The Pope's Bookbinder

by David Mason

  Ten thousand books! Even I knew that was an enormous number, almost unheard of outside of a library.

  “We specialize in Canadiana,” I said, unable to mask my excitement. “My boss is out right now but I know he will be interested. I’ll have him phone you as soon as he returns.”

  “Well, you’d better hurry up,” she said. “They’re all out on the front porch right now.”

  “The front porch? Books on the front porch?”

  This was strange, but I was so excited I didn’t pursue that thought.

  Jerry returned.

  “Anything to report?” he asked.

  “Not much, Jerry,” I suavely replied. “Except for a library of 10,000 Canadian books I got offered.”

  “10,000?” said Jerry. “That’s huge. You got the name and number?” he asked, his excitement now matching mine.

  “Yes. And we have to move quickly. She said they’re on the front porch. I can’t figure that one,” I said.

  Jerry’s face fell.

  “I know what that means,” he said sadly. “What’s the name?”

  I showed him.

  “Oh, it’s him again. I should have realized. Every few years his wife gets sick of him bringing books into the house, puts them all out on the porch and threatens to leave him. He runs away and hides, she tries to sell them, then in a few more days she forgives him and they go back in the house. I should have realized it was him, but it’s been four or five years since the last time.”

  We were both now dejected. Jerry explained.

  “The worst part is that I went out to look the first time and everything he had was junk. It was all Canadian, but he had bought the whole lot at the Sally Ann over the years, at 10¢ each, and there wasn’t a decent book in the lot. Whenever he did have a good book it would be ex-library or falling apart.”

  So my first Canadian library was a flop. Maybe they still appear on the porch every few years. Obsessives like that man don’t stop until they die.

  At Jerry’s things became somewhat schizophrenic. Not interested myself in Canadiana, I worked for a man who not only specialized in Canadiana but was hardly interested in other kinds of books, except for his own personal interests, which were Catholic books and authors such as Belloc and Chesterton. Jerry was as close to a self-taught bookseller as it’s possible to be, I think, which makes his achievement even more remarkable. You will hear me go on and on in this memoir about the traditions of the trade and the proper way a professional should act, and I learned much, if not most of that, from Jerry. But where did he learn it? There were no professionals before Jerry, at least in Toronto, or if there were I didn’t meet them. There were several dealers who knew books and did things properly, especially some of those earlier part-timers like Fred Ketcheson. And Dora Hood, whose memoir The Side Door I recently reread after forty years. This caused me to change my long-held view that she hadn’t really been a real bookseller, but only a nice, amateur, hobbyist.

  Rereading her memoir, I realized that I had been unfair to her all those years. From the perspective of thirty-five years more experience I can only shudder in embarrassment at my ignorant dismissal of her for all that time. I think I was guilty of a sort of reverse snobbery mixed with the arrogant ignorance I have despised all my life. Mea culpa.

  In fact, The Side Door demonstrates that Dora Hood was a real bookseller and a good one too, and, like Jerry Sherlock, self-taught. Only a born bookseller could have survived with neither experience or teachers, nothing but her natural experience and her instincts. She knew her Canadian history well, she learned quickly, and more interesting to me now, her book reveals a quiet, gentle humour and all the signs of someone who recognized the foibles of human nature that all booksellers need to learn in order to deal with the eccentricities of collectors.

  I never met Dora Hood, but years ago I bought a photographic study of her from John Reeves, the Canadian photographer. I guess I thought I was buying it as another ephemeral component of my collection on the history of bookselling in Canada. It has sat on a shelf in my office all these years, so I guess I’ve been at least honouring her historical significance. I now know that had I met her I would have liked her and respected her. And I like to think we would have become friends. As a belated attempt to atone I shall frame her portrait and hang it in my shop.

  Probably part of my early dismissal of her related to her too-

  gentle descriptions of some of her clients. I never met any of the people she describes but Jerry knew some of them. His descriptions of them went from “nice, but a cheapskate” to “a harmless

  fool”. Or, “he thought he knew books, but he wouldn’t have lasted a day in the trade.”

  I realize now that a good part of my cruel and ignorant dismissal of Dora Hood was based not on my lack of interest in Canadiana, but on my impression of her successors. When Dora Hood retired, the business was owned and run by Julia Jarvis and Jean Tweed. Julia Jarvis I only met once, but that was enough. She was a type I knew well, having grown up in the era when Toronto, probably all of Canada, was run by people just like her. She was the worst sort of self-satisfied unquestioning snob. She could barely bring herself to acknowledge me when we met. I, with jeans and beard, obviously wasn’t the “right sort.” When I was growing up, Toronto names were all English and Scottish, the social lines more rigid than even those of the British class system which they so slavishly copied. It was largely that pathetic assumption of some innate superiority which made the Toronto of the time (Canada?) so deadly boring, and which caused me, when I left for Europe at nineteen, to say that I would never return. Luckily, by the time I did return, we were being saved from that cultural suicide by the influx of people from all over the world. We owe a lot more to this influx of different customs and attitudes than these immigrants will ever know. They saved us from ourselves.

