CABS Report: Edward Markiewicz, Montgomery Rare Books & Manuscripts

As far as the faculty is concerned, we could not have been more fortunate to share in the wisdom and scholarship of the assembled. The week began with a keynote address by Lisa Baskin, a prolific collector who encouraged us on how rewarding, personally and financially, it could be to build a thoughtful collection. The lesson she left behind was, “You cannot do it alone.” Katherine Reagan, Curator of Rare Books and Collections at Cornell University immersed the class in an element of the book world which rarely gets such valuable first hand insight.

Terry Belanger, founder of the Rare Book School delivered a semester’s worth of knowledge about the book as an object in understandable and bite sized sessions. The collective experience of the faculty booksellers, Rob Rulon-Miller, Garret Scott, Brian Cassidy, Don Lindgren and Lorne Bair, delivered lectures on as many aspects of the book business as could be fit into a five-day session. What impressed me most about the entire staff was their accessibility, both personally and informatively. No question was too insignificant and no time was too precious for them to dedicate answering our queries. Their selfless access before, during and after classes demonstrated how generous each veteran bookseller was to the commitment of each student’s personal progress and success.

The value of the seminar was multiplied by the hands-on exercises which we participated in. Practical application, interspersed with lectures combined with open access to the faculty makes this Seminar ideal for all learning styles and all vocations in the wide world of books.

“Rulonomics” or “Would you buy this book?”

This exercise required students to evaluate 17 different books or pieces of ephemera and determine if they would purchase it and for how much. The books had to be researched, evaluated for salability and priced for a profit. Each of us would have bought a few lemons and a few bargains. All of us were glad to have made those mistakes with Monopoly money.

Descriptive Bibliography

The students were given access to both electronic bibliographic resources as well as shelves of invaluable written bibliographies. Armed with this information we wrote entries for several antiquarian and modern books. The faculty critiqued our work and made the trade better by making us better at what we do.

Teaching Library

A comprehensive library of examples gave the attendees an opportunity to select and study an array of binding techniques, condition reports, edition points, tooling applications and so much more. This will not only make us better bibliographers, but more broadly knowledgeable in the realm of the written word.

The Auction

One of our last teaching sessions was on how to bid at auctions. This culminated in a live auction where the students bid on lots of quality material. The auction resulted in $1,000’s of dollars donated back to the CABS Foundation to support future scholarships and classes. I was pleased to have picked up several key pieces of Beat Literature. The value of this seminar was so important to me that I intend to donate books every year for future classes and future auctions to benefit the Foundation.

It is with humble appreciation I extend my sincere thanks to IOBA for the 2016 Collector Scholarship. I am confident that the opportunity to attend CABS has put me two years ahead of myself with respect to book knowledge and reducing the number of mistakes all of us rookies will make. A year from now you will hear from me again as my application for IOBA membership crosses your desk. You have my sincere commitment to adhere to the ethics of IOBA as my business develops.

Ed Markiewicz, Proprietor Montgomery Rare Books & Manuscripts 1696 SW Montgomery Drive, Portland, OR 97201

#cabs #ColoradoAntiquarianBookSchool #IOBAScholarshipContest

Shop Cat – Philadelphia Rare Books & Manuscripts Company

As told by Blake to Colleen Barrett, Cataloguer

Blake joined the staff of the Philadelphia Rare Books & Manuscripts Company (PRB&M), an antiquarian bookstore in northeast Philly, in late 2011. This loveable tabby cat had big paws to fill as her predecessor Sessa had many admirers, his own email address, and even his own division of the business: “SessaBks,” which continues to offer good used, “medium rare,” and simply serendipitous stock complementing our core early books of Europe & the Americas. After much thought, PRB&M’s proprietors Cynthia Buffington and David Szewczyk decided to name her after the English poet, painter, and printer William Blake, a surprisingly fitting name considering the variety of activities in which Blake participates — not to mention that some people say she’s a “tiger”!

