The Pope's Bookbinder

by David Mason

  We do have the Canada Council for the Arts, which tries to help, but a recent article by Canadian poet and polemicist David Solway lists—in dollar amounts—the writers who seem to have benefited most by the largesse of this system, and it clearly shows that, as usual, the benefits accrue to those who are most adept at exploiting the system and not necessarily to those who are the most deserving writers.

  Solway’s piece in Books in Canada (itself now defunct—along with several other Canadian magazines and reviews—again, because of the withdrawal of government support) lists actual numbers of grants and the actual dollar amounts of these grants, citing recipient writers whom the average Canadian would never have heard of. Writers, I should add, that many other writers must have been appalled to learn had received so much public funding.

  Canadians, it seems, like other unimaginative drones, don’t assign any importance to what they can’t see. Give us some more highways or honeycomb apartment blocks. Give us the security to have comfortable existences, but who cares about the soul of a country. Not most of us; not, at least, until events necessitate vision and courage. And then all too often we learn we have failed to instil character in our nation.

  That’s why I have a policy of being as generous to imaginative writers as I can justify—justify to myself I mean, not the government—short of setting myself up for prison. I work on the assumption that our writers are our collective imagination, providing us with our dreams as a people; they are often not only our consciousness but our conscience. They deserve our respect, and more, they deserve to be compensated according to their contributions to our culture. Our writers provide all of us with our dreams, and with the fuel that provides a sense of purpose as both a nation and as individuals.

  Writers should be lionized, and in some societies in the past they were. There have been times and places where writers enjoyed the acclaim that Hollywood celebrities and rock stars enjoy today. But the days when people lined up at bookshops to get the latest installment of a Dickens or a Scott novel seem to be gone, which means that our collective consciousness is now provided by the appallingly trite pap we are offered on television and in most movies.

  By law I am supposed to appraise on the basis of a willing buyer and a willing seller. My interpretation of that law is that I may act as if any institution that accepts a writer’s archive as a donation, with all the financial consequences that acceptance denotes—arranging and cataloguing are very time-consuming—deserves to have it appraised as though it would have paid real money for the archive had the government had enough vision to provide proper funding.

  So, I decide what the writer should receive and my reports reflect this amount.

  I have had people tell me that my figures are absurd.

  “No one would ever pay that for that hack’s detritus,” I am told.

  My response is, “Well, that is what a civilized people would pay for an archive of that importance.” If you or the government do not agree, that’s your problem, not mine. I’m not responsible for either your own or the government’s cultural deficiencies. My job is to assess real cultural value. In this sense Canadian authors actually have an edge over their American colleagues. American law does not allow writers to donate their papers for a tax receipt, so they are forced to sell them. At least Canada has had some small amount of foresight, because the writers who are considered to be in the second or third level by today’s standards, which are quite different than posterity’s, can at least have their papers safely protected in an institution while we await time’s eventual verdict.

  With the paucity of government funding in most places, writers and therefore most national cultures suffer. We also owe a greater cultural debt to the small number of truly imaginative librarians and archivists than most people would imagine. The archive of a writer of even Norman Mailer’s stature was on the market for a long time—maybe ten or fifteen years—before some persistent custodian could convince his bosses at some university that paying two and a half million was not only feasible but probably, eventually, also a bargain.

  Any bookseller who has been around for as long as I have could make a list of a hundred or more authors who were ignored in their own time and whose books now command startling prices in the marketplace. I paid £100 for the first copy of Joyce’s Ulysses I ever bought, around forty years ago. I ordered it from a catalogue and even then I was astounded to get it. Today the latest prices asked for it on AbeBooks are between $75,000.00 and $150,000.00.

  Time changes society’s views.

  No bookseller or librarian can forget the infamous librarian at Princeton who turned down the papers of F. Scott Fitzgerald, stating: “We are not a charity. We are not going to buy the papers of some second-rate Midwest hack, just because he happened to have been lucky enough to have attended Princeton—unfortunately for Princeton.”

  The Fitzgerald papers eventually did sell to Princeton for $2,500.00. The most recent fine copy in dust jacket of The Great Gatsby I saw was being offered for $125,000.00. What would the manuscript of that book, included in that piratical purchase, bring at auction today? Several million dollars?

  The U.S. government shows little imagination by refusing to allow American writers to donate their archives for tax relief. In these times this means that libraries will not have the funds to purchase the papers of writers who are considered lower in rank, thereby depriving the country of parts of its literary heritage.

