The Path Through the Trees

by Christopher Milne

  But what finally turned us against second-hand books was not the buying but the selling. It was the discovery – totally unexpected – that those who came into our shop to look at them bore no resemblance at all to those who came in to look at our new books. Our new book customers, from the very first, surprised and delighted us by their obvious enthusiasm for the shop and its wares. They enjoyed coming in, they enjoyed looking around, they enjoyed making their purchases, and they were clearly going home to enjoy reading whatever it was they had bought. And naturally their pleasure was our pleasure too. How very different was the attitude of those who came in to look at our second-hand books. In fairness I must admit that in one sense of the word this attitude was not their fault. For it was we who had chosen to keep these books in the narrow passageway that separated the rest of the shop from our office and till. This meant that every time we served a customer with a card or a new book we had to squeeze our way past the second-hand browsers, and do so twice, with two sets of apologies, one on the inward journey, once again on the outward. The fault was ours, yet, because we so disliked their attitude in the other sense, we found ourselves most unjustly disliking it in this sense as well; and more and more did we resent their crouched, unyielding forms, less and less apologetic did we become as we pushed our way by.

  I recorded an early encounter with a typical second-hand book customer in my journal.

  ‘The man came in with a brisk, business-like air and carrying a briefcase. He positioned himself in the gangway, ran his eye quickly over our shelves, picked out three books, flipped through them, put them on one side, picked them up, glanced at them again, handed them to me and said: Three-and-six? I did the addition and got the answer to five shillings. Four shillings, then? said the man. I said, Sorry, five. He said that wasn’t the way to do business and if I wanted his continued custom I must be more accommodating. He then looked at the books again, rejected one, tried to get the other two for three shillings, and finally, grudgingly, paid the full three and six. No doubt if I had priced the books up to seven-and-six in the first place and then allowed him to beat me down to five, he would have left the shop delighted with his bargain. But I hate doing business in that way.’

  It was customers such as this – collectors, I suppose, or possibly dealers, whose measure of a book lay in how much they had paid for it and what they thought it was worth, rather than in the pleasure it might give anybody to read it – that made it such a happy day for us when we finally stopped being second-hand booksellers.

  By that time, however, we were already well established in another line of business: we were selling greetings cards.

  CARDS

  I have already mentioned the Swiss flower cards that we sold so briskly on our opening day. This was how it started and they came to us out of the blue, a bundle of specimens sent to us by an enterprising Miss Channing who looked after the sales of a small firm of importers. Up to then cards had entered little into the lives of either of us. We knew about Christmas cards, of course, and sent them to our friends. We knew about view cards, occasionally bought them on holiday, and inherited hundreds of extremely drab Dartmouth ones from Montague. But that was all. Birthday cards, ‘Best wishes’ cards, ‘Get well’ cards, ‘New Home’ cards, ‘Congratulations’ cards: all these were quite unknown to us. And so our delight at seeing these Swiss flower cards arose not only from their beauty but also from their novelty. We fell in love with them at once, ordered them and decorated our window with them. And at once they caught the eye of passers-by and brought them into our shop. ‘I just want that card . . .’ they would begin, then see that we had others, and hunt through them, and start making a collection . . . then go on to look at the books. . . . And when they had assembled all their purchases and were handing them over to us, they would say, almost apologetically: ‘You know I really only came in to buy that one card.’

  Thus very early on we learned that cards were worth much more to us than the profit from their sales. They gave people an excuse to come in and browse. Holding their card they could then go on to look at the books – and it didn’t matter in the least if they couldn’t find one they wanted to buy.

  We started with Swiss flowers and they remained our favourites and the favourites of our customers for many years. Indeed you could say that they were the foundation stone on which our card reputation was established. And of course they pointed the way forward. But in what direction? We needed a guide; we needed advice; and very luckily for us there entered Mr and Mrs Worth able and willing to help. Our luck was not just that they had themselves run a card business in another town before coming to Dartmouth, it was that their taste was the same as ours. The suppliers they introduced us to had just the cards we wanted.

  The cards we wanted? I might almost say ‘the cards we loved’. For another discovery we made was that there were two distinct categories, those we loved and those we hated. Our reactions really were as strong and as different as this and there was very little in between. But it was many years before we hit on a definition of those in the second category that did not seem to be an insult either to the customer who preferred them or to the salesman who was offering them; and at first much time was wasted, to our growing misery and the growing exasperation of the salesman, as he turned the pages of his album of samples and we shook our heads. The phrase that saved us in the end was ‘stationer’s cards’. And all that then became necessary was a quick glance at the album while his opening questions were being rehearsed (‘How’s trade?’ and ‘Been on holiday yet?’) and then we could interrupt with ‘Sorry but these are stationer’s cards’, and direct him across the road.

