The Pope's Bookbinder

by David Mason

  Norm also had formed the habit of falling madly in love with his female customers and would give his latest obsession huge discounts, which naturally infuriated Asher.

  Norm had a tiny locked room in the basement of Acadia where he kept treasures while he “checked them out.” Since he was far too lazy to actually do any research, this usually meant that things would sit in the locked room for years, until he got sick of looking at them. When he finally did price an item which he had believed to be rare, it might still be very cheap, since his lazy obstinacy ensured that he had learned nothing new in so long that his feel for things was hopelessly out of date.

  That’s what happened with the legendary pamphlet. One day he showed a pamphlet to Jerry Sherlock, an eight page delicate paper sheaf with a crude woodcut engraving on the cover, the author using a pseudonym. It was dated Toronto, 1852. He, of course, was showing it to Jerry in hopes that Jerry would tell him what it was and perhaps price it for him. Naturally, Jerry wasn’t about to succumb to this ploy; he wanted to have it and he knew if he said too much Norm would put an impossible price on it, just to show Jerry he wasn’t a fool. “This must be very rare, Jerry. I’ve never seen it. Have you?” said Norm, fishing.

  “No, I haven’t, Norm. What do you want for it?” Jerry replied.

  “Oh, I’m checking it out. I don’t know yet.”

  “Well, when you price it can I have first refusal?” said Jerry, giving nothing away.

  Jerry knew Norm’s eccentricities and he knew he had to be careful. If he showed too much interest the price would escalate. Jerry knew that it had to be quite valuable. 1852 for a humourous pamphlet with a woodcut was pretty early for Toronto. The city was then eighteen years old and almost anything from that early date, especially such a delicate production, would be rare and valuable. Jerry did his own homework, but discovered only one thing. Completely unknown to every bibliography and history, it was unrecorded, a bookseller’s dream. Unrecorded means that the price is limited only by the dealer’s imagination.

  A humourous political satire with a woodcut illustration and published under a pseudonym. It could have been written by some later famous person or could libel some prominent citizen, making it valuable on several levels.

  Jerry would, every two months or so (more often might give Norm a clue), go to Acadia and casually inquire, in passing, if Norm had priced the pamphlet yet.

  “Still checking, Jerry,” would answer Norm.

  Jerry was forced to bite his tongue—he knew all the checking in the world was not going to result in anything, and the pamphlet’s value had by now risen to quite a level in his head.

  After a year of this Jerry lost patience with Norm’s bull-

  headedness and took a chance.

  “Norm, forget it. You won’t find a price for it. I’ll give you $100.00 for it right now.”

  Norm was shocked, as $100.00 was a lot of money then, the equivalent of $2,000.00 or $3,000.00 today.

  “Okay, I’ll sell it to you for that. Come on.”

  They went to the basement, Norm unlocked the secret room and then the locked drawer, and there was what remained of the rare pamphlet—a few pitiful scraps of paper, chewed to pieces. The mice had eaten it.

  Jerry told me that he almost cried. An artifact of early Toronto history, hitherto unseen and unknown and now destroyed by mice and by Norm Hart’s obstinacy.

  And it’s still unknown—no other copy having appeared in the fifty years since.

  Norm’s eccentricities were exacerbated by some kind of combined neatness/cleanliness compulsion. He’d spend hours spraying and wiping every paperback and dust jacket with Windex. Once I was there when someone accidentally spilled some coffee on the floor and Norm without even interrupting what he was saying got down on his knees with Windex and paper towels and scrubbed the floor. But his most irritating compulsions severely damaged books. He had the habit of taking any dust jacket which had any wear and clipping off the flap with the book’s description, which he would then staple to the free endpaper, rendering first editions enormously less valuable because he’d destroyed the dust jacket and made permanent holes in the endpaper. And worse, he would clip off the corners of the endpapers, claiming the corner was soiled from too much rubbing-out of the penciled price. All these practices enraged those of us who dealt in modern firsts because it made those books seriously defective to a collector, and I would regularly threaten to complain to the ABAC about his depredations.

  “They’ll fine you, Norm. They’ll throw you out for destroying books,” I would tell him. This was, of course, a bluff, but Norm didn’t care.

  “The corners were soiled, Dave. You modern first guys are all nuts,” he would reply. “Those books aren’t worth your crazy prices anyway.”

  Finally, after many years of subjecting Asher to his eccentricities, Norm insisted on vacuuming the floor one day with a dozen or so customers waiting vainly to pay for books. Asher remonstrated with him and Norm quit on the spot, stomping out indignantly. Naturally, he returned to work the next day, pretending that nothing had occurred. But Asher had been waiting some years for just such a stroke of luck as this—for he was far too soft a man to fire Norm—and he refused to capitulate. He paid Norm off handsomely and Norm was forced to do what he had been threatening to do for years and open his own shop.

  He was a good bookman but he chose a location which could hardly be found without a map, and that combined with his never showing up till four or five hours after his posted hours did him in.

  His real weakness, though, was the horses, and that combined with his other eccentricities finally finished him. Norm was one of three people I’ve known who seriously contended that they could consistently win at the races, even though any sane person will tell you that Mario Puzo was right on the nose (pun intended) when he said that he didn’t bet the horses because they were “Noble, lovable, and true, but controlled by men not so noble.”

  Norm spent his life waiting for his horse to win and died one step above the Sally Ann hostel. Of the other two believers, one was a schizophrenic and the other, a fairly well-known writer who suffered a few apparent criminal attacks, which always seemed to me to hint at the sort of things which happen to people who have borrowed money from the mob.

