The Pope's Bookbinder

by David Mason

  an honourable activity for twenty-year-olds, then and now. In spite of what they say about the sixties today, those were interesting times in which to be growing up.

  Anyway, I bound my Freud in half-scarlet calf without raised bands, although a book that fat cries out for something to detract from its squat bulk, and with scarlet leather corners so big they ruined the symmetry from the side. And then I added black cloth sides which created a contrast truly startling. And when you open the covers, as you tend to do quickly to escape such a gross spectacle, you confront marbled endpapers, also of bright red and black, so that there is no escape from the vulgarity. Even the top edge is stained bright red. One can only wonder what Freud would have said. Some of my other bindings show other faults and questionable taste, but the Freud is exceptional for its lack of any redeeming features. But still, in spite of the excesses, I love them all; they are my babies, especially since they are my complete collected works, so to speak, for my career was almost over and I will never bind another book.

  I stayed at the plant a year and a half, not nearly enough time to learn more than the basics, but I enjoyed it a lot. Probably the highlight of that early phase of my binding career was when we bound a book for the Pope. The book was a religious publication, which the Spanish Government wished to present to His Holiness, and we bound it in full white morocco, a horror to work with. So easily marked is white morocco that we had to wash our hands every time we approached the book, just like surgeons, and our incessant smoking also had to be curtailed, for a falling ash could ruin a skin, just as any nick could result in a mark the equivalent of a tattoo. Actually, to be quite precise, I wasn’t allowed to touch it after we put on the white cover, although in a moment of personal triumph, I was allowed to heat up the brass wheels with which the gold-man applied the gilt. This is more important than it sounds because the proper application of gold demands precise heating. But before all that, I did all of the preparation and sewing and cut and attached the boards. So I can therefore state justly that I used to work for the Pope.

  Back in Canada, when I contemplated setting up as a binder, I thought of having a card printed like those used by some English firms such as, “Tea Merchants. By appointment to Her Majesty the Queen.” Mine was going to read “D. Mason. Bookbinder, By Appointment to His Holiness, Pope John XXIII.” In the end I decided that might appear a touch vulgar, although everywhere one looks one sees people presenting credentials no less fraudulent than mine.

  I found in Canada that there was not much opportunity for a guy whose resumé for almost ten years was blank, so out of curiosity, but with a growing awareness that bookbinding might be one of the few options open to me, I decided to check out the scene.

  Well, any of you who know what it was like in the late sixties in Toronto will know what I found, and it didn’t take long either. I found Robert Muma, about the only binder practicing the craft then in Toronto. There may have been others, but I didn’t find them. I went and spent an afternoon with Bob Muma, that very kind and gentle man, and while he was great fun what he told me wasn’t encouraging. He did commissions, mostly family bibles and such, but he did other leatherwork too, and when he showed me some of that work it was apparent that designing wallets and other leather things was his real love. If I remember correctly he was a self-taught bookbinder and, while highly competent technically, his bookbindings often looked like wallets. Do not presume that I denigrate Muma’s work; twenty-five years later I bought from his widow a half dozen of his design bindings, for which I paid a fair bit and considered myself lucky to get the chance to do so. He was generous with his knowledge and seemed as delighted to find someone interested in his work as I was happy to find him. I would have loved to work for him but there simply weren’t enough jobs. He made it plain that he believed it would be impossible for me to get enough work to set up for myself, and further depressed me by pointing out a problem which hadn’t even occurred to me. There was no bookbinding equipment to be had in Toronto. And even if there had been I didn’t have any money anyway.

  It all seemed too depressing, so I looked into some of the commercial binderies, but not with any real hope I would get a job. Furthermore, knowing how inexperienced I was, I was actually somewhat afraid of being hired because I feared I would then be exposed for the fraud I knew myself to be.

  I walked into the Ryerson Press in this mood one day carrying samples of my work and was stunned to be hired as a bookbinder on the spot. I reported the next day and was shown around the bindery. Ryerson was of course a publisher, but they printed and bound their own books so the bindery was full of machinery—which to my eyes seemed as primitive as what I had known in Spain.

  But it was the handbinding that stunned me. No fear there of being exposed as a fraud. Compared to the guys they had there I was a master binder. Now I could see why the man had hired me when he saw my work. These men, all central Europeans, were butchers. None of them had ever done any proper apprenticeship, and they seemed to relish the mutilations they inflicted on books. Hack and slice like all beginners, and oh—how they loved the guillotine, that single most dangerous natural predator of the bookbinding world.

  I must here digress to mention the Bookbinders’ Hell. Bookbinders’ Hell is large, there’s lots of room for everybody, and there is a special punishment for each sin bookbinders commit. But the largest area in that Bookbinders’ Hell is reserved for those who trim books. If you have ever read rare book dealers’ catalogues you will have noticed numerous descriptions of books which have been trimmed until all the margins, the catchwords and often even half the text, have disappeared. What this means is that books rebound two or three times over a few hundred years have been hacked at by each successive generation of binders, seemingly never learning from their predecessors’ depredations. All in the name of neatness. In the Bookbinders’ section of Hell, binders guilty of trimming are themselves trimmed every day, a bit from the fingers, a bit from the toes, and finally some from the tongue to quiet the piteous pleas for mercy.

