film companies that have taken over the production of “small” films. Along similar lines there has been a proliferation of small presses arising to take over the mid-list from the Big Publishers. On the surface this looks like it could be a good thing for booksellers; more books with small print runs. But how are these new small presses producing their books? You guessed it — as POD titles or as eBooks! And in addition to all the challenges already mentioned that this creates for selling used copies to readers, the concept of a “first printing” becomes a complicated and difficult one.9 Again, this helps create collectable copies, but doesn’t address the broader reader market. And many of these small presses also offer eBook versions; they’re easy to create from the same files you use for the POD copies.

The Demise of the Reader Market

The inevitable conclusion that I draw from these observations is that there will be a gradual decrease in demand for used reading copies of books as the trends discussed above take shape. Booksellers who make their living by selling used books to readers will find it harder and harder to make a living at it. At the same time there could very well be a slight increase in the marketplace for collectable books, as fewer printed books are produced. I don’t know how long this will take; 5 years, 10 years, maybe more. But I’m convinced it will happen.

Booksellers who want to be in it for the long haul will need to focus their attention increasingly on the collectable market. That requires a lot of experience and knowledge of books. Which in many respects is a return to the good old days.

1. For example I’m a book collector and a reader; I collect what I want to read and I intend to read what I collect. However I primarily buy books as a collector; even if my prime motivation for acquiring a book is its content, I generally try to find a collectable edition. If nothing else it allows me to rationalize the money I spend as an investment. And occasionally it works. I spent $20 in 1982 buying a trade edition copy of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower: Gunslinger at the World Fantasy Convention in New Haven Connecticut. As Mr. King was at the convention (the World Premier of the movie Creepshow was held in conjunction with it) we had him sign and inscribe it, as did the cover artist Michael Whelan. They were inscribed to my former wife who, at the time, was a fledgling cover artist herself; she went on to win Best of Show Awards at the Ottawa (1984) and Nashville (1987) World Fantasy Convention Art Shows. At the moment I can’t find a signed copy for sale online; unsigned copies run from $500 – $1250.

2. Some readers do have preferences as to form, but these are usually due to specific usability concerns. For example, I have a friend who has trouble with her hands and finds reading a large hardcover book uncomfortable — she prefers paperbacks. Also readers will sometimes buy a collectable copy of a book because that’s the only form in which that content is available.

3. For non-fiction there is another important reason; often in research it is desirable to find a particular edition of a book which may not be the current one sold new. In this case readers are often as picky as collectors when it comes down to the specifics of a title.

4. The Authors Guild has set up Backinprint.com, a program that allows authors to reprint their out of print titles. The Mystery Writers of America has an imprint program arrangement with iUniverse. I’m sure there are other similar examples.

5. See the question in their FAQ at http://www.wildsidepress.com/ubb/Forum4/HTML/000019.html

6. Although this is easy, most eBook publishers still sell books through “traditional” online bookstores like Amazon.com, Barnesandnoble.com or Powells.com for marketing reasons; having their eBooks available right “next” to the printed versions.

7. Xerox Parc, for those who don’t know, is the research facility where the mouse, Graphical User Interface, desktop publishing and the Ethernet were born. Alumni went on to start 3Com and Adobe Systems, and their ideas were “borrowed” by both Apple and Microsoft.

8. See http://www.epic.org/privacy/drm/ for a discussion of the privacy concerns over DRM.

9. As a collector of Modern First Editions myself I’m very interested in what may happen to this area of book collecting. But that’s a subject for another day.

Bio for Erwin H. Bush

Erwin started out as a reader who turned into a book acquirer and eventually became a book collector.  Over the years he has been a patron of the illustrative arts and early member of ASFA (The Association of Science Fiction & Fantasy Artists), a radar technician on a naval destroyer, a small press publisher, an editor of an academic journal, a book reviewer, a professional philosopher (who talked his way into a non-existent Masters Degree program at an Ivy League School), a spouse and business partner to a book cover artist, a computer repairman, a course designer and teacher, a technical writer, an early designer of CD-ROM based documentation, a steering committee member for the Silicon Valley Chapter of the Association for Software Design, and an aspiring fiction writer and member of the Mystery Writers of America (MWA).  He has spent the last 20 years working in the high tech industry, focusing on how to make technology accessible and understandable to ordinary people.  The beginnings of a website can be found at http://www.erwinbush.com.

Never Mind The Book, How’s The Cover?

