The Pope's Bookbinder

by David Mason

  In retrospect I realize that my instinctive reaction to Jerry’s offer, meaning I was again taking the long, hard way, was the proper one. For Jerry and I still remain dear friends forty years later. And my immeasurable admiration and affection for him as a human being was never tested.

  Premises were no problem, even though I still had no money. My friend Marty’s Village Bookstore was three floors. The second floor was his overstock and storage area, but since he had prospered enough to take an apartment elsewhere, the third floor was empty and he offered it to me for $25.00 a month. It was two small rooms with one wall still holding a built-in shelf.

  So here I was, still ignorant, still impoverished, with only about 700 books of questionable quality, a pregnant wife and yet, instead of being terrified, as I should have been, I was exhilarated.

  Finally, I was entirely on my own and I could now say, “I’m a real bookseller now.”

  I took my few shelves, built a couple more and moved in.

  When I was ready I had only enough books to cover about half of two walls in one room.

  I had an atrocious letterhead on crinkly paper, somebody’s idea of sophistication, which had been printed for me and shipped from my old printing plant in Spain, and a rubber stamp with my name on it for the envelopes. Curiously, it was ten years before I had properly printed letterhead and envelopes, and forty years before I even attempted to design a more attractive letterhead. Most booksellers begin with well-designed and beautifully printed letterhead, but I resented every penny spent on anything but books. And so ingrained does the sense of poverty become when one starts with nothing, that it was thirty years before I relaxed enough to spend money on business things that weren’t books.

  Chapter 6

  My First Real Shop

  After I took over Marty’s third floor I began keeping tabs on all the shops on Gerrard Street West, waiting until one came up for rent. The next summer a tiny two-storey house with an attached, even tinier shop, came up on the strip of Gerrard, past Bay Street. It had been the home and business of a masseuse, and the basement, a half-level down from the shop (the main floor of the house being a corresponding half-level up from the shop, reached by three or four stairs), was finished, giving me an extra large room.

  It was perfect. There were even two small windowed compartments on the front of the house where I could set up book displays. The rent for the whole thing was $300.00 a month, which seemed an enormous amount to me then. It was a scorching August that year, and I worked long sweaty hours shelving the store, even though I didn’t have enough books to fill them.

  It was then that I worked out a system whereby I could build an eight-foot shelf in twenty minutes, no small thing for a newcomer with no money who had to get open very quickly. Despite being a lousy businessman, I had been smart enough to con the landlord into allowing me in to work for three weeks before paying my first month’s rent.

  The upstairs, the living part, was filthy, having been unused for years, but we had it shining in a day, and I moved my wife and young son into it at once, again before paying rent. I have since managed that with every store I’ve had, opening before I was paying rent, perhaps the only example of business acumen I’ve ever shown.

  Beside us was a tiny restaurant called Mary John’s, an eatery dating back to the 1920s and famous for having fed artists and writers since that time, including, purportedly, Hemingway, when he lived in Toronto while he was at the Toronto Star. And unlike many such claims this one appears to have been true.

  On September 1st, 1969, at 10 am sharp, I descended the short flight of stairs separated from our living room by a curtain into my new shop, made a last brief inspection to make sure everything was still as perfect as it had been at 4 am, when I had turned off the lights and gone up to bed. I unlocked and opened the door of my first actual open bookshop for the first time.

  Standing on the sidewalk waiting were Phil McCready and Bob Pepall. I was shocked and very moved by such a gesture. They both shook my hand as they entered. After compliments on the look of the store and effusive encouragements they looked around a bit, each bought a book for $10.00 or $20.00, we shook hands again, they wished me luck again, and then they left. I was almost in tears at their thoughtfulness. Green as I was, I knew that they didn’t need or probably even want the books that they had bought; they were just being quietly generous. They had obviously arranged to be there. My first customers! I still think of them as that, even though I had already been in business for two years and already owed both of them several favours. Several other dealers and friends made the courtesy visit that day, but the rest of that first day remains a blur. I can’t even remember if I had one real customer that day. Nor did I care. It just seemed natural that all my first visitors were dealers, although I was a long way from learning what became apparent over the next few years: other dealers are, by far, the best customers in the book business.

  My new life as a shopkeeper—a bookshop-keeper—had begun, and continues still, forty years later.

  With an open shop, I finally found myself selling books most days, instead of only selling them when I had assembled and published a catalogue. I had calculated that with a rent of $300.00 a month, for both the store and the adjoining house, I needed to put aside the first $13.00 I took in each day to ensure that I would be able to pay the next month’s rent. And there were quite a few days when I didn’t even take in $13.00. I was still operating under the now deeply-ingrained habit of not spending what I didn’t have. All those years in Europe living on the edge of disaster had instilled a caution which made me resent the spending of any money which wasn’t essential.

  And, of course, with the added responsibility of a wife and a very young child, I had to be even more careful that I could pay the bills.

  Waiting for customers, I read bibliographies incessantly, absorbing points about books I hoped to search out and memorizing the pseudonyms so many writers used for whatever reason.

