by David Mason
I had become acquainted with Marty Ahvenus because his shop on Gerrard Street was fairly close to Young’s and he had made an arrangement that when he needed a recent publication for a customer Barry Young would order it for him. I became friendly with Marty on these visits. I took to going there often. Marty gave everyone generous discounts, but he was even more generous to young people with little money. It didn’t take me long to realize that dealing in used books was a hundred times more interesting than in new ones.
Marty, through his friendship with so many of the young Canadian writers, found himself by the accident of those friendships stocking the new, often self-published books of those young writers. His shop had become a center for those writers to meet and discover the books of their peers. It’s unlikely that any of those writers who used Marty’s store as their unofficial meeting place in Toronto were aware that they were part of the beginnings of a true Canadian literature, anymore than we young booksellers were aware that we also were laying the foundation of a true antiquarian trade in Canada.
We were, all of us, just having a good time, as we struggled to embark on our vocations and survive, whether it was in writing or bookselling. We may not have known it at the time, but the modern literature renaissance was going on everywhere in North America, with the ascendance of the Beats in New York and San Francisco and with young writers in every city testing the limits both in form and in law. With bookselling, renaissance is an inappropriate term, because there had existed little before in Canada—a few decent shops and dealers in the whole country, though mostly part-timers dealing in Canadiana from home. The closest we had had to a real general used bookstore in Toronto was Old Favorites.
I was already intrigued by the idea of becoming a bookseller. I knew I had only one place to go for help, my father, and I knew that I couldn’t subject him to an appeal unless I was certain. But hanging around Marty’s listening to all the fascinating conversations with readers and collectors and the many writers who dropped in regularly convinced me that if I was to become a bookseller, used books was the way to go.
So, I went to my father, who was less than enthusiastic, knowing as he did my track record. And he would be aware that bringing him my scheme meant I was going to hit him up for money.
Here’s how I described it in a talk I once gave at the Fisher Library:
Having decided to become a bookseller, I went to my father, who was a banker, to tell him the important news. But his enthusiasm didn’t match mine—probably because he suspected what was coming next. Now, any of you who have had children and have heard all the great schemes that are going to make them millionaire entrepreneurs before the age of twenty-five will know, as my father did, that the very core of all such schemes always begins with dad laying out some money. After extensive negotiations we arrived at a deal, which was that I got a one-time loan of $500.00 (to be paid back for sure this time and not a penny more ever no matter what great opportunities or disasters not one penny more period, if you want to ruin your life with your crazy schemes I can’t stop you but please leave your mother and me in peace for the few years left us etc. etc.). We all know that scenario. The funny thing was that I paid him back the five hundred and never did ask him for another cent, but until he died some fifteen years later, whenever I entered his home he always looked at me a bit quizzically, as though he was expecting me to broach the subject of a loan once again. In later years, whenever I told him that I had just bought a library, his instant response was “I don’t have any money.”
I’ve never been certain whether my father was convinced by my obvious seriousness or if he was just doing what desperate fathers do: trying to give his son another boost, hoping against hope that this time ….
But he signed a cheque for $500.00 and I began my new life. The truth is, I was as skeptical—and as terrified—as my father probably was. But I was determined to give it my best. If I went down in flames, again, I knew it would be back to the factory, doomed to a life of drudgery.
As I entered the Village Bookshop that day in 1967 Marty was talking to a man, to whom, when I made my profound announcement, Marty introduced me.
“This is Gord Norman,” he said, informing me that Gord was also a bookseller. Gord Norman, it turned out, operated from his home issuing catalogues in his specialty, Modern First Editions. Gord was cordial, asking me at one point how big my stock was. When I informed him that I had no books, he inquired how long I thought it would take to acquire sufficient books to stock a store. I replied with the confidence of the abysmally ignorant, “Oh, I figure about six months.” (I also thought that my $500.00 loan was going to be enough money to stock a shop, too.)
