by David Mason
The Pope’s Bookbinder
A Memoir
David Mason
A JOHN METCALF BOOK
BIBLIOASIS
WINDSOR, ONTARIO
Copyright © David Mason, 2013
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.
FIRST EDITION
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Mason, David, 1938-
The Pope’s bookbinder / David Mason.
Electronic monograph.
Issued also in print format.
ISBN 978-1-927428-16-0
1. Mason, David, 1938-. 2. Mason, David, 1938--Books and reading.
3. Antiquarian booksellers--Canada--Biography. 4. Beat generation. I. Title.
Z483.M43A3 2013 381’.45002092 C2012-907646-5
Edited by John Metcalf
Copy-edited by Dan Wells
Typeset by Chris Andrechek
Cover Designed by Kate Hargreaves
Biblioasis acknowledges the ongoing financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Council for the Arts, Canadian Heritage, the Canada Book Fund; and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Arts Council.
For Debra
and
For Michael Patrick Mason
Without whom it
wouldn’t mean much.
First to possess his books, for without them
He’s but a sot, as I am, nor hath not
One spirit to command. They all do hate him
As rootedly as I. Burn but his books.
—Caliban, plotting against Prospero
Wisest are they who read old books—
drink old wine—converse with old friends—
and let the rest of the world go…
—J. Cowper Powys
“He cannot lock us all up.”
“He has prisons enough.”
“For bodies, yes. But what are bodies? He can take our goods, but God will prosper us. He can close the booksellers, but still there will be books. They can have their old bones, their glass saints in windows, their candles and shrines, but God has given us the printing press.”
—Hilary Mantel
Wolf Hall
“What I do is me: for that I came.”
—Gerard Manley Hopkins
Family Album
My earliest memories are reflected by one of the earliest photos in the family album. We are living in a small Ontario town called Mount Forest, where my father is the temporary manager at the Royal Bank. In those years my father was a sort of troubleshooter for the bank. Whenever a manager in one of the branches in the towns of Southern Ontario dropped dead, or absconded with some of the money or the minister’s wife, or both; or whose alcoholism became too blatant to cover up any longer and they had to haul him off to the asylum, the bank would send my father out from head office to handle things until a new manager was appointed.
We lived in a big wide two-storey house with a veranda running the entire width, an exact match of the house next door, except that I remember the next-door neighbour’s kids taking me to their second floor and opening a door at the back of a closet, a secret door which revealed stairs ascending into a dark mysterious unknown—an attic. I remember being very incensed that we had no such attic; it seemed grossly unfair, and I concluded that it must be due to my father’s being the bank manager: he was just too respectable to have an attic full of the sorts of secrets and mysteries I was sure the kids next door experienced daily. I now believe a significant part of my character was evident in this attitude; I think it illustrates that sense of curiosity and wonder which, in spite of my timid outer response to the world, was already evident and which for the rest of my life has caused me an enormous amount of trouble, landed me in lots of messes, a few of them very serious, but which also has been responsible for most of the greatest triumphs I have experienced. I guess I’ve been going into that mysterious attic ever since.
That first photo shows a group of five or six kids of various sizes sitting in a circle. I recognize only my older sister. To one side, three or four feet away, sits a child of maybe three years of age, watching this group but noticeably not part of it. This is me, and every time I look at this photograph it evokes feelings of both sadness and some wonder at how clearly it captures my personality, now and obviously then, too.
One can also discern in this photo another central component of my character, apparent even then. I am watching this group with a sense of awe—I find them fascinating. I am the observer—the eternal outsider, that just about every writer whose autobiography I have ever read describes. That I became a bookseller rather than a writer speaks only to natural talent—that is, my lack of it—the reason I never considered the writer’s path.
Chapter 1
My Earliest Heroines and Heroes
My father’s parents were of farm stock, from small Ontario towns. Settling in Toronto, my grandfather, a plumber and tinsmith, had his business at College and Bathurst. The father of my friend and sometime business partner, Malcolm Lester, the publisher, owned a movie theatre a few blocks along College. I like to imagine that my grandfather would have been called in when the pipes in the theatre burst in the cold.
Across the street was College Street United Church, which, as a kid, I always assumed was owned by my mother’s family, the Baillies, since the minister, a personal friend, visited us regularly. My Uncle Bob was the choirmaster at the Church, and my Aunt Mina played the piano in the Sunday School. Most of the first two rows were always full of Baillies, so it was not an illogical assumption for a kid to make.