  After opening on Gerrard Street I learned the routines all used booksellers develop and very quickly began to devise my own personal variations on those methods. I had already begun to question some of the practices of my two main mentors, Jerry Sherlock and Marty Ahvenus. Both were constantly observed and asked for advice. I quickly saw that both were very good booksellers but both were very lousy businessmen. Furthermore, like Tolstoy’s unhappy families, they were both lousy businessmen in very different ways. I learned that, while I could learn plenty from both of them, I needed to weigh what advice they gave me against their known eccentricities.

  I watched how Marty handled the purchase of libraries. I had never even bought a large lot of books yet, and I envied him when a huge lot came in, sometimes fifty or a hundred cartons of books. Marty would leave the cartons of books in the store, making it uncomfortable, or impossible, to see the shelved books.

  Naturally his customers, the regulars who came in several times a week, wanted to rummage in those boxes, and Marty would let them. They would sort through the boxes and bring an assortment of good books to Marty, who would name some pitifully low price for them. This, of course, is why everybody, customers and dealers, loved Marty: his generosity was legendary.

  I would watch Marty give away the cream of a library and be left with the dregs. After that, he would usually call in Bela Batta and offer him what he wanted at 25¢ or 50¢ a book. When Bela was done, he would call in Old Favorites and sell them the residue for a nickel a book or less. Marty thought this was okay, but it wasn’t any good for me because I had very few books and needed to build up my stock. But more important, no one was offering me libraries anyway; the best I got were accumulations, very small and of very mixed quality. I had had a bit of wonderful advice from Les Gutteridge, the British dealer, who had been the boss and mentor of my friend Len Kelly (the founder of Volume One Books), who had sold the stock of Epworth Books, the English firm he managed, to the University of
Alberta at Edmonton and included himself in the deal, becoming their agent in the acquisition of their specialist collections. Incidentally, this was one of the few truly clever moves any Canadian university made during the frantic attempt in the 1960’s by universities to prepare for the invasion of post-war baby-boomers.

  “A young dealer needs to sell books, but he also needs to improve his stock,” said Les Gutteridge. “The way to do this is, when you get what you know is a desirable book, find out its value and then price it 10% over that value. Ten percent extra is an acceptable range with any good book. A serious collector who wants it will not be deterred by such a price—$110.00 for a $100.00 book, or $1,100.00 for a $1,000.00 book, will be acceptable to a knowledgeable collector. He will not resent nor hold against you such a minor excess, knowing that if he pays you a bit extra on that book he will certainly make it up on the next one, for you both know that in his narrow area of interest you cannot hope to emulate his knowledge. This is how it should be, and he will know that having bought your good book for more than he might have had to pay elsewhere, you will remember his interests.”

  A smart collector will know, in other words, that in the long run he will profit.

  The cheapskates and the bargain hunters will not buy your book. They, being fuelled by their psychological defect (for a true collector cheapness, the meanness of spirit which measures in pennies rather than value, mixed with that terrible error that causes so many people to equate cleverness with intelligence, will ensure that such a man will not buy your book. The cheapskate will say to himself: “That’s a $100.00 book, I’m too smart to pay that man $110.00 for it.” That the next copy he might encounter could be $125.00 or $150.00 doesn’t occur to him; that he might never again get a chance to own that book also does not occur to him. He’s no fool, he thinks to himself, that silly dealer can’t put one over on him. I’ll show him, he concludes, but he loses the book. Who did he outsmart? Himself).

  So, based on my observations of Marty’s style, and with Les Gutteridge’s very good advice, I worked out my own system.

  I had no money and few good books. All I really had was time. I concluded that, surely for someone in my position, I should do the opposite of what Marty did. Instead of buying a lot of books and getting my money back from the cream and then dumping the junk, I should try and get my money out of the junk and keep the good stuff, which would gradually increase the quality and the value of my stock.

  It worked. I built a box outside the store, the quarter-box all bookshops use to dispose of what they consider of no value or outside their interests.

  I spent a lot of time tending it, feeding books into it and I also kept a running total of what it brought in. I did this for all of the years I had a ground level store, and I was constantly amazed at how much I realized from what most dealers considered dreck. In my next store on Church Street, which was a converted three-storey house with covered veranda, I left the quarter-box, a six-foot shelf, out all night, with the porch light on during the warm months. I had restaurants on both sides of me then, and often in the morning I would find $20.00 to $100.00 which had been pushed through the letter slot. Often there would be notes too.

  “Dear Mr. Mason. It’s so nice to find people who still work on trust.” Or, “I took $13.00 worth of books. Here is $20.00. I’ll return soon for my change later.” Sometimes they returned for their change, sometimes they didn’t. But lots returned and became customers. Once, during a book fair, Michael Thompson said, “If you tried that in L.A., they’d not only steal all the books they’d probably steal the shelf and break all your windows just to teach you not to be so trusting.”