  That, then, was the situation in Canada at that time. One bookbinder who really preferred leathercraft, a large publishing company whose bookbinding department contained the worst sort of book butchers, trimming and hacking away, no tools available and not the slightest sign that anyone cared or was even aware of that sad state.

  And to make matters worse, this new bookbinder on the scene was a fraud; he hardly knew what he was doing, and, worse, couldn’t even talk bookbinding talk in English.

  I didn’t know the English words for the technical terms used by binders. I had learned everything I knew in Spain, so naturally I only knew Spanish words for the tools and techniques.

  I still occasionally see a book which I recognize as Ryerson work, and it still causes me to wince. One happy event, though, was that I joined the Bookbinders Union, the only union I’ve ever joined, and I still retain my union card, of which I am inordinately

  proud, I don’t know why. It was a provisional one, for there was a six month probationary period. But, unfortunately, I didn’t work six months. In fact I only lasted eight days, after which I was laid off along with about a dozen others from the bindery. In case you are thinking that they did in fact discover I was a fraud, I don’t think so. I may have been, but so were all of my co-workers. At least I knew it. Most likely, being laid off had more to do with the general incompetence which put Ryerson into bankruptcy a few years after my brief stint with them.

  Anybody who attended the sale in Varsity Stadium that Ryerson put on when they went bankrupt could only be amazed that they had lasted as long as they did. What a mess of junk. Two and three volume sets of the memoirs of forgotten soldiers. Or worse, the exciting adventures of some protestant clergyman subduing the Devil in rural Saskatchewan. And thousands of leftover copies from the Ryerson Chapbook series, which included every amateur hack in Canada who ever wrote a poem; thousands of books that they could hardly give away, even
at giveaway prices.

  Anybody who knew anything about books, seeing that turgid mixture of pointless books which should never have been published, understood at once why and how Ryerson went under.

  On the other hand, if you are partial to conspiracy theories, there is another possible explanation for my being laid off. The Ryerson Press had been founded as The Methodist Church publishing house and was still owned by the United Church of Canada. Perhaps they had somehow learned of my Vatican connections. Whether I was in fact the victim of some anti-papist conspiracy is now unprovable, but whatever the true explanation this ended my professional bookbinding career, all eight days of it. But by amazing good luck, in a series of flukes surely too significant to be a coincidence, I found myself in another career, bookselling, which ensured that I would spend the rest of my life unappreciated on the margins, culturally and socially, and, most important, well below the official poverty line in income. Just like bookbinding after all.

  Chapter 4

  Marty Ahvenus—Out of the Wilderness

  Back in Canada after all these years, I spent an uncomfortable couple of weeks at my parents, then moved in with my old friend Alfred Ames and his new wife Nancy, sharing their house on Ward’s Island. This was when I got to know Bob

  Mallory, Gwendolyn MacEwen’s ‘Magician’, who lived behind us in a tumble-down shack which, in some schizophrenic extravaganza, he had completely covered in tinfoil. Through him I met Gwen, who still visited and tried to help him. As with many schizophrenics, Bob had many weird characteristics of dress which made him appear similar to a genie or an eastern magician, especially his constant wearing of a large turban; along with his otherworldly and often incomprehensible

  conversation it’s not hard to see that Gwen probably got the idea and the model for her novel Julian the Magician from Bob.

  I needed work right away but wasn’t sure how to set about getting it. Close to ten years’ absence washing dishes and digging ditches is hardly going to impress any potential employer.

  A neighbour on the Island had a part-time job in a bookstore, but was leaving town and offered the job opportunity to Alfred, with whom I was sharing the cottage. He was going to apply for it and I accompanied him on my way to seek work myself.

  We entered the tiny shop on Yonge, just south of Dundas, and met the owner. Al told him he wanted the job, but when the owner, Barry Young, heard that we were neighbours of his last employee he said no.

  “I don’t want another person from Ward’s Island. She was always missing the early ferry and she’d get here at noon, when I was arriving. That’s no good to me,” he said.

  As a one-man operation he needed the assistant for the three hours each day he needed to go to the publisher’s to pick up books and orders. This job also included all day Sunday, so with the three hours in the morning it came to 23 hours a week at $3.00 an hour, $70.00 or so a week, not much, but possible with a rent of $60.00 a month. Al was as desperate as me, and he also had a wife to support.

  But it was obvious that Young was not going to relent. Knowing our neighbour, we knew that she had probably missed the ferry at least two or three times a week, and if she missed it on Sunday he wouldn’t even know.

  I said nothing, but in spite of Al’s pleas that he wouldn’t miss the ferry I could see that Young wasn’t about to be talked into another Islander.

  But something made me act quite out of character; I suddenly spoke up.