Books As Literature

“It is a salutary discipline to consider the vast number of books that are written, the fair hopes with which their authors see them published, and the fate which awaits them. What chance is there that any book will make its way among that multitude? And the successful books are but the successes of a season. Heaven knows what pains the author has been at, what bitter experiences he has endured and what heartache suffered, to give some chance reader a few hours’ relaxation or to while away the tedium of a journey. And if I may judge from the reviews, many of these books are well and carefully written; much thought has gone to their composition; to some even has been given the anxious labour of a lifetime. The moral I draw is that the writer should seek his reward in the pleasure of his work and in release from the burden of his thoughts; and, indifferent to aught else, care nothing for praise or censure, failure or success.”

Books In Context

Literary merit aside, though, it is often hard to do the sensible thing and throw these long forgotten, apparently worthless objects, into the dumpster in the alley – if only because they have managed to make it so far. Take, for instance, this volume found in the back row of a triple-stacked shelf the other day:

It must have been an unexpectedly hot item in its day: the first printing was August 24th, and there were reprintings August 27th, September 3rd, September 7th and this one September 16th. Moreover, Grosset & Dunlap, the reprint house, ran to at least seven printings in 1908 and 1909.

But hot in 1908 is one thing – hot in 2001 is quite another. Search in vain for the name of Joseph Medill Patterson (1879 – 1946) among the list of Nobel Laureates in subsequent decades. The first few pages aren’t bad, but this is clearly not the stuff of which Great American Novels are made. A quick check on some of the book lists, too, confirms the suspicion: True, an optimistic seller has listed it for $125 on the grounds that it is a Rideout novel (ie named in Walter B Rideout’s The Radical Novel in the United States, 1900-1954, pub. Harvard University Press, 1956); but there are 15 other copies (excluding the Grosset & Dunlaps) listed, including another fifth printing at $5 and quite a number around $12 – not really enough incentive to go to all the work of photographing it and putting it up on Popula.

As it happens, a little research reveals some good reasons (other than the hoarding instinct) to keep the book. For one thing, Joseph Medill Patterson, it turns out, is not a totally obscure name, after all. His grandfather was founder of the Chicago Tribune. He was in his youth a prominent socialist (hence, perhaps, the Rideout reference) and a member of the Illinois House of Representatives; he founded the New York Illustrated Daily News, in imitation of English tabloids he had seen during service in the first World War; and though he missed the Nobel he did win a Pulitzer for editorials supporting FDR’s second re-election. Hence, though his name is not usually mentioned in the same breath as those of Mark Twain, Henry James, or even Nathanael West, it does lend enough incidental interest to provide an excuse not to chuck out the book.

Alma-Tadema/ Ladies Home Journal kitsch about it. The artist, it is noted within, is someone called Hazel Martyn Trudeau (1887 – 1935). Off to the web again, and we discover a couple more interesting tidbits. Hazel Martyn Trudeau was widowed by the Canadian Trudeau at an early age and, apart from being something of a painter herself, married in 1909 to a somewhat well known Irish artist from Belfast,John Lavery (1856 – 1941). His portrait of her – a story in itself, since it also served at various times as a portrait of three other women, including Sarah Bernhardt — is one of his better known works. The two of them, Sir John and Lady Lavery as they became, apparently lent their London house in 1921 to Michael Collins and others of an Irish delegation who came to negotiate the Anglo-Irish treaty which shortly thereafter precipitated the Civil War in Ireland. The Irish Free State government which emerged from that war invited Lavery, as a token of their appreciation for his help, to paint a portrait of his wife to be used on the Irish pound note, which it was for the next 50 years. The face of the painter of the frontispiece was known to millions of people.

Hence, despite its apparent obscurity, the book has all kinds of unexpected historical associations.

Books As Objets d’Art

This is all very interesting, of course. But the real reason for keeping the book, what really stays the dumping hand, so to speak, is the cover. The strange mixed fonts of the white lettered title, obscured behind the thin black cord of the money bag, and, stranger still, by a gold halo – why the halo? Not to mention the grasping white paws beneath, one hand rather fleshy with oddly blunt fingers, the other smaller, skinnier and even more deformed. On second looks, are they grasping, or are they throwing the moneybag, like a basketball? The whole palette of gold, black and white blocked into the dark blue grosgrain just too characteristic of the era. Who could resist this oddity, who throw out this feast for the eyes? The book is a work of art.