  Despite four stores since—all bigger and grander—my tiny Gerrard Street shop remains my favourite. It was painful to leave there, even though I knew it was time, for my stock and my ambitions had exceeded the space. Almost no one remembers the Gerrard Street shop. I can think of only two living customers who go back that far, both of them still clients and both now friends of many years: Eric Robertson and Ian Young.

  Eric Robertson, a musician and composer, has a magnificent collection of books relating to his native Scotland, especially Sir Walter Scott, but he also owns many of the great books of English literature in first editions. Many years ago he showed me his first edition of Robert Burns’ Poems, purchased on one of his yearly visits to Edinburgh, the only copy I’ve ever seen.

  Like every bookseller, I’ve had ten thousand people offer me the first edition of Burns’ Poems, which their grandfather brought from the old country, every one of them at least a hundred years too late. Eric Robertson’s grandson will someday be able to say that his grandfather did bring one here and in his case it will be true, maybe for the first time ever.

  In a history of the modern British antiquarian trade published in 2006 by the British Association the ABA to commemorate their centenary, Elizabeth Strong, the proprietor of the well-known Edinburgh bookshop McNaughton’s, mentions that Eric Robertson was a regular, rummaging through the six-penny boxes outside their shop when he was six years old.

  Ian Young, poet, writer, bibliographer (The Male Homosexual in Literature, Scarecrow, 1975), publisher, bookseller, and collector, is my other oldest customer.

  I once told Ian the anecdote of my discovery of literature through buying books with lurid covers for their promise of sex. He, in turn, demonstrated the secret codes, both in word and cover art, by which a young gay man could recognize literature which contained gay themes, so young gays could do the same as I had done. In those times, when being gay was still illegal, those codes were necessary. I was fascinated by Ian’s explanation, and when I found he had written an essay on the evolution of gay liberation as illustrated in paperbacks, I and my partners in a small publishing company, Malcolm Lester and Wesley Begg, published his account, called Out in Paperback (LBM, 2007).

  Chapter 7

  Los Angeles

  About this time Richard Landon brought Michael Thompson into my Gerrard Street store. Thompson was an American dealer who greatly influenced me and became a good friend. Thompson was in Toronto with two large trunks of early books on behalf of his employer Jake Zeitlin, of Zeitlin and Ver Brugge in Los Angeles. He was here to sell books to the University of Toronto, especially the early science books which were Zeitlin’s chief specialty and naturally of great interest to the University’s rapidly growing rare book department.

  Thompson spent his days selling books to David Esplin and Marion Brown, still then the head of the rare book department, with Richard Landon absorbing all this new experience of books, just as I was. Late into every night Landon, Thompson and I, with our women and other booksellers, drank, ate and gossiped.

  Except for the occasional visit from scouting dealers, this was my first contact with the foreign trade. I found Michael’s anecdotes about all those dealers I didn’t know and all those great books I’d never seen, much less owned, fascinating.

  My friendship with Thompson led to many new things. Michael pressed me to visit Los Angeles. The Americans had been mounting book fairs for a few years, and in California they were coalescing into their current system of alternating yearly between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Michael suggested that I visit Los Angeles, stay with him and participate in the fair.

  I certainly hadn’t the necessary stock to even consider exhibiting, but it seemed like a fun idea. I thought about it, especially when around that time my banker offered to lend me up to $30,000.00. I should mention that, though I was at that time specializing in Modern Firsts, everyone else here except Hugh Anson-Cartwright and Gord Norman dealt only in Canadiana. Hugh had good books in most fields, while Gord only sold Modern Firsts and general literature, like me.

  While I was slowly building up a small stock of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century books, thanks to Britnell’s, few in Toronto had

  much experience with this type of book. Indeed, most people here, whether they were de
alers or collectors, didn’t much care about first editions then. When I had been working for Jerry and starting to specialize in Firsts, I had been astounded by Jerry’s answer when, on compiling a catalogue of Canadian Literature, I noted that Jerry had not differentiated between first editions and reprints in a long run of Stephen Leacock he was cataloguing.

  “Librarians in Canada don’t give a damn about first editions, Dave,” Jerry explained, “They just want a copy of the book.”

  The presence or absence of the dust jacket was of no concern here then either, a pretty good indication of the complete lack of sophistication in collecting in Canada, with the exception of Canadiana. All bibliographic expertise was centered on Canadiana, everything else being ignored as of no significance.

  But I wanted literature and especially earlier books, in particular British nineteenth-century literature, increasingly my fascination.

  “You can’t sell early first editions here, nor fancy leather bindings either,” the older experienced dealers told me. I didn’t understand how they could be so certain. They’d never tried to sell such things, and I was determined to do so. Later, I realized their negativity was merely another example of that old contradiction—making assumptions and acting on them without testing them first.

  With the encouragement of Thompson and my new $30,000.00 credit line I decided to make my first trip into the larger international book world.

  When I got to L.A., Thompson took me around the stores to introduce me. I was astounded at how high book prices were. Of course, they seemed high to me only because I hadn’t seen many of those sorts of books. I quickly realized that the earlier books on my own shelves were quite underpriced compared with what was usually encountered here; my sophistication as a bookseller was being raised another notch.