by David Mason
At first, I was stunned at the array of beautiful books I was presented with, but at those prices I thought I wouldn’t be able to buy any. But in a day or so, as I became more acclimatized to the wealth of material before me and its shocking cost, it became clear that I was the one who was naïve. These dealers and their prices were not out of line.
I decided that I must bite the bullet and just buy nice books. And so I did. I decided my only safeguard was to buy things which I had never seen in Toronto, my idea being that if no one had seen these books they couldn’t question my prices.
In one store I agonized over a nice nineteenth-century book called Death’s Doings, by Richard Dagley (London, 1827), with nice steel-engraved illustrations, in two volumes, bound in a nice half-leather binding. It was pretty and it seemed interesting. The price of $45.00 was intimidating, but I decided to buy it anyway. The same day, two stores later, I found another copy, also attractive, this one priced at $35.00. Naturally my insecurity made me certain that I had paid $45.00 for a $35.00 book, but it didn’t take long to realize that I needed to bite the bullet and buy this one too. If I’d liked it at $45.00, surely I should like it better at $35.00, in spite of the apparent evidence that it must be a very common book. I sold both copies fairly quickly back in Toronto and didn’t see another copy for some fifteen years—two copies in a row having been just a fluke. Bernard Amtmann, the founder of the Canadian booktrade, would say often, “You should never hold a book in contempt just because you have two copies of it.” This experience taught me the truth of Bernard’s statement.
Working on the standard 20% discount dealers offer each other, I also hit on another great bookselling truth which, matched up with the great advice I’d received from the English dealer Les Gutteridge, I’ve been using happily for the forty years since. As Les had told me, no serious collector will find fault with a price on a good book being 10% over what he expected; such a price will only make the fool and the cheapskate balk. So it followed that with higher priced books, say $150.00 or more, with a discount of 20% and adding 10% one would be working with an acceptable profit ratio of 30% (acceptable to realists like my father, the banker).
What that meant is that a dealer can buy any book he can afford to pay for if he doesn’t much care about money. Since I was already discovering that money, for me, was not a goal, but only part of the means to obtain my real goal—to own good books—I realized that the only danger would be if my taste was deficient.
And where my taste was deficient, it followed, experience, if I lasted long enough to gain some, should develop. And this system did work. And still does work. That’s why my advice to beginning collectors is always the same. Buy what you like. Buy the best copy of a book your resources allow, and always remember the rules of condition. A defective book is never a bargain (or at least hardly ever).
If you follow that rule, the only further advice is to keep buying. Putting out hard cash for things teaches quickly. Costly errors grate every time they are noticed. I used my own advice years later when I became interested in buying art.
Follow your own instincts. Your early mistakes, no matter how costly or how embarrassing they will be to you later, will, in the end, just be more evidence of your increasing sophistication.
All my early life, my father’s favourite condemnation of my behaviour had always been “You always need to learn everything the hard way, don’t you?” I always ignored this, because I believed that what he meant was that his so-called “easy way” was to do what he advised me. I never thought there was an “easy way,” and I still don’t.
The major purchase of that trip also provided the most pleasure. It was a first edition in two volumes of Pepys’ Diary (London, 1825). Because it had taken most of two hundred years to break the cipher Pepys had used, it wasn’t published until that date. The two large folio volumes I found in the shop of one of the major dealers there was priced at $250.00.
I could hardly believe it: $250.00 for a first edition of one of the great classics of English literature. I sold that copy for about $450.00 very quickly in Toronto, and I found that over the next few years I was able to buy other copies on almost every trip. I bought a lot of wonderful books on that first trip and found on my return to Toronto that my colleagues had indeed been way off in their untested assumptions—the Toronto collectors bought a lot of them quickly, allowing me to make that trip every year thereafter and to buy even more expensive books each time.
Even better was the rest of the trip. At that time Air Canada had a special deal where one could fly to Los Angeles, then Vancouver and back to Toronto for a special rate. And this deal included free stops in any one city in between. Naturally between Los Angeles and Vancouver I stopped in San Francisco, where I met many of the booksellers who later became friends or mentors, including Franklin Gilliam, Barney Rosenthal, John Windle and David Magee. A lot of the advice I received from them also proved to be wrong; I was increasingly learning that the advice of others often proves to be merely the untested assumptions of people who prefer a comfortable opinion to actually trying something new.
“Don’t bother going to John Howell Books,” I would be told. “He’s too expensive. You won’t be able to buy anything from him.”
In fact, I spent $1,000.00 in Warren Howell’s shop (Warren Howell, the son of John Howell, and Jake Zeitlin were then the two most prominent dealers in western America). I bought there a very good inscribed Jack London for a good client, and several desirable books for stock, including a Canadian book which proved a great sleeper. After that, I never again listened to that sort of conventional wisdom. Mostly, the sort of people who make these silly assumptions really only demonstrate their own lack of imagination.
Being confident in the rightness of your opinions is certainly comfortable, but I find myself dismissing as second-rate those dealers who I hear voicing untested nonsense.