Neither man laughed in my face, although I’m sure they were both quietly amused at my incredible naïveté. (In fact, when I went out on my own two and a half years later I had some seven hundred books, about two shelf sections.)
But both of them took me seriously, demonstrating a generosity of spirit I’ve never forgotten. And both of them immediately began a process I only became aware of quite a long time later, quietly and subtly instructing me, guiding me with gentle suggestions, mentoring in the time-honoured traditions of the book trade. They knew what I then didn’t know, that there being no schools for booksellers, the responsibility for educating future generations of the trade falls to other booksellers. The continuity of five hundred years of tradition demands that the older pass it on to the younger.
They didn’t know whether I was one of the worthy ones or just another of those who show up often, do it for a while and disappear. They did what I have done ever since I realized the importance of these traditions; they took me seriously and were prepared to do so until I proved myself unworthy of their attention.
My new acquaintance, or I guess my new colleague, Gord Norman told me that he was just going up to a sale of books run by Hadassah, the Jewish women’s organization, and asked if I wanted to accompany him. I did. It was an outdoor street sale on Markham Street in the Mirvish village.
Rummaging through the assorted books I realized I hadn’t any idea what I should be interested in buying—reality was starting to intrude.
I finally found a book by Somerset Maugham, whom I was then reading with great pleasure. It was a late novel, and it had no dust wrapper, but I didn’t know that it should have. On the verso of the title it clearly stated “First Edition,” although it wasn’t. More properly it should have read “First U.S. Edition,” but even that was not true. It was in fact the Book-of-the-Month Club issue. In that period the Book Club would simply purchase a part of the first printing and the only certain way to tell the issues apart for one who didn’t know the other signs was if it retained its dust wrapper, where the book club details could be found.
But I couldn’t get into too much trouble because the price was only 25¢. I bought it.
A few minutes later Gord showed me a book called The Buddhist Praying-Wheel, by a man called Simpson. It looked very serious and obscure. I didn’t know enough to realize that that was a good sign. It looked too dry and scholarly to me, which is exactly what it was. A real bookseller would have known that was what made it desirable.
But Gord advised me to buy it, and since it was only 50¢ I suppressed my skepticism, bowing to his superior experience (at that stage my experience of the used-book business being of about ten minutes duration; I guess every other used bookseller in the world had more experience than me). So my first expenditure as a bookseller was two books: cost 75¢.
Travelling home that same afternoon on the Ward’s Island ferry I met my friend Blake Stevens, to whom I proudly announced that I was now a bookseller, showing him my entire stock, all two books. He astonished me by showing great interest in the Maugham and asked if he could buy it. I agonized for a moment about what to ask for it, my first experience of that anxiety-laden existential dilemma booksellers come to know so well: needing to arrive at a price on the spot, no
time for reference, no time to properly think. After years and years one gets better at this but never comfortable. I bit the bullet and suggested 75¢. He paid me, thus completing my first sale, on my first day as a bookseller. Part of my shock and indecision at Blake’s request indicates another of my worst dilemmas as a bookseller, then and now. I didn’t really want to sell the Maugham to him because I had intended to read it that night. In the forty-five years since that day I have countless times faced the same dilemma; wanting to keep a book which I should actually be trying to sell. And countless times I have solved my problem by deciding to form yet another of the many collections I have built over the years, my justification being that some time in the future I would sell the whole as a collection. It works very well too. Another first on my first day, this one a pretty dumb one as my father always pointed out. I had bought two books for a total of 75¢, sold half my entire stock and got all my money back, being left with Simpson’s The Buddhist Praying-Wheel as my eventual profit. My first sale as a bookseller was therefore conducted on a boat, perhaps, I like to think, the only career in the annals of the book trade begun thus. Later I also sold a book on that same ferry to my friend (and first publisher) Karen Mulhallen, who also lived on Ward’s Island then.