The realization quickly sends one back to the three-deep shelf in search of more pretty covers, to the library in search of more information about book covers in this period, and, naturally, to the web in search of same.

A Little History

Modern bookbinding could be said to have begun in the 1830s. Up until that time, books were generally produced without covers or in plain paper wrappers. Either the bookseller, or the final buyer of the book, would have it bound to his liking by a specialist in the art. With the advent of new bookbinding technology, however, it became economically feasible for publishers to mass-produce books fully bound between hard boards. The books could be covered in paper or cloth and decorated. With this “case binding”, the spine of the binding is completely separate from the back of the text block, which greatly simplifies the whole process of decorating the exterior binding of the book. (For a fuller explanation, click here)

Yellow Backs (they were block-printed in three or four colors on a glazed yellow paper) thrived beginning in the 1840s (some say early 1850s), but they were gradually superseded when the art of truly decorative mass-produced cloth bindings began in around 1880, and had more or less disappeared by 1900.

Generally, cloth covers were decorated using a technique known as “blocking”. Blocking is similar to other “intaglio” or “relief” printing methods in which the design is raised from the surface, in this case on a metal “block”. (“Blocking” is an English term – in America one would generally call it “stamping”). The color is laid over the cloth board and the block, usually after being heated, is impressed on it, using a block press, to stamp the color into the board. Gilt and “blind stamping” (impressing without using any color) were used in the 1830s, with other colors generally coming later. Obviously, designs with more than one color require blocking as many times as there are colors to be impressed. By the time of the true golden age of decorative covers (say, 1905 – 1915), there could be as many as six different blocking operations in the production of one multi-colored cover.

In the library in downtown Los Angeles, the best book available on the subject is The Twentieth Century Book, Its Illustration and Design, by John Lewis, published in this country by Reinhold Publishing, NY, 1967. (Grab a copy if you see one going cheap – it’ll cost you upwards of $40 on the web, maybe a tad less for the 1984 revised and updated edition). The roots of twentieth century illustration, typography and cover art, according to Lewis, can mostly be traced either to Art Nouveau or to the private press movement most prominently exemplified by the extraordinarily influential arts & crafts school of William Morris (1834 – 1896) and his Kelmscott Press in London. These two influences were, on the surface at least, totally opposed to each other. Art Nouveau professes to be anti-historical, completely “new art” – even though, in fact, it is clearly heavily influenced by oriental art, particularly 19th century Japanese prints beloved of such exponents as James McNeil Whistler. The William Morris school, on the other hand, is deliberately medieval, rejecting the art of the Renaissance and going back to earlier roots, emphasizing the painstaking care and craftsmanship of medieval work and the predilection for quality, also, in materials. According to Lewis, the art of the book, from the 1880s when art nouveau began to flourish until well into the twentieth century, was completely bound up, so to speak, in these two remarkably persistent threads.

Sarah Wyman Whitman.

Sarah Whitman designed several hundred covers for the Boston publisher, Houghton, Mifflin, beginning in the early 1880s. Her designs incorporated elements of Morris as well as of Art Nouveau. Shown here is a design for Oliver Wendell Holmes’sDorothy Q Together With A Ballad Of The Boston Tea Party & Grandmother’s Story Of Bunker Hill Battle: With Illustrations by Howard Pyle, published by Houghton, Mifflin in 1893. The cover is charcoal grey cloth, and the lettering and decoration are blocked in silver.

Anybody Need Ideas For A Thesis?

Relative to the material on typography, layout and illustration, though, there isn’t a lot of information on the subject of cover design from this period. As Lewis himself noted, “The history of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century illustrated cover is still to be written”.

One of the main problems in researching such a hypothetical work, though, would be to identify cover artists. In the case of books and magazines, the illustrators are often explicitly credited in the text; or at least have legibly signed their work and can thus, albeit with some effort on the part of the researcher, be identified. The identity of cover artists, though, is much more problematic.

Unless the artist has unobtrusively introduced initials into the design, there is almost no way to make an attribution. Hence, even in Lewis’s well researched and well documented book, there is very little about the cover artists in this roughly 1890 – 1925 period. The web is almost equally uninformative (though there is an excellent site-in-progress on German bookbindings at the University of Wisconsin).

Evidently, there is an opportunity here for anyone taken with the subject to do a bit of primary research. Nobody seems to know very much about these covers, and, to judge by the prices of many of them, nobody is really collecting them – at least, some are collected for their literary or historical interest, but very few people seem to be collecting them for their artistic interest or as relics of this extraordinarily rich period of bookbinding history.