In Vancouver that first trip I met all the dealers there and bought a lot of books. I spent most evenings getting drunk and arguing with either Bill Hoffer or Ned Bowes, but never with both together as they were already enemies. I also spent some time soliciting Vancouver dealers to join the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of Canada (ABAC). I was by then a director on the executive of the ABAC, and I had been mandated by the board to talk western dealers into joining our group.
After Vancouver I went to Calgary, where my wife was from. She had taken our son there to visit her mother and I spent several days there doing the bookstores, especially Jaffe’s, the Old Favorites of Calgary, where I probably paid for the entire trip three times over just in their basement. The enormous profit from Jaffe’s was largely based on what I consider the greatest single discovery I made in my earliest period—Canadian editions.
The Jaffe’s of the time was a huge dimly-lit mess run by two old men who I gathered were long-time factotums, the original Jaffe seemingly long gone. Jaffe’s was a great used bookstore of the sort that makes scouts salivate—in the class of the Holmes Book Shops in San Francisco and Oakland, Acres of Books in Cincinnati and Long Beach, and who knows where else, Old Favorites in Toronto, Foyles in London and from what I’ve read half the now-defunct stores on 4th Avenue in New York. For a book scout, whether a dealer or collector, these stores are prime territory—any astute collector or a young dealer can and will find treasures in such places, things that might have sat there unseen by the casual browser for fifty years, and priced accordingly.
The two old guys who ran Jaffe’s were so pleased to encounter a dealer who actually loved books that they offered every amenity.
They took me up and turned me loose on a balcony with a huge desk piled high with books, which I suspect had been the office of the original Jaffe. There was between ¼” and ½” of layered dust covering everything, for which they apologized. “We’ve been meaning to clean up for a while,” said one, echoing almost every dealer I’ve known.
“I don’t
mind a bit of dust,” I replied, trying to hide my excitement. The heavy layer of dust told me that no one had been up there for years. I knew that there would be sleepers here—and dust does no harm to books unless it is allowed to get damp.
Amongst other things, I found a fine copy of the first edition of Poe’s The Conchologist’s First Book (Philadelphia, 1839) which, because of the very low price asked, I assumed couldn’t be the first—it had to be an early reprint. Many books from that century (and, of course, earlier) are almost impossible to ascertain as firsts unless you’ve had them before or are certain of the precise date. Publishers of the time did not consider the dealers and collectors who would generations later appreciate some indication of a book’s edition or printing. (They still don’t—publishers don’t care about the books they published in the past; they care about the ones they’re publishing now and next year.) A young dealer learns to gamble when he finds a book that could be significant, but of which, since it’s new to him, he can’t be sure. A fairly high percentage of those gambles disappoint, probably about 70-80% in the early years. But in later years those percentages should be reversed.
That Poe was a first and paid all the expenses of the whole trip.
But it was in Jaffe’s basement that I hit the jackpot. Already a large store, Jaffe’s somehow had the basement space in the adjoining three or four stores as well.
Maybe they owned the building and rented out the adjoining stores, but whatever the reason they had a huge space all shelved with orange crates stacked in narrow aisles, where they had fiction filed in alphabetical order. All that fiction was priced from $1.50 to $3.00, and starting at “A” I went right through the alphabet picking out first editions of the secondary authors, mostly British, that I found there. I had learned by studying the sales in my first catalogue that many American institutions lacked these British authors in their collections, and I had realized why. Authors of the sort I was finding, such as Arnold Bennett, Chesterton, Belloc, Bernard Shaw, and H.G. Wells, had been popular enough in their time to warrant U.S. publishers issuing their own edition. But in Canada, with our branch-plant mentality, we had merely distributed the original English editions, and
these were what I was finding here. Serious research libraries in North America were now intent on filling out their holdings of the first editions of those authors. Although not then considered as important as writers like Eliot, Lawrence or Yeats, they had become very saleable in the $15.00 to $25.00 range. I bought hundreds of them, interspersed along with books which were by then-collected authors.
I bought enough, just in Jaffe’s, to fill out my next three catalogues.
And even better, this alphabet was also jammed with Canadian editions, which I now considered not only one of my major specialties, but my own private personal territory. By now I was buying not just the Canadian issues of collected authors, I was buying everything I saw. And I was already becoming adept at spotting the Canadian publisher’s imprint, denoting a Canadian edition, at the foot of the spine.
Chapter 8
Reflections on Scouting
A few years ago I had a visit from Justin Schiller at my store, and that visit initiated a lengthy period of meditation on an aspect of bookselling which, while largely unknown or of no interest to the public, is so central to bookselling that dealers constantly dwell on it. For anyone who doesn’t know who Justin Schiller is, I will briefly explain. Justin Schiller is generally acknowledged to be the greatest authority on children’s books in the booktrade. Although he is only in his sixties, he has been a bookseller for longer than many other people’s entire careers. He was issuing mimeograph lists of books for sale from his bedroom in his parents’ home in his early teens, and there is a famous photograph of him in the front of the auction catalogue of his first great L. Frank Baum collection, auctioned in 1978, where he appears to be about twelve years old.