  “Listen: why don’t you hire us both? We’ll switch every other day and one of us will always make it on time. Why not try us out?”

  Still skeptical, Young considered it—it would solve his problem because he was well aware that it wasn’t that easy to get someone willing to commit themselves for $70.00 a week—so I pressed: “Why not try this? Give us a two week trial, if one ferry gets missed we’ll call it quits. What’s to lose?”

  He weakened and agreed.

  So we started the next day and it turned out fine—we easily managed the ferry and took turns, alternating Sundays as well. After a few months Al and Nancy decided to move to Northern Ontario and I got the entire job to myself. I also took over the entire house, since by then, I had met my future wife, Kathleen, become enamored and she had moved in with us too. So, with her working we were able to handle the rent on our own. And Barry Young, who was a great guy, was himself very eccentric, so he prepared me for all the eccentric used booksellers I would soon engage with.

  Like many another in the antiquarian book trade I therefore started in new books. The new book trade, of course, is so different from used books that the only real experience gained for an antiquarian is in gaining some knowledge of how people buy books, a small part of what’s needed in the antiquarian trade, but a necessary preliminary. But really the most important part is the experience of dealing with that uncontrollable monster known to all small businessmen as “The Public.” I found I loved talking to people about books—or at least that part of the public who actually love books and are reasonably sane.

  I never have figured out what compelled me to act so out of character to gain entry into the book business. Were some subconscious factors at play?

  I have no idea, but what I do know is that I was a natural from day one. Young’s was a tiny shop, so small he could only have any variety by confining his stock to paperbacks. All the walls were lined with the normal paperback racks, as was the centre, leaving barely enough space to navigate aisles. Therefore, to have any selection, it was necessary to have each rack, which in a normal store would contain multiple copies of the same book, filled with as many different titles as it could hold. By the second day I suggested that I spend my three hour shift putting the books in alphabetical order so we would have a hope of finding a book when it was requested.

  By the time I was done I had discovered that I had a phenomenal memory for books and authors, even if I had never read them. Someone would inquire of a title and I would name the author. Where did that come from? More important, for a budding bookseller, if I had handled a book I remembered and could go to the appropriate rack at once. In later years, with my own stock, this great gift made me many sales and often astounded the staff of other stores. Often, a few days after scouting a store in San Francisco or Vancouver or Calgary, I might regret not buying a book, phone the store, request the book, and give explicit directions as to its location in the store (“It’s on the second floor, third aisle of the literature section, second shelf from the bottom, fifth or sixth book from the left.”) There must be some explanation for this phenomenon, because I’ve met many other dealers who can also do this.

  Perhaps all those years of libraries and then Old Favorites had imparted some of this remarkable ability to retain authors and titles, but it’s still a mystery to me. And it never went away, at least not until very recently when following the nature of things in aging, everything seems to be going away, especially my memory.

  And I also found I loved the job, loved talking to people, discussing books and, since my only real job after answering questions was to sit at the cash desk and take money, I also had a fair amount of time to read.

  After a while, when my interest didn’t lead to boredom, I started thinking that maybe this was what I should be doing with my life. It had literally never occurred to me. All those years of reading in solitude had convinced me that reading books was a vice, not something that one could consider doing for a living. Almost thirty, a failure at everything I had ever tried, I was desperate to find a challenge, to find some work that mattered to me and that would test the capacity of my mind and challenge my intelligence. But I feared that the old familiar boredom would again appear, as it always had in the past. That fear lasted for several years. For almost my first ten years in business I woke every morning fearing that this would be the day my interest in bookselling evaporated. Finally, I caught on that, after that long, it wasn’t likely to happen. That it took so long t
o realize I had found my vocation indicates, I think, something of the depths of my despair at not having found anything I could engage with earlier.

  Of course, now that I have had forty more years to think about such things, I have realized that most people go through life that way; they do work they hate only for the money they need to keep them going as they count the days until they can retire.

  Realizing how incredibly lucky I had been to discover bookselling has more than made up for the pitiful living booksellers can look forward to.

  For, of course, I whine at any opportunity about my poverty, but in truth that’s only to keep up appearances. All booksellers whine, it goes with the territory. I wouldn’t want to hurt my colleagues’ feelings by admitting that I don’t care about the lack of financial reward. But the fact is, I don’t.

  So I find myself, like all old men, lecturing the young, as my father had me. “Try and find some work to do that you can love; and do it the best you can,” he would say, perhaps a cliché, but for a banker in that terrible conformist decade, the fifties, as close to a radical thought as my father ever uttered.

  So, on June 15th, 1967 I entered the Village Bookshop on Gerrard Street in the old Bohemian village in Toronto and announced to my recent acquaintance, Marty Ahvenus, the proprietor, that I had decided to open a used bookshop.

  I had no knowledge of books, except of some of their contents, no experience, and most crucial, no money. I had only my part-time job in Young’s store, now earning $3.50 an hour, but such was my ignorance that none of these factors bothered me at all.

  Furthermore, a good part of my motivation was based on my near complete lack of qualification for just about any other type of work.