Which takes us back to the source – the books themselves. The following is a sampling, shown in roughly chronological order, from our shelf of forgotten early 20th century English-language hardcovers. Note that there is nothing particular or special about these covers individually, except in that they illustrate some of the features of covers of the time. There are doubtless far better examples around.

There is a whole series of George Barr McCutcheon novels with illustrated covers published by Grosset & Dunlap. Grosset & Dunlap, as well as the other well known New York reprint publisher, A L Burt, tend to be rather despised by book collectors generally, in much the same way and for the same reasons as Book Club editions are today: they are rarely, if ever, true first editions; print runs tended to be large, so that scarcity often isn’t a factor; and in many cases the materials and production are of lesser quality. (There are notable exceptions, like A L Burt’s 1918 Son of Tarzan, which goes for $30,000 – $40,000: check the web price before you throw it out!) It is worth noting here, though, that both these publishers produced some very worthy illustrated covers in this roughly 1900 – 1925 period. It isn’t inconceivable that they might one day stumble into respectability.

As for the cover artist on this book, there is no direct attribution in the text, but the front bears the inconspicuous initials, MA, for Margaret Armstrong (1867 – 1944), who was prolific in designing similar covers for Scribner’s (as well as Dodd, Putnam and Harper) from the 1890s through the early years of the 20th century and has been held largely responsible for the “genteel” look of many such made-for-posterity books in this period. Perhaps because she inscribed her characteristic monogram on her designs, she is almost alone among cover artists in having escaped anonymity during this golden age of cover design. This talented woman also achieved some fame as a mystery writer, publishing three whodunits in her waning years.

As in so many other spheres of life (some may say: alas!), the key may well be in the bags of gold. By the mid-twenties, almost every book wore a colorful dustjacket. Early dustjackets had been relatively drab, but by this time printing technology had reached the point where full-color jackets were, presumably, much cheaper to produce than elaborately blocked cloth-covered boards. They could compete visually on the bookstand with the highly designed and gorgeously colored magazine covers of the day. Not only that, there was more scope for advertising on a dust-jacket than on a cloth-covered board: some choice words on the flaps could be used to sell the book – or other books by the same publisher; and there was, similarly, space on the back. Hence, economics dictated at the very least a more modest expenditure of resources on what had become, so to speak, the underwear of the book.

Not that there weren’t some spectacular cover designs to come – more of that, perhaps, another time. But it is clear from the most casual inspection of those dusty shelves that, with the possible exception — true in all decades of the twentieth century — of children’s books, as well as some fantasy/science fiction and adventure titles, from about the mid-twenties onward, illustration and decoration of the cover generally took a back seat.

The moral for the likes of Willie Somerset Maugham are clear: when you plan the marketing campaign for your book, make sure your publisher hooks you up with a good cover artist. You may end up unread, but at least you have a shot at being collected.

Collecting

What to collect in book covers? Well, as we’ve seen in this brief survey, the field is pretty much wide open. Even those few artists who are well known are not out of the range of most pockets. For instance, there are several copies on the web of the Sarah Wyman Whitman Oliver Wendell Holmes cover (see above), the most expensive of which is $105, with a Near Fine copy offered at $60 and half a dozen Very Goods in the $15 to $50 range. True, you can spend $20,000 to snap up in one swoop a collection of 300 bindings by Margaret Armstrong, but you could assemble a decent collection piece by piece yourself for a lot less than that, starting, perhaps, with the Scribner’s Van Dyke (Van who?) collection.

Perhaps the best part about this whole field, though, is the conspicuous lack of knowledge and easily available information on the subject. For example, who did all those Grosset & Dunlap and A L Burt covers? Any collector could have a lot of fun finding out, and maybe in the process rescue some poor undeserving writers from obscurity.

Some Interesting Links not in the text above:

• Bowling Green University’s Popular Culture Library – This link shows work from their exhibition of Decorated Bindings by Women Designers

• New York University Bobst Library exhibition of bindings – a quick tour of binding history, with representative examples and a bibliography

• Bud Plant Illustrated Books – A site put together by someone who clearly loves his subject, with hundreds of illustrations and tons of information (and opinion) about illustrators. Bravo!

• Violet Books gallery – some beautiful covers in Sci-fi and Adventure from the late 19th century to about 1940. Another wonderfully informative connoisseur’s site.