I never met my grandfather Mason, as he died before I was born. My grandma Mason was one of those severe Methodists, a stern judgmental woman, disapproving of all childish exuberance. She lived with us until her death in the fifties. I suspect it was not easy for my mother to have her continually severe presence in her house, but I never heard my mother say a word against her. I guess she and my mother had worked out some sort of truce over the years. But, to be fair, I don’t recall my grandmother ever chastising my sister or me in my mother’s presence, although she was quite strict when our parents were out. I avoided her, as she had that Methodist quality of making you feel guilty without ever quite understanding what you were supposed to be feeling guilty about.
The Baillies, my mother’s people, were a very different lot. Grandpa Baillie immigrated from Borthwick, Scotland, while his wife Gertrude Dore was from England, where family legend places her as a descendant of Sir Francis Elderfield of Sutton Courtney, near Oxford. Many years later I was delighted when I learned that one of my heroes, George Orwell, was buried in the graveyard of that village, buried there by David Astor who owned the manor house once owned by my distant ancestor.
I never knew Grandfather Mason but I did know my other grandfather, Grandpa Baillie, a silent man who said little. He fathered eleven children, of whom eight survived to adulthood, and he was a carpenter by trade. His claim to fame was that as an employee of the Hospital for Sick Children he had built the first iron lung in Canada. As a child I was mystified by how, if an iron lung was made of iron, a carpenter could build it.
Grandpa Baillie also seldom seemed to smi
le, but I clearly remember his gentleness with me. My mother was close to her mother and we visited often at their house on Admiral Road, where he would take me down in the basement to his workshop, a place of great mystery and wonder to a child. There was sawdust everywhere, and I would always be given a few little sanded wooden blocks, so beautifully smooth to the touch, worthless scraps which to a child were like precious jewels. I guess my love of wood comes from that. I have always loved to handle wood, real wood, not that disgusting veneered pressboard which passes as a substitute for it today. In five separate stores, I have always built my own bookshelves, starting on Ward’s Island, where I had begun selling books by catalogue from my home and sometimes to friends on the ferry. I built my first bookshelf from some discarded wood siding I scrounged from a demolished house. It took me three evenings to build that first shelf. I did everything wrong, but I gradually evolved a system (which I naturally named The Mason System) where I could construct an 8’ x 4’ shelf in twenty minutes.
Constructing a shelf in twenty minutes is not an insignificant accomplishment when you need a hundred or so of them, and really quickly, economic reality always prodding you. All my friends laughed at my boasting, but they all ended up adopting my system. In those days in Toronto, all the booksellers were good friends and when a new bookstore opened we would go down and spend a day or two working for our friends for free. We were all so poor that we all understood how important it was to open as quickly as possible so that one could start bringing in some money to pay for it all.
Like probably every man who spends too much time thinking, I regret that I didn’t know my father better. The intricate connection between fathers and sons is universal and probably ultimately inexplicable. A man of my age knows that, but still compulsively wrestles with whatever clues his memory retains. I expect women have the same problems with their mothers, only different in content.
My father seemed a simple man. He seemed to care about only two things, his work and his family. I never had a philosophical conversation with him; in fact, I never had a political conversation with him. At home, he didn’t seem to care about the great world outside. One of my loveliest childhood memories involves his coming home from work every night. My sister and I would run to the door to greet him with hugs, screaming “Daddy’s home!”, he bringing in with him the chill and all the smells of that great mysterious world out there, that I was certain he had been arranging properly every day.
I don’t think his capacity for intimacy extended much past us. He had a huge, beautiful smile, which I have decided was a defense against intimacy with strangers. It was probably very useful in business too, as was his always-impeccable dress. There are family photos showing him and my mother before their marriage, standing beside his shining Model A Ford, impeccably dressed even then and with that beautiful warm smile that seemed to radiate confidence.
My mother was the traditional wife of the period, keeping a perfect house. Her hobby, as we called it, was sewing, and she was very good at it. She made clothes for all her friends and because she charged ludicrously low prices for her work she was constantly solicited by all sorts of people for dresses and such. Amongst other things, she made by hand the wedding dresses of my sister and probably every Baillie niece, alongside those of the daughters of all her friends.
It was only when I was middle-aged that I realized that sewing wasn’t a “hobby”—it was her vocation. In those days women weren’t supposed to have a vocation, but that is what she had. She sewed every day all her life and she was sewing the last time I saw her, on the day she died, going to sleep that night and not waking up. We should all be so lucky to end so easily.
The nursing home in which we had had to place her the week before offered only a single room, and when Debbie and I and her parents visited that last day I could see she found it humiliating, her sense of dignity affronted that she had to greet guests in what was, in effect, her bedroom.
I believe she died on purpose, refusing to continue such an affront to her sense of propriety. When they called me the next morning from the nursing home to inform me that “they couldn’t find any signs of life,” I went up and sat with her for a couple of hours and waited for the funeral people. She must have succumbed quickly after she went to bed because her hair was still perfectly coiffed, not a hair out of place.