  Jean Tweed, conversely, I liked a lot. She was earthy and friendly. Once, when she and I and Hugh Anson-Cartwright had the thoroughly embarrassing and unpleasant duty of going to the apartment of a thief we had caught who had stolen from all of us, and whose explanation for his betrayal of our trust was his drinking, where, he said he “lost all moral control,” Jean gave him a passionate but gentle lecture on alcohol, which demonstrated pretty clearly that she was herself a reformed alcoholic. I liked her a lot, but not enough to forgive her partner her stupid snobbery.

  A friend of mine, who started bookselling about the same time I did, very cleverly made a good part of his living off Dora Hood’s Bookroom for a couple of years, based on the stupid systems which Hood’s successors considered a proper way to buy books. They had taken Dora Hood’s system and without thinking through the implications applied them as “rules” in an entirely different era.

  They used a system whereby they paid one half of the retail price of any Canadian book they had stocked previously. No doubt this was fair for books for which they had a back order. Commendable even, when these were good books, books which sold for $100.00 or $200.00. But for really valuable books, where desirability and rarity would cause a knowledgeable dealer to pay 70 or 80% for a book which they could sell the next day, they were cheating the seller, whether they knew it or not. But what did them in was the $5.00 to $20.00 books, which at 50% meant they were paying half-price for what they shouldn’t have bought for any price. This stupidity,

  in my opinion, is what eventually brought them to ruination, as unquestioned axioms and methods usually will. This may have worked well for Dora Hood when her sources of supply would have largely been from the dispersal through death and moving of her acquaintances and collectors, but when the next generation—my own—introduced not just a bunch of sharp young dealers who were intent on actually making a living at bookselling as a profession, but also a bunch of scouts who went out seeking Canadiana in every possible source, many more copies of books became available quickly, just as the advent of the Internet a generati
on later showed everyone that many books once thought to be scarce were a lot more common than had been assumed.

  My friend, learning this, took them all his cheap, common Canadiana that he got for free and that every other dealer knew one couldn’t pay anything for. Paying half price on $7.50 to $15.00 books ignores the obvious, that they’re in that range because they are common. In a capitalist society everything must have a price but acting on the idea that price is value is what did them in.

  Adding up a large number of books at $3.75 or $5.00 will result in a fair amount of money. I believe this eventually bankrupted Dora Hood’s successors. While I and most of my friends may be terrible businessmen, we’re not stupid. Vanity and snobbishness and the unquestioned assumption of the rightness of one’s position in the world is the basis of the old saying “Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations,” a fate of many dynasties. The tragedy of the Eatons, considered by so many Canadians as our own home-grown royalty, was no tragedy; it was another shirtsleeves scenario, as Rod McQueen’s admirable book The Eatons illustrates.

  Working for Jerry I started to absorb a sense of the booktrade in Canada.

  In the booktrade in Montreal there were Bernard Amtmann and Grant Woolmer, both very good booksellers. There were also Heinz Heinemann, of Mansfield Bookmart, William Wolfe and Isobel McKenzie, but when I showed up the trade was just beginning in Toronto, with Jerry, Hugh Anson-Cartwright, Marty Ahvenus, and Gord Norman. Within a very few years another whole group of young booksellers, including me, appeared.

  It is for that reason that I consider those above-mentioned people the first true generation of real booksellers in Canada. Myself, Steven Temple, Gail Wilson, Larry Wallrich, Paul Lockwood, and Joyce Blair of Abelard, Bela Batta, Bob Russell even, I like to think of us as generation ‘one-and-a-half’, since all of us came along during the next ten years.

  By some curious inexplicable coincidence, a similar thing occurred in the States, with a whole wave of new booksellers appearing in the middle-to-late ’60s. When we started having bookfairs in the early ’70s a whole bunch of young Americans showed up. Some twenty or so years later, with some sense of historical perspective, I took to calling all of these people, all of whom I recall with the same nostalgic affection one finds in people’s accounts of their university friends, the class of ’67. Now that some of those people have died or are dying off my nostalgia is even more intense, probably another effect of the strong sense of history and tradition that becomes imbued in all booksellers in time.

  To continue with the historical minutiae, in the summer of 1969 I began to feel constricted by many of the hassles which went with living on Ward’s Island, especially the ferry schedule, which demanded precise timing, and my by-now normal habit of carrying one or two shopping bags of books each way every day. But most important was the impending birth of my son, due some time around early December. Even though the ice in the bay didn’t usually impede the ferry that early, I had nightmares about being stuck in the ice mid-bay with my wife delivering in primitive conditions on the big boat. It’s one thing to start your career as a bookseller on a boat; it’s another altogether to enter into fatherhood. My friend Alfred had needed to rush his wife Nancy to the hospital via the police boat with what turned out to be an ectopic pregnancy, which had scared us all. This was, admittedly, irrational, but for a man just about everything about having a child, especially when it is your first, is irrational. We decided it was time to leave the island.

  My friend Karen Mulhallen had left the island by then and told us about a basement apartment she had seen on Kendall Avenue, on the edge of the Annex, so we took it.

  Then Joseph Patrick Books was evicted from the Wellington Street store. The owners had finally started construction on their new head office across the street and decided they wanted Jerry’s building as well.

