The Pope's Bookbinder

by David Mason

  During one period it was Lesage’s 1715 novel Gil Blas, which one assumes is not much read anymore except by period specialists in French literature. But John wanted desperately to read it. I had only a fancy illustrated edition done by the Limited Editions Club, which naturally I couldn’t sell him, not because of the $150.00 price tag, which to him would be irrelevant, but because I couldn’t be a party to him destroying such a handsome book.

  One day I had a call from a bookseller up the street. “I just bought a copy of the Limited Editions Club version of Gil Blas from Crazy John which seems to have your writing in it,” he said. “Did you sell it to him or did he steal it?”

  “He stole it,” I said, and went up the street to buy it back.

  When John next appeared I confronted him. He was properly abject, but I could see not really repentant. “I had to read it, don’t you see? And you wouldn’t sell it to me,” he offered as an excuse for this theft, a self-evident explanation to him. Although I could hardly admit it, I secretly agreed with him.

  So John was banned; in fact as word went around he was banned from every bookshop in Toronto. But after he paid me back the amount I had to pay my colleague, I lifted the ban and so did my colleagues. (It took him a couple of months to repay me; he didn’t care about the money, but I guess it was painful to pay for a book he’d already read and he needed to keep some money for books he hadn’t yet read. I suspect that all of us secretly admired someone who wanted to read Gil Blas so much they would steal it to do so.)

  Later on, Debbie would sometimes eject John instantly, as he tried to enter, chasing him down the stairs as he cried out, in a futile effort to placate her. “God bless you, you’re a wonderful person. God bless you. You’re a fine Christian woman,” he would yell as he ran.

  This was because John started having problems with urinary control and he would sometimes leave puddles on the floor, where he had been standing. Especially when Debbie appeared, because she always aroused anxiety.

  “You’re too soft, Mason,” she would rail at me. “Stealing Gil Blas is one thing, but I won’t have that filthy bum peeing on my floor. Out he goes! I don’t care if he has read Gibbon twice.”

  As I said, John’s family was an old Toronto family which had had a town, Langstaff, named after it. [His sister was Phyllis Grosskurth, who I mentioned in the last chapter]. John and Pat had been long estranged. Pat is a scholar with an international reputation for several biographies and the possessor of one of the finest minds I’ve encountered, ever. I’ve appraised her papers for years, so I have seen evidence not usually available to outsiders. One of her books, Melanie Klein: Her World and Her Work (1986), aroused such controversy that she was attacked viciously in the pages of the New Yorker. She devastated her critics in her replies; and I’ve seen the whole evidence. Once, a few years ago, she was brought as a guest to a lunch club of which I’m a member. We sat together over coffee and the couple of glasses of wine I’d had gave me the courage to think it might be okay to mention John. She had recently published a memoir and, reading it, I had learned both that John was dead and that his real name had been Gary. This discovery saddened me so much I never could finish her memoir. Sadly, it’s not uncommon for booksellers not to know their long-time customers have died. It’s usually only when one remembers that they haven’t been in for a year or so that the logical conclusion is arrived at. Lack of money won’t dissuade a true book person; only death will.

  “I knew your brother,” I told her. We had a lengthy, intense conversation, which a couple of times brought her to tears.

  “You mean he went into all the bookstores regularly,” she asked, her disbelief making her astonished.

  “Yes, we all knew him well. Liked him too. Admired him in fact, except some people didn’t like it when he peed on the floor.”

  She couldn’t believe it.

  “But David, what about his violence? His insane rages, that’s why we had to disown him, hospitalize him.”

  “We saw no violence, not a trace,” I replied. “In fact, a harsh word would reduce John to tears.”

  This brought tears too. I felt badly, but I sensed that she was comforted that, although clearly hopeless, John was held in affectionate regard by all the booksellers.