As I sat there for that two hours, that became a point of great comfort to me. She would be so pleased to know that she was properly arranged for wherever she now was.
About a month earlier she had called me in the shop where I was negotiating a purchase of books with Bob MacDonald, one of the best book scouts I’ve known.
“I think I’m having a heart attack,” she said.
“Call 9-1-1,” I replied, alarmed.
“I most certainly will not,” she replied.
I didn’t drive then, but Bob offered to drive me to her place on Bloor, out past Keele.
When we arrived, she was standing outside in a suit, elegantly dressed, including a hat and her fur wrap. There was no way she was going to the hospital improperly dressed, not even for a heart attack. She was in and out of the hospital three or four times before the nursing home, mostly staying in the emergency room. One day the doctors told us she wouldn’t last the day. She lay unconscious all day making rasping noises, surrounded by her children. But she didn’t go and they finally sent us all home promising to call if she went in the night.
We returned the next morning to find her sitting up in bed eating her breakfast.
“I’m not supposed to be here, you know,” she said, a smug smile on her face.
My sister Marguerite was everything to me as a child. Three years older than me, she was both my minder and my mentor, my protector and my persecutor. Sturdy, very strong and of very determined character, she could not only outsmart me and easily subdue me, but in the time-honoured tradition of older sisters everywhere she often did. My partner Debbie, also an older sister, has told me many stories of her youthful persecutions and manipulations of her younger brother. They are so eerily similar that I have come to believe it is a biological phenomenon. I believe that it is in their role as older sisters that women learn, very young, how easy it is to manipulate men, no doubt a useful tool when they grow up. Studying this as an adult, a perceptive man will likely conclude that biology, not viciousness or cruelty, is the centre of this trait.
But, to be fair, she could also beat up most of the bigger boys in the neighbourhood and often did, too. Especially Blake, who lived next door and who, although part of my small neighbourhood gang of friends, was a bully. His outweighing me by a fair bit meant that he only needed to sit on me and I was helpless. I think Marg especially enjoyed beating up Blake when he bullied me. Twenty-five years later when, as an adult, I met Blake and renewed our friendship, I happened to tell my sister about that meeting, and her response seemed to imply that if she were to see him again she’d again enjoy beating him up.
Marguerite always seemed to know everything about our family (she still does) and she continues to fascinate me with arcane family details that I never knew about.
It was Marguerite who told me when I was about seven years old that she and I had both been adopted, even showing me, secreted in some drawer, the newspaper death notices of our adoptive parents’ two natural children, one dead of an early staph infection, the other of the complications of hydrocephalus and spina bifida. Both died very young.
But, another clue to my character: even though this profoundly affected me, I never asked my parents about it. And they never mentioned it. It was never talked about, ever.
In later years, when I caused my parents so much pain and grief, I couldn’t help wondering if their thoughts didn’t return to their two lost boys, and if they didn’t also speculate on what weird personality defects of my natural parents they might be paying for.
I was born and mostly raised in Toronto, in the
area north of Yonge and Lawrence Ave. After some years on small-town assignments with the Royal Bank my father was permanently posted to the head office in Toronto, and we settled in a nice house on Elm Road. That area remains much the same as it was then except that the cheaper houses, mostly bungalows, have disappeared, replaced by monstrous houses filling entire lots, which upsets the aesthetic symmetry of the neighbourhood. Once, some thirty years later, buying a library in that area, I parked afterwards and studied the old house. Except for paint on the trim everything was the same, except for some inexplicable feeling of difference which I couldn’t pin down. I woke in the middle of the night, realizing what the confusing difference was. It was the trees I had climbed as a child, now thirty years bigger. No child would ever climb them again as I had done, familiar with every branch and crotch.
I don’t know who taught me to read, but someone must have very early, because I have no recollection of a time when I couldn’t. Sometimes I like to think that I was born already knowing.
However, I grew up in a house in which there were no books, except for the books my sister and I received at Christmas and on birthdays, or the occasional ones loaned to my parents by friends. On Christmas day, with all the presents opened, when the inevitable let-down occurred, I would always retreat to my bedroom to read whatever book I had received.
But, as with just about everything else, this book deprivation had some positive benefits—the greatest one being that it introduced me to libraries. And it also meant that I not only read and reread all the books I received as seasonal presents, like the Hardy Boys, but as a voracious reader, after I read my boys’ books, I devoured all my older sister’s books too. So I have read all the Nancy Drews, the Bobbsey Twins, and the Pollyanna books and many more meant for young girls. And while I have to admit that all those young lady heroines were “plucky,” they didn’t really meet my criteria for adventure.