• American Library Association correspondence showing a detailed timeline for 19th century book production

• University of Wisconsin gallery of German book covers – some really superb work here

• Smith College’s Mortimer Rare Book Room – a gallery of beautiful late 19th and early 20th century bindings

• Oberlin College Special Collections – A splendid illustrated tour of 19th Century American book covers with information on some of the cover artists.

God Bless the Library of Congress, and all those who pay for her.

Ephemeral Assays – the Paper Trail

If I had five seconds to ask two questions about life, they would be “From whence?” and “Where to?” Same with paper ephemera. Where on earth do you get it, and what in heaven’s name do you do with it once you’ve got it? Paper is great for collectors because they know what they want and how much they will pay for it, and most antique dealers and booksellers can handle the occasional good piece that comes their way, but full-time pursuit and dealing is pretty specialized. It requires a lot of hunting, winnowing, processing, and marketing.

The word is out about paper, especially at auctions, and it’s getting harder to make the big scores that can sustain this career choice. On the plus side, house call purchase prices are still fairly low, the gene pool is deep, you attain a highly efficient degree of retail display verticality (a bucket of nicely packaged paper totaling hundreds of dollars takes up the same shop or show space as a musty $19.00 deco hamper), and you’re in a niche market with universal appeal.

Ask an ephemera dealer how s/he got started. In my case, I used to buy dollar box lots at the tail end of auctions, including those loaded with the paper detritus of an individual’s life. Much of this is dreck, such as banking records, but there’s usually a good amount of family history in there which future genealogists would surely like to see saved. A lot of the older ephemera from the first half of the last century has little monetary value, but these items were created in interesting ways for interesting purposes. They come down to us from an innocent, unhomogenized era, and have defied the odds of survival in doing so. I couldn’t bring myself to discard these things, which led to storage problems, so I packaged the saleable pieces and box lotted out the non-garbage remainders at other auctions in the hope that someone else would spare them from the dumpster. I bumped along in this slightly bemused and barely profitable mode until I had a $5.00 auction purchase epiphany which appeared in the form of two thirty gallon garbage bags filled with the early paper of a future bank president. I was able to trace his life without any voice-over narrative. As a young man around 1928 he made modest investments in mid-western oil wells and western mines that went bust as soon as the Great Depression hit. These certificates and high-pressure missives were nicely decorated with oil rigs and mining equipment, and probably made more for me than they did for countless investors. After that debacle, our young man contacted hundreds of firms that marketed get-rich-quick schemes with a fervor that foreshadowed his future predominance in the world of high finance. There were full color pamphlets and catalogs (the lion king of ephemera) for advertising stilts, store punch-cards, fountain pens, soda fountains, novelty items like nudie knives, radios, popcorn machines on portable advertising stands, thermometers, and just about anything you could think of, all in perfect condition and in their original envelopes. I stayed up all night absorbing them till the robins told me to call it quits.

The better examples sold to specialist collectors at book and antique shows for several years at an average of about $40.00 per piece. One telescope catalog collector up from New Jersey begged to come home and look through whatever I hadn’t brought with me, and repeat customers would run way back to my full booth as soon as the doors were flung open at future shows. What I couldn’t have known then is that the days of such auction finds were numbered, and that I would have earned ten times more for this stuff by selling it online years later.

Thus bitten, the next step is to see what ephemera reference books there are, attend paper shows and auctions, join an organization like the Ephemera Society of America, and perhaps learn at the feet of a master. Thus schooled, it’s time to journey into the wilderness alone to test your mettle and perfect your techniques.

Hunting ephemera at general auctions is a very hit-or-miss affair. Many auction halls don’t bother with it at all. Others don’t understand it, and if auctioneers misstated the nature or importance of pottery or furniture in the same manner they’d be hooted off the platform. The only thing funnier than a worthless beer flat of religious hymn books or Currier & Ives calendars or Etude music magazines failing to get a single bid is when somebody pays far too much for them. I know many antique dealers and even booksellers who have been burned by paper so often that they’ve learned to avoid it assiduously. For those auctions that don’t have an aversion to or ignorance of paper, you often find box lots arranged by category. One can usually tell if these lots are first time to market or if they’ve been picked over already. For example, if you scope out a groaning table of Life magazines with no Marilyn, Ali, Beatles, or other standout covers present, you’re not in Kansas anymore. If the auction print ad uses the words “paper” or “ephemera,” bring extra cash. Serious, well-advertised items such as a batch of good Civil War letters seldom go under the money these days.