  Another of the unforeseen benefits of being a bookseller is that one becomes less judgmental, or at least one becomes judgmental in a different way. Our feelings for those people who don’t read books, for whatever reasons, range from pity to contempt, but a passionate lover of books will be forgiven much. The booksellers didn’t care that John was an unshaven dishevelled addled bum—he loved books. So he was accepted (except for peeing on the floor), and generally treated with patience and affection.

  But let us now look at the other extreme.

  Joe Brabant was a customer for my entire career but only a friend for the last twenty-five years of it, due to, I guess, another of those weird conventions which make the book world so eccentric and delightful.

  From the first month or so I was open, Joe would come in when he was in town. He was a lawyer, the House Counsellor for Sun Life, whose head office was in Montreal then. He travelled for Sun Life regularly to Toronto, but also to most of the important cities in the world.

  This was perfect for a book collector, for it meant that he could put in his day’s work in London or Prague or Cairo and in the evenings he could visit those cities’ bookstores in search of his real passion, in this case anything relating to Lewis Carroll. I suspect that Joe was famous in the book trade worldwide due to his persistence. As I later learned, Joe had decided early on that, due to the almost endless supply of reprints of Alice-related books and advertising material incorporating Alice and her friends, he should primarily focus on only one aspect of Carroll/Dodgson’s activities: he chose the Mad Hatter, which after Joe and I became friends I came to believe was more appropriate than it first seemed. Always impeccably dressed, as befits a lawyer in an important position, in the beginning Joe was always quite formal. He would enter the shop and greet me in the same manner every time. “Good day, Mr. Mason, do you have anything for me today?”

  “Hi, Mr. Brabant,” I would reply and either go get whatever was on the hold shelf to show him or tell him, “No, I’ve got nothing this trip.”

  This went on for many years, during which time Joe endeared himself to me by his impeccable behaviour, especially when he acted against his own interests.

  I sold him a fair bit since he bought every illustrated Alice, indeed anything which he didn’t have. Some years later when primary Carroll material, inscribed books and such, reached startling levels, Joe would get angry when I would bring some great Carroll item to his attention from a catalogue, an item which might be priced at $15,000.00 or $20,000.00.

  “I wouldn’t pay that even if I could,” he would fulminate.

  It wasn’t that Joe was cheap, he always bought what he needed without questioning the price, he just believed those prices were ludicrous and he refused to break his principles.

  Joe endeared himself to me early on through the following incident. I had acquired, without fully understanding its scarcity—the biggest pitfall for the inexperienced dealer—a great Carroll rarity, the true first edition of The Game of Logic, one of Carroll’s mathematical games. First issued in 1886 it had suffered Carroll’s displeasure for technical reasons, as had the first Alice, and had been suppressed. No more than fifty copies of The Game were printed before it was suppressed, and their rarity was compounded by the fact that a small packet of markers—to play the game—had been issued, loosely inserted in the book, and were often missing in the few copies which remained.

  I happened on quite a fine copy of the 1886 edition, and with the markers still present. After extensive research, which really only demonstrated that it was so rare I was on my own with price, I put $200.00 on it and set it aside to show Joe on his next visit.

  W
hen he came in next he looked at it and told me he had it. This is when he showed his character.

  “That’s a very scarce book, Mr. Mason. I must tell you that I bought my copy from Scribner’s in New York over ten years ago. My copy is not nearly as nice as this one and I paid then $300.00 American. I think your copy is much too cheap.”

  I was shocked.

  I was operating, as I still do, on the strict principle that to the one who has the knowledge should go the profit. Painful as it was to me, it was obvious that he should take the fine copy and sell his own copy for considerably more than I was asking, thereby getting a much better copy and making a profit as well.

  I told him that—which, of course he knew—but he refused anyway. This was improper, contrary to the unwritten code of collecting. It’s all very well to be kind to a neophyte but a collector shouldn’t allow that to influence his opportunity to upgrade his collection.