And, furthermore, my first day as a bookseller, I now realize, may very well have been my most successful day as a bookseller, in spite of all those years since.
A library bought, half of it sold at once for an enormous profit-ratio, paying for everything and retaining one very good book as my profit.
Forty-five years later I still have Simpson’s The Buddhist Praying-Wheel. Its history illustrates a lot about the used-book business, and probably me as well. After much thought and anguish I decided that it should be worth $15.00. That was a considerable price when used books were mostly priced from $1.50 to $3.00 and the more common first editions only sold for $5.00 to $10.00. But it was a good book, and scarce, as I later found, having only ever seen one other copy of it since then.
A few months later I began working for Jerry Sherlock at Joseph Patrick Books. I have been asked and have explained thousands of times about Joseph Patrick. There is no Joseph Patrick; Joseph Patrick is Jerry. He didn’t want to use his own name so he used his middle names. His full name is Gerald Joseph Patrick Sherlock (yes, his people came from Ireland). I have cursed Jerry thousands of times for all of the time I’ve wasted explaining that. Still, during the two years I worked for him and in the forty-five years of friendship since then, that would probably be the only thing that has ever given me real cause to curse him. Jerry very generously gave me some space in his shop to put up some of my books for sale. The Buddhist Praying-Wheel lasted through those two years and then accompanied me to my new office, where after a few months I raised the price to $17.50. There it sat for a few years more, before I raised the price again, to $20.00, then $22.50 and up in those increments until it reached $35.00. Finally, after fifteen or twenty years, with the price now at $75.00, I looked at it one day—but now with the eyes of someone who had gained the sense of tradition and continuity which all booksellers inevitably acquire through time—and realized that I should not sell that book; after all it was the first book I ever bought as a bookseller. I removed it from the shelf, gave it to my bookbinder, instructing him to make a folding protective box, and put it in my private library, where it affords me great comfort and pleasure every time I look at it.
This is precisely the sort of book anecdote which infuriated my father, the banker. “Oh fine,” I can hear him say, “you buy a book that nobody wants, pay rent to keep it on the shelf for twenty years, then spend even more than it’s worth to put it in a special case. And somehow you convince yourself that you are running a successful business. You need your head read.” (This was one of my father’s favourite expressions, which he directed at me my entire life. It wasn’t until many years later, when I seriously began buying books on phrenology, that pseudo-science which believed that character could be ascertained by the shape of the head, that I realized where it came from. His parents’ generation had actually believed in phrenology, and no doubt his father had said that to him a few thousand times too, but seriously.)
So, now a bookseller, at least in my own mind, I worked my three hours a day at Young’s, scouted the Crips and Sally Ann in the afternoons, and spent a lot of time in Marty’s store watching and listening and learning.
One curious detail of which I was then completely unaware, was that Young’s Books was the only bookstore on Yonge Street then right up to the Batta Bookstore north of Wellesley Street which wasn’t a porn store. I never went into any of them (there was one directly across the street from Young’s) so I never realized this until I became friends with Nicky Drumbolis. Nicky Drumbolis is an extraordinary bookseller for whom I have enormous affection and respect. He is a remarkable man, unlike any other bookseller I’ve known well personally.