That photograph shows Justin with braces on his teeth, but also wearing a warm, toothy smile. Now, Justin wears three piece tweed suits and exhibits signs of portliness (aren’t we all), but the toothy smile remains the same. Just don’t make the mistake of thinking there isn’t a very determined mind behind that smile.
Not being much of a traveller anymore and seldom participating in foreign book fairs, I don’t see many of the dealers of whom I once saw a lot. I hadn’t seen Justin in probably ten years. I expected, from various reports I had heard, that this would be the sort of visit one expects from a highly successful and very specialized bookseller. This is more or less how it works. The dealer enters, passes a few minutes in pleasantries and catching up on old mutual friends, praises your store, spends a few minutes,
(in this case) in the children’s section, and then asks if anything not readily visible might pertain to him. And then after a purchase—even a token courtesy purchase is usually welcomed by both parties in this trade ritual—the visiting dealer departs. But on this occasion this standard ritual did not occur. Justin instead started in the children’s book area but then proceeded to look at every other subject section in my rather large stock. After a couple of hours he brought a foot-high stack of books to my desk to be totted up.
On examination everything became clear. When adding up the total of a dealer’s choices, the owner always takes mental note of the titles chosen, both out of curiosity and, if he is smart, as a way of learning. This is the time when many dealers get that sinking feeling which occurs when they suddenly realize that they have missed the significance of a book, and that a sleeper—an undervalued book—has once again slipped through to someone with more knowledge. Or, in my view, because of a more lively imagination on the part of the purchaser. In this case, every book in Justin’s pile, extracted from every part of my store, from religion, science, art, literature, travel, and even crime, instantly told me why he was buying them. Every single one had some connection to the world of children. It was a compelling demonstration of the consummate pro in action.
And so, after the goodbyes, Justin left, leaving me musing on how seldom these days one goes through that practiced ritual with one’s colleagues. And in the ensuing days I found myself musing more and more on the significance of this experience. For what Justin was doing was not simply buying a few books from another bookstore: he was scouting, the central preoccupation of bookselling to many dealers, and the part most like a game, where dealers hone their skills and test their knowledge and imagination against their colleagues, the prize being profit, a book found worth more than the seller realizes—sometimes significantly so. And as with professional gamblers and sports figures, while the profit is not negligible, the real significance is the feeling of winning. A professional athlete may earn or win millions, but the core of his triumph is in winning, the feeling of being the best. Book scouting is no different.
So, unlike some successful booksellers, who expect to be shown the best books in a bookstore, Justin Schiller hadn’t lost either his scouting skills or his love of searching out good books himself. His visit renewed my respect for his justly acknowledged depth of learning and, more important, it led to this ongoing philosophical meditation.
I have been scribbling notes and meditations ever since, another attempt to make sense of my now lengthy time in the trade.
I officially started in the book trade in 1967 when, as I have recounted, I consciously decided to be a used bookseller, and began buying books for the store I intended to open. But I now see that my scouting career really began one afternoon, probably in 1946 or 1947, when two pals and I were walking through the bush adjoining the Rosedale Golf Club, the prime spot for kids from North Toronto in winter for skiing and tobogganing and in summer for exploration and adventure. On that late summer day my friends and I were stumbling through shrubbery when I suddenly came across a lost golf ball lying at my feet, shiny and white, perfect, glowing up from its hollow, no less beautiful than a diamond would have seemed to an adult. I was awed, then excited. If there
was one, there must be more. Our aimless wandering now focused on the search for more of these treasures. We spent the rest of the day searching. I quickly learned the trick of not looking directly, but flicking my eyes over the surface of the rough, glancing from the side of the eye, which allowed that eye to register flashes of white on the brain, stopping me while each flash was investigated. Looking without looking, a skill which, when cultivated later, was essential to scouting books. Often the white flash would be nothing more than a discarded scrap of paper or an empty cigarette box, but by the time increasing
darkness warned us we were in for trouble at home and we desisted I had five shiny white golf balls. My friends had not a single one between them. I was a scout; I had the eye. I had the gift. A shy, timid kid with not much self-confidence, I had found something I was better at than my companions, perhaps the first such thing. Selling the golf balls later in the caddy shack, my first monetary rewards for scouting, also led me to take up caddying, which I did until I was around fourteen and discovered the pool hall. But during all those years I continued to scout and sell golf balls. A scout was born.
While a good part of the excitement in finding a significant book is the eventual profit, the imaginative scout comes to realize that he has a higher purpose; he is rescuing from obscurity something which has historical or aesthetic value to society. And having rescued it, his next social function is to then place it somewhere where its contribution to the record of civilization will be understood. He is serving the future by saving the past, a noble activity.
There are two basic, but quite different, categories of scouts. The first group—in which I include myself—is the one I am most concerned with here. It is made up of either booksellers or serious and very knowledgeable scouts who are often affiliated with a single bookseller in some sort of exclusive arrangement or partnership.