  By confining ourselves firmly to those in the first category – we never bothered to find a generic name for them: they didn’t need one – we very quickly established a reputation that was, in one respect at least, quite undeserved. ‘I’ve never seen such lovely cards anywhere else before,’ customers would say. But of course they had. It was just that they had seen them mixed in with all the others, and in such company – flamboyant, tinselly, ostentatious – they appeared small and drab. Only when they were among their fellows did they shine. It is the same with people.

  As we chose our books, so we chose our cards: slowly, thoughtfully, pleasurably, one by one; never if we could help it accepting a ‘mixed assortment’ always preferring to make our own selection, a dozen of this, a dozen of that and then perhaps, greatly daring, four dozen of something that specially took our fancy; influenced very much by our own tastes, but realizing, naturally, that we were buying for others. I used to love these buying sessions, eager to see what was new, eager to discover a publisher or importer who could offer us something entirely original. Each season brought fresh delights. Each card gave us a double pleasure: the pleasure of finding it and buying it, and then the pleasure of displaying it and selling it. ‘What lovely cards you do have!’

  Were they extra attractive in those days I wonder, or were they like the first spring flowers after the long winter of War and Austerity? As I look at our cards today and remember those cards of twenty years ago, it is like looking at a hedge-bank in high summer heavy with vegetation and remembering the starry-eyed celandines that first pricked it into colour. It is like remembering spring gentians on a hillside in Italy.

  FRAMING

  A single incident, happening out of the blue, starts one off on a new course. It was Miss Channing and her Swiss flowers who had introduced us to greetings cards. It was Harold Finlinson who now introduced us to old prints and thence to picture framing. If Miss Channing had never written her letter, if Finlinson, visiting Dartmouth, had called elsewhere, or if in either case I had said ‘No’ instead of ‘Yes’, would the fortunes of the Harbour Bookshop have been very different?

  They were small steel engravings and they had come from topographical books published in the early nineteenth century. In their original state they had been black-and-white, and perhaps over the years they had become blotched with brown.
But this didn’t matter. They were torn out, bleached, washed, sized (to make the paper non-absorbent), tinted with watercolours and then mounted. This was how Finlinson offered them to us, and since they were all of South Devon scenes and many of them were of Dartmouth itself and since they were modestly priced at 3/– to 5/–, I was able to assure him very quickly that he had come to the right place.

  Dartmouth in the 1830s was not so very different from Dartmouth in the 1950s. The Butterwalk, Bayard’s Cove, Dartmouth Castle, the views up and down the river: these had changed little in those hundred-odd years. This gave the prints an added charm: they showed not just what had been but what very recognizably still was. We put them on display and were delighted to find that our customers shared our enthusiasm. And at once the question arose: what about frames? I asked Finlinson and he recommended a black-and-gold Hogarth moulding and suggested that I arranged this with a local framer. So I went to Skinner.

  I had discovered Skinner the previous year, for I was already thinking of framed pictures as a possible addition to our books. One or two of our greetings card suppliers also sold prints and it seemed natural that we should, too. There was a framer in Dartmouth but he was unwilling to help us; so I had to go further afield. Skinner was in Torquay and this meant catching first a boat, then a train, then a bus. But the bus landed me almost at his door, and then came half an hour with just the sort of man whose company I so specially enjoyed – that of an elderly, Devonian craftsman – and after I had shown him my prints (they were mostly pictures of sailing ships and coastal scenes) and discussed mounts and mouldings, I could listen to his stories and laugh at his jokes and store them up for passing on to Lesley when I got home.

  So now I took him my old engravings. But, alas, he could offer me only narrow oak or plain black; he didn’t have Hogarth. It was too expensive, he said.

  In the end, therefore – for there seemed no alternative – I became my own picture framer. I started in a very modest way with a hundred feet of half-inch Hogarth, some sheets of cardboard, glass from old pictures picked up for next to nothing at auctions, and a table in our dimly lit office behind the shop – which made it difficult, when I was working, for Lesley to get to the till. Then, as our business expanded and my skill grew, I acquired a larger, lighter workshop, added more and ever more mouldings to my range, and tackled larger and larger pictures in an increasing variety of ways. ‘I expect you need lots of special tools,’ people would say; but in fact I didn’t. I think the only tool I had to buy straight away to add to my existing collection was a very fine nail punch. The devices I needed for cutting the angles at the corners I designed and made for myself. Today there are books telling you how to do it, but I don’t think there were then; at any rate I never found – or needed – one. I was a self-taught frame maker. Only when it came to mount cutting did I need Skinner’s advice. He showed me how he did it, using a chisel and a home-made ruler, and I copied him: I don’t think I would have discovered so simple and effective a way on my own. The only luxury I ever allowed myself was a machine for shooting metal tacks into the backs of frames to hold everything in place. This was so much quicker than hammering in panel pins that I felt the expense was justified. When you make things for yourself, it doesn’t matter how long you take over it, but when you make for resale, speed is important.