The secret to success when it comes to general auction paper lies in the preview process. Arrive early, or, if possible, the day before. (True ephemera auctions require a whole day, though you often have the aid of a printed catalog.) If you can’t preview adequately, sit as close to the front as possible. There have been times when I arrived very late and just outbid everyone else on the boxes of ephemera which caused the most excitement, but this is risky business as you may be bidding against the uninformed or against the determined collector who doesn’t have to worry about resale value. On one occasion innumerable boxes of alphabetized files from the career of an ancient social studies teacher came up. It took a long time to preview them and others gave up, but five or so were quite valuable, being chock full of ephemera on Native Americans, canal monographs, etc. I must mention verticality again. When you buy a big box of postcards or a van full of books and paper, you’re getting a lot of stuff for the money. And all kinds of great things can be hiding in there. When you buy a rocking chair in need of repair, there are no mysteries. You’ll spend hours fixing it up, and it may or may not sell for a small profit in your lifetime. If it’s a Hummel figurine called “Sensitive Hunter” or something, you know within twenty bucks what you’ll get for it someday. You know who your three Hummel competitors in the area are, you have to worry about authenticity and hidden repairs and breakage, and you have to have this around your house until you sell it. Give me the virgin forests, hidden ravines, deep fishing holes and swarming exotic game of ephemera any day!

In addition to the Power of the Preview, another admonition is Let the Buyer Beware. All the chicanery of auction houses and the antiques field is refracted by the multiplicity of surface planes and undulating folds inherent in rag and wood pulp products. It pays to know what’s going on around you. Several years ago I was acrobatically extended over a tall narrow box of Boys’ Life looking for Norman Rockwell covers. Ten mags from the bottom I found a huckle of early Stanley tool catalogs that I eventually sold for hundreds. Hours later they got to this part of the heap. The auctioneer was trying to signal his pal up front to pay attention, but the guy was chatting away and didn’t notice that his hidden cache was about to be knocked down. The fix was becoming obvious, so the auctioneer had to let it go for a few dollars.

When the burrower realized he’d missed out a moment later, he looked around to see who the naive buyer of a bunch of boy scout magazines might be, in order to make a lowball offer on the tool catalogs. It’s also a good idea to check the lot you’re interested in periodically, to make sure that expensive trade card or whatever didn’t somehow leap from one box to another or even right into a pocket. I heard about a guy in Boston who bid thousands on a loose lot of stamps for one very valuable specimen that disappeared between the preview and the bidding, and the auction house did not give him a refund.

Other more standard auction advice also applies to the pursuit of paper. Calculate ahead of time what you can reasonably expect to make on an item, and don’t let auction fever sway your estimates. Try to pick up some things that you can turn over quickly. Learn what’s hot and what’s not. Listen in on free appraisals during the preview. Avoid entangling alliances because there are usually too many variables. Get to know the runners. Go over and ask them to put stuff up when your bitter rival starts heading for the bathroom (just kidding, sort of). Roll with the punches. I’ve paid $700.00 for a box of faraway local historical photos and papers I fully expected would sell for one tenth that price, and I’ve paid one dollar for a huge amount of 1920s architectural greenhouse drawings I would have spent $500.00 on. Look for unexpected opportunities, stay frosty (as in alert), and make mental notes for future reference.

If we don’t learn from the mistakes of buying history, we are doomed to repeat them.

Where else do you find good paper? Yard and estate sales provide the occasional score. Some outfits that run estate sales are willing to unload all the books and paper for one money days before the cutthroat event even begins. Estate lawyers can help along these lines too.

Targeted newspaper advertisements sometimes get your foot in the door without the competition breathing down your neck. Dumps are clamping down on bin diving, though I was reading the other day about a growing company that cleans out garages and attics. Many of their franchise holders take advantage of the free spoils policy, and the article included a photo of a guy in overalls (if I recall) holding up a valuable comic book that went quite high on eBay. I work on a commission basis with a good plumber friend, and my brother’s best informant is a Roto-Rooter man. There’s probably even some valuable ephemera laying around your own house which may or may not have enough sentimental value to keep it there.