Blake spends her days here at The Arsenal patrolling the bookstore, which served for over 100 years as U.S. Army officers’ quarters before it became home to PRB&M’s stock and offices. Her lack of opposable thumbs prevents her from greatly contributing to cataloging efforts, but she makes up for it through her phenomenal public relations skills. She often greets visitors at our Saturday Open Houses, occasionally contributes to emails, and “helps” employees with their daily work by cleaning their desks of notes with her tail or demanding attention when they need a break. Her most famous appearance in print to date has been in the Lifestyle section of Cat Fancy, where she was a featured cool cat, but she is even more enthusiastic about being featured in a truly bookish publication.

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Serendipity in Bookselling – Tim Doyle

The Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines “serendipity” as: “the faculty or phenomenon of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for.” The word has just celebrated its 262nd birthday, having been coined by Horace Walpole in a letter to Horace Mann, dated 28 January 1754. Walpole built his neologism on the name of a land in a Persian fairy tale from Amir Khusrau’s Hasht-Bihisht of 1302. For an interesting discussion of this, see Dr. Oliver Tearle’s “A Short History of the Word ‘Serendipity‘.”

The key role that the concept of serendipity can play in book buying and selling is well-illustrated by the legendary bookstore founded by Peter Howard in Berkeley, Ca in 1967, and that he chose Serendipity Books as its name. In Howard’s New York Times 2011 obituary, Serendipity Books is described as follows:

Potential customers were confronted with a warren of rooms, some two stories high, with good books stuffed absolutely everywhere, including in shopping bags blocking the narrow aisles. Although there was clearly an underlying order, its nature was hard to discern; there were no signs. People would wander in a daze, sometimes asking, “Do you sell books here?” They thought it was a library or perhaps a museum. The lack of direction was on purpose and in earnest. Mr. Howard wanted people to search for books and find not just what they were looking for but the book next to it, which they might want more if they only realized it existed. “The bookstore is an infinite array of material and knowledge of which you know nothing,” he said. “If you’re focused, you go to the library.” Browsing at Serendipity Books was, on purpose and in earnest, an exercise in serendipity.

Interior of Serendipity Books, image courtesy of Eureka Books.

There are two key factors at play in the concept of serendipity. The first, and the one that perhaps gets an undue share of attention, is Chance – luck, good fortune – being in the right place at the right time. At one of the thrifts where I scout, I once walked in just as their book lady was bringing out three garbage bags full of books, magazines and ephemera on the topics of stage and close up magic, hypnotism, and biographies of famous magicians. I told her I was interested in the whole lot, and she said I could have them for $10 per bag and save her the trouble of sorting and shelving it all. At another thrift a few years back, I came across sixty-some Easton Press and Folio Society titles in Fine condition and priced at $2 each. When I was checking out the cashier told me the books had just gone on the shelf less than an hour before. I suppose I was only half-lucky on that one – she then told me I should have been there the day before when they’d put out another, equally large lot. Someone else snapped up that one just as fast.

The second part of serendipity is Response. Louis Pasteur once said “Fortune favors the prepared mind.” Or as someone once told me: “Opportunity may knock, but you still have to get up off your butt and answer the door.” It doesn’t matter what luck brings you, if you don’t recognize it or know what to do with it. As book sellers, there are any number of ways we prepare ourselves for the serendipitous opportunity. Not all will work for all sellers; in fact some are mutually exclusive.

Be a specialist. Get to know one subject really well, so well that whenever something comes up in your specialty – at auction, in a thrift store, wherever – you will know if it is worth buying or not. You will be familiar with the books of worth in your field that most others would overlook. Establish a reputation as a specialist, and get the word out that you are seeking specialized material: through professional contacts and organizations, and through advertising. Put it on your business card, and hand it out liberally. As you become known as a specialist in the field, material will begin to seek you out.