  Sometimes the content of a writer’s archive will arouse emotion, stunning one into a reverent silence. Am I to consider what some unimaginative bureaucrat might think is a fitting amount of compensation? Not likely. I trust my instincts, honed now by many years’ experience and reflection. I give them an amount that any civilized nation should be prepared to pay. If someone in the government disagrees with my assessment, I simply assume that it reflects their lack of civilization—not mine.

  While much experience is needed, the appraising of archives can be learned. Most Canadian dealers of my age had to learn it themselves; the lucky ones are those who had an older dealer to guide them. For what is, in essence, intellectual property, there had to be some mechanisms developed in order to assign value to the donated archives of writers. It was logical for book dealers to be called in, since we already dealt in letters and manuscript material in smaller amounts and, more pertinently, we already had much experience in the mechanics of measuring relative value based on importance. These skills had only to be extended to cover an entire creative output.

  A writer’s archive will reflect the writer’s research, creative focus, intent and, not least, the writer’s character. We, both dealers and the institutional custodians we work with, have to teach ourselves the techniques. Now we dealers teach one another, often while we work. While study of the writer, the importance of the writer’s work and its perceived position in the literary hierarchy are all measured, other factors must also be considered. Some can be found in the archive itself while others are based on the appraiser’s knowledge of the author’s private life, often drawn from gossip—sometimes unkind and malicious gossip.

  My own personal system with an archive always begins with the individual’s correspondence. By starting with these I am introduced to the full range of the person’s activities, both public and, to me more important, private. But, most crucial, it is in the correspondence where one meets the personality, which, to my mind, is the key to assessing everything. That doesn’t mean I’m trying to find out if the author in question is a nice person. If we had to exclude the work of all the miserable sons-of-bitches, the despicable creeps, mean-spirited fanatics, or the near-insane we would have to relinquish a good part of our literature. What are the admirers of such people as Ezra Pound, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, or my own beloved Knut Hamsun to do with the records of these geniuses’ flirtations with the Nazis? Or that huge number of writers who either joined the Communist Party or at least admired Stalin?
The usual moral lines don’t always work with art. For that matter, they don’t always work with life either.

  This brings me to a serious point that I should make. Very early on I realized that, having access to what constitutes a person’s personal life, I had to follow the same professional obligations that a doctor or lawyer must, especially in the matter of discretion. Since I am widely known as an inveterate gossip, some—including one widely known national columnist, himself a renowned gossip—have questioned my integrity. This man wrote a column about me once where he quoted my standard line, which is that I forget everything I’ve seen by the next day. He derided this explanation, not because I’d ever revealed anything to him that I shouldn’t have but maybe because of his chagrin that I hadn’t.

  It was not until I’d been doing appraisals for many years that I started to notice a certain pattern. I found that certain things that I had come across in archives stuck in my mind, and would often surface many years after I had conducted the appraisal. The significance of this discovery was that there was no discernible reason why I should remember those details from what were often immense and very rich archives. Obviously, they must be things that had touched me on some deep level, and they came back in moments relevant to what they had touched on. When I noticed this phenomenon I began making notes on things I discovered in papers, and I often repeat them if they do not have to do with personal and private matters.

  When I relate such things I sometimes alter details and always relate them without attribution if the subject is still alive. Some donors, of course, restrict parts of their archives until after a death or for longer—those archives I never discuss in any manner. Most of these archives are open to any scholar anyway, so I do not trespass by making notes.

  Whether literary, political, scientific or simply reflective of social history, an archive is raw history—history not yet sifted by scholars with the pattern of a thesis or history resulting. Some archives contain material that moves one deeply, and some are boring. Politicians are easily the most boring—all those photos of rubber-chicken lunches with Korean trade delegations need to be endured, not assessed.

  The single most boring archive I ever appraised was the papers of a Premier of Ontario; the single most disappointing was the archive of Keith Davey, widely known as the consummate back-room fixer. As I approached that one, I thought that I would finally be privy to the real back-room deals that fuel the politics of the country. I was wrong, of course. The whole essence of what really goes on behind the scenes never gets written down. Politicians must have learned that from the bureaucratic masters who really run every country. The essentials of protecting your back: never write something down. Never even say it.

  I once recorded a conversation I had with a bureaucrat with whom I was having a dispute, after he promised something verbally and then shamelessly broke his word. In a conversation that went on for an hour and a half, he adroitly managed to avoid making a single concrete statement. He was masterful in his obfuscation. That wonderful quote from John Gregory Dunne, “Hello, he lied,” came from this type of person. Every once in a while, when I despair a bit about never having made much money, I replay parts of this conversation. It shows me that at least I didn’t sell my soul for a pension.