  Jerry decided to move to his house, from which he would issue catalogues. He told me that I was welcome to stay on, but he lived in the east end and I had no wish to travel across town every day to sit in a basement, cataloguing. So, in spite of now having some sense of the extent of my abysmal ignorance, I decided that it was time to go out on my own. This didn’t surprise Jerry, because a few months earlier I had almost taken over the Village Bookstore from Marty Ahvenus, who had been offered a much nicer shop further along Gerrard Street. When he offered me 29 Gerrard Street I jumped at it. It was perfect for someone like me, and even better because with a bit of work, we could have lived on the second and third floors. This is way more important to a young, poor, bookseller than it may appear. To live above or behind one’s shop means not only saving money, it reduces travel time (and carfare) to work and, most important of all, it allows one to work at odd hours.

  Later, in my first shop, I would go up and eat dinner at 6 pm and come back down, staying open till 9 pm. In fact, in those days I would stay open as long as a customer was in the store. It was very painful on the occasions when a browser would look till 10 pm

  or so, say thanks and leave without buying a book.

  Naturally, they couldn’t know that we were only open hoping that they might buy a $10.00 book. Every dollar was crucial in those days.

  But Marty’s new store fell through, he stayed, and I continued working for Jerry and issuing catalogues for another year.

  Jerry had been upset when I told him that I was leaving to set up my own. He had made it plain that if I reconsidered and stayed with him I would soon be in line for a partnership. Jerry being then the best Canadiana dealer in the country, this meant that I would have gone very quickly from a new kid with not much more going for him than some flair and ambition to being a major player. And with me being interested in almost all other areas except Canadiana, such a business probably would have become within a few years the most prestigious antiquarian bookshop in Canada. It was very tempting, but some spark of native intelligence caused me to hesitate and then refuse. I was determined to do it my way and I told Jerry I wanted to try it on my own.

  Part of my rationale would have been because I had already seen enough of Jerry to know something of his eccentricities. His were similar to mine, but where they were different, there would have been problems. For instance, during the day Jerry and I would talk too much, and then the work didn’t get done. Then Jerry would decide he had to work overtime to catch up. Even though I shared his guilt, I didn’t want to work overtime. I had both my own work at home plus a beginning family. Jerry would stay half the night. But sometimes the next day I would see that Jerry hadn’t got much cataloguing done and he would explain that in going through a book to describe it properly he ended up reading it all night.

  Thinking back, I realize that I acted properly, whether by instinct or by accident. Partnerships almost never work in the book business, except those between people who are also partners on a personal level. Character traits which cause affectionate amusement in friends can be very irritating when it means that you are losing money. Jerry Sherlock and I have remained close friends for the forty odd years since I worked for him. I don’t like to think about any other possibility.

  I have never regretted my decision, mainly because I now have the enormous pleasure of looking around my shop and realizing that I did it all by myself. And from nothing, too ….

  I wanted to do things my way, and some residue of caution after ten years of extreme poverty had taught me that growing too fast without commensurate growth in knowledge and experience would be dangerous. (I was exactly right there, I think. The only cases I’ve seen in forty years where growth not matching experience didn’t matter, was where the dealer started off wealthy—usually quite wealthy—so that the inevitable errors based on inexperience could be handled. For all such errors cost money.)

  I think I was right. Wonderful as Jerry was, gentle, generous, easy-going, he would have been a difficult partner. All the attributes which made him such a congenial companion might not have been
so endearing when his generosity and lack of business ruthlessness was costing a partner money. Jerry’s wife Bernice had learned years ago that, as wonderful a father and husband as Jerry was, the future, in fact just the everyday welfare of her six children, meant that she had to be the one that was practical. Jerry was the archetypal absent-minded professor, totally inept at the practicalities of making profit.

  In later years, when the kids were all in school, Bernice took on a part-time job and began banking money as insurance that her kids wouldn’t starve.

  Much later Jerry would joke, when he didn’t have the money to buy yet another desirable lot of books, that he knew Bernice had money in her bank account, but he also knew that there was no way she would lend him a penny for books. It’s not that he didn’t support his family, he gave her a considerable sum every week, for it’s not cheap supporting six children. But he knew that he shared the disease of every good bookseller—a desirable book, when seen, must be purchased—and will be by the man who can. And every day brings more opportunities to see and buy another desirable book. So he didn’t blame Bernice for ensuring that there would always be food money, knowing she was right. While I refer to Jerry as a great bookseller, that means, to be precise, that he was really a great book buyer. He was not an aggressive salesman, in fact, the most potentially dangerous lesson he taught me working for him came from his basic credo. “My job, Dave,” he would say to me, “is to find the books and point out their importance. It is the job of the collector and librarian to find me and buy them.”

  That was too one-sided—even I knew that—but I shared with Jerry the characteristics which cause such a one-sided view; a distaste for the vulgar necessities of commerce, which will cause a shy man, who dislikes confrontation and subterfuge, to retreat into that private defence which says: “I have great books that are properly collated and described and fairly priced. It is the duty of the client to recognize this and buy my books, based on his recognition of those facts.”