  But Joe refused. There could be no rational explanation for such behaviour on the part of a collector (and in forty-five years I’ve never seen any other collector do this). It could only mean that he refused to profit by the ignorance of a neophyte.

  I never forgot that fine gesture and Joe profited considerably in the end from his class.

  Incidentally, I sold The Game of Logic the next day for $1,000.00 to a colleague in California. But in spite of that

  enormous profit I still feel badly. Joe deserved that book and he should have taken it.

  Joe had so much Carroll material that in the later years most of what he would find waiting for him to examine was ephemera. Debbie and I would go to considerable trouble to collect advertisements relating to Carroll (the Mad Hatter still gets used very often in sales brochures and such).

  Once Debbie told Joe that she had seen a huge poster with Alice and the Mad Hatter in a bus shelter. The next day Joe was at the TTC offices getting one.

  Another time, in her bank, an account promotion was using a large kiosk-type structure, covered with cut-out illustrations of Alice and her crew to solicit accounts. I wondered what the bank manager must have thought when this distinguished man made an appointment with him, not to open an account but to try and buy two of those kiosks. He got them, too.

  For the kinds of ephemeral pieces we found, I could have asked, and Joe would have been happy to pay, $5.00 or $10.00 each. But instead I took to giving them to him. It made me feel good and he always graciously accepted.

  After some years of this Sun Life moved their head office to Toronto in 1979, during another of the Quebec separatists’ threats to split the country, and Joe chose to move with them.

  Then I would see him every week, always at opening on Saturday mornings. The only difference was that he would be dressed on Saturday in a ratty old tweed jacket and turtleneck sweater instead of the impeccable business attire we were used to.

  But the ritual was the same. “Good morning, Mr. Mason. Anything for me today?”

  “Sorry Mr. Brabant, nothing this week,” or I’d hand him some magazine with an Alice ad. And then, “Well, see you next week,” and he’d leave.

  I had, of course, had a few conversations in passing with Joe, some where he had dropped interesting tidbits into the conversation on political and other subjects, such as a casual comment once that he and Pierre Trudeau were members of the same club in Montreal and he didn’t much care for him.

  One day I decided this was silly. I’d known the man some fifteen years or so, liked him a lot, but I’d never had any sort of personal conversation with him. The next Saturday as we went through the regular ritual I simply didn’t let it go. I just started talking, questioning him about Trudeau and the politics of the country. At first he was a bit disconcerted—I was contravening our usual ritual—but he quickly opened up. The next Saturday I asked if he’d like to stay for a coffee. He would, and sat down and chatted with Reg Innell and me for over an hour. Like so many book collectors, he was lonely in the bookish sense, he had no friends who collected, except for the large Lewis Carroll Society, which flourished worldwide, and when he was given an opportunity to chat with the other book collectors who came in on Saturdays he loved it.

  And he went from a man who said little to someone who had lots to say when he was in bookish company. He would enter every Saturday at 10 am, offering to pay or to go for the coffee, and sit for a couple of hours. I got to know Joe pretty well on those Saturday mornings, and some of what I learned was extremely helpful in what occurred later.

  Joe, lawyer though he was, hated two things vehemently—politicians and lawyers. He was a man of rigid principles, as my anecdote of him refusing a $500.00 or a $1,000.00 profit showed, and that was why he hated politicians; his distrust of politicians was visceral.

  Of unimpeachable character himself I guess he came to despise lawyers because he had seen too many examples of lawyers who lacked his integrity.

  There was a group of collectors then who formed a little group for discussion of book matters and they began meeting every month or so for coffee and talk, often dropping into the store afterwards. Like most book groups it was a disparate lot, the only common thread being the love of books and talking about them. Aside from Joe, there were people like the aforementioned John Slater, the philosophy professor who built the magnificent Bertrand Russell and modern philosophy collections, and Michael Walsh, the investment banker who built a collection that complemented it. Both these collections are now housed in the Thomas Fisher Library at the University of Toronto. And my friend Reg Innell, a well-known photographer at the Toronto Star, who had met and photographed every major literary and show business personage who passed through Toronto.