  One political archive I did want to appraise was Pierre Trudeau’s. I was asked to do it but I wouldn’t agree to the ludicrous system the authorities demanded for such appraisals. This needs a bit of background. When the original laws relating to gifts-in-kind were formulated, the government—in its normal bureaucratic stupidity—set up a system of forming an official board called the National Archival Appraisal Board (NAAB). This board consisted of an historian, an archivist and a bookseller who would travel together to institutions where they would value donations by consensus. Perhaps this appears sensible; it did to the government, and these boards have been operating for many years now. Indeed, the gossip I hear lately states that the same sinister back-room strategists are attempting to make the use of such boards mandatory throughout all the institutions in the country. Of course every bookseller and good librarian knows just how stupid this idea is, even those many colleagues of mine who serve on these ludicrously compromised boards.

  Richard Landon of the University of Toronto wouldn’t allow them in his library. The only time I know of them being in the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library was when the government ordered it after questioning an appraisal done by Robert Wright and me, which they didn’t believe was worth the near half-million figure we came up with. Wright and I had spent three days assessing this archive; NAAB spent two hours deciding it was worth around $75,000.00. In the ensuing fuss I got quite angry. I wrote to the head of the Cultural Property Board demanding to know how they dared question my competence when they had no one on their board competent enough to judge my work (they had no bookseller on their board, nor had they had for several years). They appointed a special person to submit a report. In case you think you’re hearing sour grapes, they hired a man who had been the rare books librarian of the National Library of Canada and, previous to that, an antiquarian bookseller. This man’s report completely vindicated our opinion, and our original appraisal was reinstated. If you’re thinking this demonstrates something about government in general, you’re right. And the lesson, in case you missed it, is this: the bureaucrat rules. In government, stupidity will always trump expertise. Experts: $500,000.00; bureaucrats: $75,000.00—think about that.

  That’s what they wanted me to work with on the Trudeau papers and, of course, I refused. Jerry Sherlock worked on one of these boards in the very early days and he told me he wasted untold hours trying to explain to the historian and the archivist he was working with that the papers under consideration were worth ten times what they thought adequate. Jerry knew the marketplace. These people, completely lacking in any such experience, had no means to even guess what things might sell for—how could they? They’d never bought or sold anything. But it didn’t stop them from guessing. Faced in their own fields with such ignorance from an outsider they would have no doubt been enraged. But, to quote Schiller, “Against fools, even the Gods are helpless.”

  The government’s logic, put to me in the Trudeau case, was that the archivist and the historian would be able to point out to me the archival and historical importance of the material. This could be logical only to a bureaucrat, and my response was appropriate to such a ludicrous view. All my training as a bookseller, over forty years, consists in being able to recognize the historical significance of everything I look at. Since booksellers buy their material and pay hard cash for it, if that sense wasn’t well honed, we wouldn’t survive. I pointed this out to the bureaucrat pretty bluntly. If I need the help of anybody to ascertain the historical value of what I’m assessing, I shouldn’t be hired in the first place. They hire me precisely for that reason: my ability to make an assessment of value.

  I read much history and have great respect for those professional historians who, with their extensive training and experience, dredge through the morass of an archive and assemble a coherent thesis. I work closely with several archivists and I have come to have enormous respect for their ability to take a huge mass of paper, often simply thrown with incredible disarray into boxes, and arrange it into a comprehensive, workable archive so that historians can locate the essence of their books. Even after forty years of working with these people and discussing their work with them, I still don’t understand the skills that allow them to make order out of such chaos.

  Like all highly developed skills, theirs remain incomprehensible to outsiders. But these people, both historians and archivists, know nothing, nor should they be expected to, about the marketplace in which I operate. How could they?

  Anyway, I missed Trudeau, although I have seen enough evidence of his intellect in the papers of others. He corresponded with several of Canada’s prominent public intellectuals whose archives I’ve appraised, which in itself is an
indication of his importance. But I’m still a bit chagrined. If any Canadian statesman since Macdonald had the guts to say what he believed, it was Trudeau. Maybe he actually wrote some of it down, too.

  This may be the place to point out that this is precisely why original archival material is so important to our history and why the government wisely (for a change) allows compensation for the donors—for their contributions to the historical record.

  Of all the appraisals I have done the first two are, if not the most important, still the most significant to me, and remain the ones that are most clearly embedded in my memory. I guess they are there in the same manner, and for the same reasons, that our earliest experiences of love are also the most ineradicable. I can’t remember which of these two came first, but it hardly matters. They were both done for the University of Toronto. The librarians I worked with then weren’t any more sophisticated than us dealers. I think we all educated ourselves as we went, learning through experience.