Be a generalist. Do research to develop a broad sense of what is selling and why – look for trends and patterns. I like to systematically look at eBay Sold results as a way of learning what real people are paying for real books, with the big caveat that there are a lot of weird over and under outlier prices on eBay. I’ll often focus on books that sold in a specific price range, typically between $40 and $400. This reduces the number of results to a more manageable level, and you may want to experiment with using various keywords to get even narrower results sets. Most books that sell for higher than that are not ones you will run into all that often in a thrift store or other general sources – my Near Fine Random House HB 2nd printing of Cormac McCarthy’s The Orchard keeper notwithstanding. Looking at Sold listings on eBay will give you a broad education in what’s selling in fiction, non-fiction, modern, vintage, children’s books, etc. It will give you ideas on general topics and trends. And there are pictures – lots and lots of pictures.

Step outside your usual rounds. Craig Stark at  bookthink.com likes to say “Books are everywhere.” Try scouting at venues you’ve previously ignored. There are great book bargains on eBay, though I’ve heard many sellers say they don’t like the “neighborhood”. I source some of my best books at thrift stores, but in the past I’ve stopped going to one or another of them because the manager began overpricing, or writing prices in black marker on the front free endpaper. Stop back after a couple months, because managers and policies come and go pretty quickly in these stores. Try one of your local auction houses, or friend of library sale, or big flea market, or multi-family yard sale, or Craigslist, or any number of other sources. Developing multiple sources of stock protects you from being too dependent on one that could dry up.

Increase the odds of being in the right place at the right time. If you scout at thrift stores, get to know the people who handle the books. Find out if there is a regular schedule for when new stock goes on the shelves, so you can be there for first crack at it. Develop a relationship with your local auctioneers or estate liquidators – I’ve heard of book sellers who get called when a house needs to get cleared quickly.

Set up Wants on venues that allow you to do so, like eBay and Abebooks. Both of these sites let you save searches, and receive email notifications when a new listing appears that matches your criteria. I know some sellers who have developed numerous and sophisticated sets of saved Wants. This strategy is particularly useful now that so many eBay sellers use fixed price listings, because it allows you to get a notification and buy the item before others are even aware of it.

Following is an example of serendipity in my own experiences while book scouting, that illustrates some of the points I’ve made here.

In 2009 I went to a large college book sale. A high percentage of the books were recent – that is, printed within the last thirty-some years, and so had ISBNs. There were a lot of people with scanners, so rather than try to compete head to head with them I decided to focus on the pre-ISBN titles. One of the older titles that caught my eye was The End of an Era by John S Wise, a very good copy in original binding, published by Houghton Mifflin in 1901. The blurb on a recent reprint of this book from Anza Publishing describes the title as “one of the best first-person narratives of the Civil War period.” I saw that the book had a previous owner’s name (“Col. John Thomas Gibson”) signed to the front pastedown.

Additionally, there was a second inscription on the front free endpaper: “Given to me by my father / January 3d 1903 / Susan G Gibson”. I was intrigued by Susan Gibson’s period inscription, as well as the military rank included in Gibson’s inscription. On a hunch, I checked in the index of the book and found entries for a John T Gibson. Turning to the indicated pages, I learned that Col. Gibson was the commander of the Fifty-fifth Virginia Infantry based in Charles Town Virginia (now West Virginia), and was the first military commander to respond to John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry. In addition, his home in Charles Town was built on the site of Brown’s execution. The secondary inscription from Susan Gibson not only adds some charm and human interest to the book, but through publicly available genealogical information confirms the identity of Colonel Gibson.

So the book, while not signed by the author, has a very cool association with a key figure in a well-known and controversial chapter in American history. Purchase price of $1.00, sold for $290.

This is an example of serendipity in finding a significant book and of building value by recognizing something about a book that others missed, and by applying research. Specialized knowledge definitely gives you a leg up in terms of recognizing the significance and value of a book, but my example shows that you don’t always need specialized knowledge. Sometimes just paying attention to detail and following up on a hunch is all it takes. Anyone could have looked at the book and seen that the name written in the front was listed in the index.

If you have a story of serendipity in your book selling experience, email me at editor@ioba.org or baysidebooksmd@hotmail.com to tell me about it. I think it would be fun and informative to publish a follow up to this article, presenting a variety of real life examples.

Timothy Doyle Bayside Books of Maryland, IOBA Baltimore, Maryland