  And Brian Kennedy, who originally came in seeking Margaret Atwood first editions as gifts for his wife. He and I had long chats and he got interested in collecting himself. After a bit, I started loaning him books on books and this became a regular occurrence until one day he returned several and when I asked if he wanted some new ones, he said, “No, I’ve read enough, I’m going to start collecting. In fact I’ve decided to collect Thomas Hardy. And as I’ve learned from these books and your talk, I’m only going to buy books in original cloth and in fine condition.”

  I offered him another lesson on the spot. Just a couple of days earlier I had received the latest catalogue from Sumner & Stillman, who specialize in nineteenth-and early twentieth-century literature and have, for many years, issued what I consider to be amongst the most interesting and best-researched catalogues anywhere in those areas, catalogues from which I quite often treat myself to a personal book for my own library. This particular catalogue contained the three-volume first edition of Hardy’s The Woodlanders, in what they called very fine original cloth. I knew their style very well and I knew that meant the book would be like new.

  I showed Brian the catalogue entry, explaining that it was a pretty good example of what he would face if he insisted on really fine condition.

  This copy was priced at $3,000.00 US and I told Brian that a normal copy, in nice original cloth, would range from around $1,250.00 to $1,750.00.

  “This is what you’ll be faced with if you insist on very fine condition, Brian,” I lectured. “This copy is double or more the normal and I can assure you, for what it is, it’s not overpriced.”

  Brian looked at it for a moment while I waited for him to absorb this lesson and demur. Then he said, “I’d like to buy that. Can you get it for me?”

  As befits a very good lawyer, and Brian is, he had carefully prepared, considering all the details, and once he’d decided he acted decisively.

  He’s been my lawyer ever since.

  When I got over my momentary shock I phoned Sumner & Stillman and secured the book. A few days later the book arrived. I didn’t open the package but waited for Brian to come in so he could experience the pleasure and anxiety of unpacking his first major purchase. As I knew it would be, it was a lovely copy
, in about new condition. (As I’ve said elsewhere, proper dealers never used the term mint, even if it is.)

  I felt constrained to give Brian, a Brian properly delighted with his first three-decker, yet another lecture.

  “Brian you’d better start lowering your standards of condition right now. If you insist on only this sort of condition you may never be able to buy another nineteenth-century book.”

  I could see that Brian didn’t think that would be true, and in fact it led to several errors over the next few years where he erred in the opposite manner to most new collectors.

  Most beginners make the error of buying desired books in less than proper condition, ignoring defects, deciding that they are of no importance, lulled perhaps by a cheaper price or certain that they can live with obvious defects.

  Another of my caveats for collectors when I’m trying to help them decide if they can live with a defect in a book is often stated like this: “Look at it this way. If you don’t like this stain, or tear or whatever now, it won’t get better. Everytime you go into your library that defect will leap off the shelf and hit you in the face. Decide, before you buy, what you can live with and if you’re not yet sure, do it only with cheap books, until you learn this lesson.”

  Brian held to his unrealistic standards for several years, which resulted in him missing several books I expect he now regrets not buying. We offered him a fine first of The Trumpet Major, which was rebound in a lovely half-morocco binding, which he refused because it was rebound. I think he has regretted it ever since. Debbie, who also loves Hardy and has a few nice ones, deeply regrets that she didn’t buy it when Brian turned it down.

  Now neither of them own a copy and it is now worth double or triple what we sold that copy for. It remains a painful regret for both of them.

  But back to Joe Brabant.

  Once Joe invited Debbie and me up to view his collection. He lived in a sumptuous apartment on St. Clair, his window overlooking the remains of one of the oldest cemeteries in Toronto, seemingly a rather macabre situation, but to my mind quite appropriate for book people like us who live in the past anyway. The crumbling and tilted gravestones seemed to emphasize our antiquarianism.