At that time I didn’t know Nick, nor was I aware that he was the distributor for all those stores, almost all of them owned or controlled by “The Mob.” Every month Nicky (he told me years later) would travel to New York to pick up a truckload of pornography and bring it up to Toronto to supply these stores. These stores were all the same, usually having a small front room stocked with a few ordinary new publications or soft-core porn magazines, and a larger back room where the very lucrative hard-core porn was displayed. When I walked up Yonge Street I would notice that the front windows often displayed the avant-garde work of the time: the Beats, lots of pamphlets, poetry published by Ferlinghetti’s City Lights in San Francisco, and similar publications from the New York underground. In fact, much of the poetry and prose displayed in these shops were by writers now considered among the giants of Modern American literature, writers such as Williams, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Olson, Spicer, McClure, and Burroughs, who were then considered scum, perverts, communist perverts in fact. Nicky had many funny anecdotes about his dealings with Canadian customs, but what was curious were his motives. As he told me, his bosses had no interest
in what was displayed in the front windows of those shops, so he had a free hand; he could buy, bring in and display anything he wanted. Their profit came from the back rooms. Nicky believed it was his duty to bring those books into Canada, believing if he didn’t Canadians would have no opportunity to be exposed to these
writers and their books, who he believed were transforming American literature and who would one day influence the world. He believed that if he didn’t do it, no one would. He considered it his moral obligation to expose Canadians to their influence. He was like those crazy missionaries, so many of them Canadian, who sailed to the Pacific Islands to convert the natives to Christianity. But in Nick’s case his religion was literature, and just as quite a few of those dedicated Christians were eaten by the natives, so has the indifference and contempt of our society attempted to eat Nicky’s idealism. But while he’s starved for thirty or forty years, he persists. And if God doesn’t reward him, I believe history, literary history, will. I consider Nicky to be probably the most remarkable bookseller Canada has produced. Drumbolis is a true visionary but is considered a fool by many of his contemporaries who can only understand profit. But remember William Blake was also considered nuts in his time.
Another thing which Nicky told me during our many conversations about books in Toronto in those arid times continues to fascinate me. The Mob, who muscled out the original pioneers in the porn trade in Toronto and elsewhere, eventually controlling it, refused to traffic in gay porn. They were apparently too straight-laced. So they ruthlessly controlled pornography, prostitution, and later drug traffic, but they drew the line at gay porn. Contrary to their morals, apparently. Another irony pointed out to me recently relates to Nicky Drumbolis. Nicky recently sold a huge and extremely important collection of very contemporary literature to the University of Toronto. Nicky knows more of the minutiae of modern literature than any dealer I’ve ever met, and he learne
d all this and acquired much of the collection that he sold because of his experiences and his purchases during the time that he was working for the Mob.
So, as my friend took great delight in pointing out, it appears that the Mob is largely responsible for buying and supplying this great collection to the University of Toronto.
One day, shortly after meeting him, Gord Norman asked if I wanted to accompany him on a scouting visit to see the books of a man called Mr. Honsberger. Mr. Honsberger dealt books from his home, and as we travelled there Gord gave me instructions.
“He specializes in occult or astral projection, also spiritualism (books generally categorized in the trade as ‘nutbar’) and he believes in it strongly himself. All his books will be very cheap except anything otherworldly. Don’t,” admonished Gord, “under any circumstances, put anything with remotely that kind of content in your pile. None of the books will be priced but they will be very cheap. If you put any books in your pile which he believes to be important—which means an occult book—he will ask a lot for them.
“And, if you don’t take it at whatever crazy price he asks, it will be the end of us both. He will become cranky and kick us both out without any books. Make sure none of your books could even remotely fall in the occult genre. And, also, when he answers the door, whatever you do, don’t laugh. Don’t even smile.”
I didn’t understand what he meant and spent the rest of the trip trying to figure it out.
We knocked on Honsberger’s door. When he opened it Gord’s warning became clear. Mr. Honsberger was an elderly gentleman and, as book people often do, he radiated gentleness and courtesy. The only mildly disconcerting thing was his appearance.
He was wearing huge flying goggles, with really thick lenses held in place by a thick rubber strap encircling his head, and a World War I airman’s leather helmet with big earflaps, along with a heavy floor-length canvas coat, even though it was mid-summer. He obviously saw nothing worthy of explanation in his bizarre get-up so we pretended that we didn’t either. It turned out that the goggles were really specifically-made glasses, for he was extremely short-sighted. The coke-bottle lenses so enlarged his eyes that with the leather flying helmet he looked like some sort of demented Red Baron.