  One might be excused for thinking that framing picture after picture is dull, monotonous work; but this was rarely so, even if I were putting six more Finlinson prints into Hogarth frames or six more Redouté roses into pink mounts and white box frames. It depended on what I was framing, and how: very much it depended on this.

  What and how: the picture in the middle and the mount and frame that surround it: these are the two components of the completed whole; and both were able to arouse in me the strongest feelings. If I liked what I was framing and if I could frame it the way I wanted to, then the work gave me intense pleasure. I never got tired of old engravings, nor did my customers; and fortunately – Dartmouth being a more famous town at the beginning of last century than it was when Mr Webster gave me his opinion of it – many artists (including Turner) had come here and a great variety of steel engravings, copper engravings, mezzotints, aquatints and lithographs had survived to record their industry. Finlinson was able to keep me supplied with a very considerable number, but not enough, and I had to go hunting elsewhere. I searched in Dartmouth, I searched in London, and on the way I came upon other delights: old maps of Devon, old road maps, old charts, prints of old ships, flower prints. . . . Sometimes, too, my prints would come in their original state, dirty and uncoloured, and so I had to learn how to smarten them up. I had to find out how to bleach and clean them, and I have memories (and Lesley has too) of prints in the kitchen sink, prints in bowls on the kitchen table, prints floating in the bath, and throughout the house the smell of chlorine.

  Parallel with this we were building up our stock of modern reproductions, becoming members of the Fine Arts Trade Guild and so being allowed to buy the larger, more expensive colour prints. Here was almost my first encounter with Art, for it had never entered much into my life before. Now, handling these luscious collotypes, I learned something of the artists who painted them, something of what they were trying to express, and felt the first prickles of the thrill that art can give its devotees.

  Much depended, then, on what I was framing. And much, too, depended on how. One might be tempted to think that, of the two components, the frame was of relatively minor importance. ‘I just want a very simple frame,’ customers would say to me: and sometimes even: ‘It really hardly needs a frame at all, just something to hold the glass.’ So, to restore the balance, may I mention those many customers who, seeing one of our completed pictures, fell in love with it and bought it scarcely even noticing the print in the middle, choosing it solely for its frame.

  Buying mouldings was like buying cards. Once again I discovered that it could be as painful to look through the range offered by one supplier as it could be a pleasure to look through that of another. I bought from two suppliers and their salesmen called once a year to show me their latest patterns. You could say that they were just sticks of coloured wood, but, oh, how I loved them and how I loved choosing them! How hard they were to resist, and (in consequence) how hard it became to squeeze our way through the ever-growing forest of them that – because of their length – I used to keep on the stairs!

  Mouldings and mounting boards; wood and paper and canvas; their colour, pattern and shape; their look and their feel: what materials these were to work with! You start with the print. How shall it be treated? You choose the ingredients, decide the proportions, blend them together, admire the result, put it on display. . . . I never made book ends. I never made another cigarette box. But I framed many hundred pictures, and, oh, what pleasure it gave.

  Yet within the bud there lurked the worm; and just as it was one of our happiest days when we closed down our second-hand book department, so it was with our picture gallery. There were, in fact, two reasons, two worms, you might say, one attacking our prints, the other our framing.

  I have already said that I never got tired of framing our old engravings, even though the treatment was always the same. Nor did our customers ever get tired of buying them, even though they grew progressively more expensive. The trouble came with our modern prints. Here the range was very considerable, stretching from the sort of pictures you might find in the National Gallery to the sort you might find at the Royal Academy. My own preference was for the former, but I was prepared to accept the public’s preference for the latter. What I wasn’t prepared for was their addiction to a tiny range of bestsellers. I could frame ten Peter Scotts with some degree of pleasure, but not fifty. And it was the same with Tretchikoff and David Shepherd, with moonlit seas and galloping horses, with sunny Spain and clipper ships. A bestselling print is so very different from a bestselling book. How nice it is if we like the book, for then each sale gives added pleasure; but if we don’t,
it doesn’t greatly matter, for books do not press their attention on those who do not wish it. They keep themselves to themselves within their covers, and the customer who chooses and the bookseller who wraps need exchange no more than a ‘please’ and a ‘thank you’. But it is not like that with pictures. Pictures do not lurk in shelves; they hang on walls for all to see, staring you in the face, hiding nothing. And there is another difference too. A book becomes a bestseller because it is talked about and its name becomes known: people buy it because it is a bestseller; knowingly they follow the herd. Prints are not bought in this way: they are seldom asked for by name, rarely chosen because everyone else is choosing them. Yet the bestsellers emerge, for all that; and unconsciously the public are drawn towards them; unknowingly they follow the herd.