When you reach the tyrannosaurus level, like a certain colleague of mine (we’ll call him “T”), you no longer have the time, space, or inclination to deal in lower-end ephemera. T displays at a book and paper show almost every weekend, following the circuit. He prefers those where he can set up the night before, allowing time to shop around. T has a great customer base, and he knows his merchandise, so he can simply walk the aisles before the regular crowds arrive, buying low and selling high. He can double his money on a $500.00 broadside with just one long distance phone call. He has the confidence to buy an old bicycle poster all in pieces for hundreds, have it professionally restored, and sell it shortly thereafter for thousands. T also buys entire estates full of paper and books. When I first met him he said he’d just bought a house one state away for $85,000.00, which I thought was pretty cheap for that county, but he meant just the paper in it! He finds things I can only dream about, like a captain’s trunk full of 1850s clipper ship cards and related NY to San Francisco transportation ephemera. A few years ago he purchased a barn-full of boxes that came from a rural New Hampshire lawyer’s office. The lot was sold for the first time in the 1970s, and it changed hands a couple of times before he picked it up for $5,000.00. Obviously, the standout items had been skimmed, but even some of those he was able to buy back separately after the sale because the previous owner didn’t know how to market them. Most of the boxes had not even been opened, however, so he was faced with the monumental task of wading through them one at a time. The amount and variety of ornate nineteenth century letterheads and billheads alone was staggering. There were thousands of old deeds (which will hopefully find their way back to New Hampshire some day). And there were loads of hidden treasures. T opened a boring, nondescript ledger book late one night and ended up with a lapful of early, unusually indecent cabinet cards. These are of the type most highly sought after by serious erotica collectors. “Were they French?,” I asked. “The poodle was, anyway,” came his reply.

One can picture the proper small town Victorian lawyer squirreling these away in such a hiding place. After years of handling boxes in alternately broiling and freezing self-storage units, T bought another house near his own in which to sort and store all this stuff. Separate rooms are reserved for different types of subject matter. Someone asked him how his new house was looking and he said, “Frankly, I don’t have very high hopes for it.” T is tired of auctions with a capital “T.” Besides the trickery and all those wasted hours waiting for the books and paper to come up, he often finds himself competing with his friends and customers or being asked to enter into cooperative arrangements with them. He particularly doesn’t like those auction houses that allow consignors to bid their own items up, which most do by the way. T says he makes ninety percent of his mistakes at auctions. He does use them to unload mass quantities of less than stellar stuff, however, and I haunt these whenever possible like a sucking remora follows a shark.

To bring us regular ephemera fanciers down to earth for a moment, there is one final paper trail, and that is serendipitous discovery. True ephemerons hide well. Awhile back I purchased a box lot of books, one of which was that ubiquitous A through B free first volume of a supermarket encyclopedia offer. I think it was called The Encyclopedia of Collectibles.

Flipping through the pages very quickly, a crisp yellow and red Big League Chewing Gum card from the 1930s worth $30.00 fell out from the baseball entry under the Bs. I bid on a dreaded old regular encyclopedia set at auction not long ago because I noticed the tiny tip of a silver certificate poking out, and that one volume alone was some departed soul’s hiding place for ten or so more. My favorite, though, is another little coincidence that got me interested in ephemera early on. I was sitting high up in the corner window of a major research library plowing through some books for hours on end, and time was running out. I’d left one large tome that appeared as if it hadn’t been cracked open in twenty years for last because it didn’t look helpful. Turns out it contained just what I was seeking. At the very end of this research session a curious piece of paper fell out and spiraled down in the waning golden twilight. It turned out to be a learned mini-essay on, and tribute to, ephemera, published in the 1970s by some eccentric down south. It is multi-colored and quite beautiful.

He likened ephemera to his other passion, which was fireworks. He told of the print run, some five hundred and fifty or so if I recall, and of the vault where a certain number were archived. I doubt if they’re still in that vault. How many have survived? Less than a third, I’ll wager, and half of those accidentally alive like the one I found. Maybe fifteen will still be with us in excellent condition by the year 2100. I believe in the severest punishment for taking anything from libraries, but surely this was different. It didn’t belong in that book or in that building. Some hurried researcher left it there years ago by accident. Any staff person finding this on the floor would have thrown it out. Though not really worth any money, this is my favorite piece of ephemera. I’d like to reprint it in full, but, like all good ephemera, I re-lost it some years ago. I know I’ll find this printed May Fly again when I get down to the right archaeological level in the Mesozoic carbon heap that is my office, and it will be reprinted some day as a farewell column in this series like the finale at an ephemeral fireworks display.

#ephemera