  I believe Asher “loaned” Norm a considerable amount of money in later years. All the rest of us dealers loaned him money too, on the principle that after he owed us all $200.00 or $300.00 each, he would be too embarrassed to come around, and that’s what happened. Somehow he lasted another few years, ending up living in a room above a strip bar where he would, I’m told, spend his days with a single beer, hopelessly in love with all the artistes.

  Any account of the antiquarian book trade must deal with the subject of theft, a serious problem for all used booksellers. But unlike what you might expect, the greatest problem is not what is stolen from us, but the books we are offered by thieves, who have stolen from our colleagues or from new bookstores.

  There are various classes of thieves with which the antiquarian bookseller must contend. With many of the bookshops on Queen Street in its heyday, both new and used, the easiest ones to catch were the drunks and street hustlers who would steal from one bookstore and walk along the street to sell their loot to the next bookseller on the row. This is relatively easy to deal with, for when a ratty looking drunk or a near-illiterate brings in a pile of nice books it’s not hard to figure out that something is wrong.

  These street people conclude quickly that stealing is pretty easy. Part of the ethos of antiquarian bookselling dictates that we do not follow people around spying on them. Nor do we mount those convex mirrors or cameras, another result of our conviction that we have a more serious destiny, seeing ourselves as purveyors of civilization. Many dealers, and I am one of them, decided years ago that we would prefer to suffer the odd loss rather than lower ourselves to such a level.

&nb
sp; The most dangerous thieves are the ones who steal because they want to own the book. Against them we are near powerless, unless we catch them in the act. Or unless some crisis causes them to try and sell their stolen books.

  Something of that will be obvious in the following anecdote.

  One day Steve Temple called. “I’ve been buying some books from so and so,” he said, naming a young guy who was well-known to the Toronto trade, a frequent visitor who, like any young person who demonstrates enthusiasm, we had all spent a fair bit of time with, teaching and guiding. He bought regularly but carefully. He was a paramedic, so it wasn’t so much that he was poor; his caution in buying was, it seemed, based on the natural caution that any intelligent neophyte uses while learning. That’s why dealers spend so much time talking to such people. We see one of our primary tasks as educational, assuming our rewards will come later, commensurate with the increased sophistication that we help to instill.

  “He’s having a divorce and needs to raise some money,” Temple said. “He’s just offered me some books of a sort that he never showed any interest in. There’s an early book on Angling in the last lot and when I looked in the back [many dealers code their costs on the last blank leaf] the code was in your handwriting. Did he ever ask you about fishing?”

  I should add here that another of the ways we catch thieves is through their cover stories. Dealers in the same area become proficient in recognizing their colleague’s handwriting. So when someone tells you that he inherited his grandfather’s library (almost always another of the giveaways that the books are stolen) and one sees that the handwriting on the blank pages is that of a friend or colleague, suspicion is immediate.

  “No,” I said. “I’ll check.”

  I checked, and found that the book had not been sold. I went over to Temple’s and we examined the books. Others had marks in my hand and in those of several other dealers. Some might have been purchased but too many didn’t fit his known interests. We reluctantly decided we had a thief on our hands. We were very upset. He was a nice guy, an enthusiast who we had, as usual, decided was one of the good ones and left pretty much alone in our shops.

  He came to my store often on Sundays, and when I questioned Reg Innell, who ran my shop on Sundays, he recalled the seeming-coincidence that often our young friend would choose to leave the moment Reg was called to answer the telephone. It became apparent that our young man was a thief, and calls to several other dealers in town confirmed our suspicions.

  Temple stopped payment on the cheque for the last lot purchased and phoned our culprit. He told him that a glitch at the bank had caused the stop-payment, and that if he came in the next day at 4:30 pm he would replace the cheque.

  The next day the guy entered Temple’s in his paramedic’s uniform with his ambulance parked outside to be greeted by seven or eight dealers and two detectives from the Toronto Police force. Confronted, he confessed immediately, all the dealers watching in a silent contempt mixed with a certain sadness at this disturbing betrayal of our trust. Catching a thief whom you had thought to be a friend causes pain, similar to the destroying of trust which results from betrayal in friendship or marriage. As the police led him out in handcuffs he turned to us and in one of the most bizarre justifications I ever expect to hear said, “I just want you all to know—I only ever stole books.”

  What an incredible thing to say to an audience of book-

  sellers! Did he mean that stealing only books meant he wasn’t a thief? I’m still trying to figure that one out.

  Off he went and the clean-up commenced. Of course, he lost his job since he now couldn’t be bonded. We had several meetings with the Toronto police officers, who acted in a marvellous fashion, way beyond their legal mandate. What really impressed us was that, unlike in the past, they didn’t dismiss book theft as though it was simple shoplifting; they understood that it was a serious problem, and a cultural problem which was becoming international.

  More amusing was how our books were returned.

  One of the detectives called one day to say they had all our books at 52 Division and we could come and claim what was ours. There had been a liaison with the police in Cape Breton, where our thief was from and had returned after his conviction, and where his ex-wife lived. All the books in her home had also been seized and they were shipped to the police here. It happened to be a holiday, so Debbie and I went up to 52 Division where we were shown several separate piles of books (we estimated there was $50,000.00 to $75,000.00 worth of books from the stocks of most of the Toronto dealers in those piles).

  The detective explained that the thief, seeking to make amends or at least to mitigate his sentence, had separated them into piles denoting the separate stores he had stolen them from. We started to look through our designated pile.

  “That’s not ours,” said Deb, “it’s Temple’s.”

  “Nor that,” said I of the next one, “that’s Acadia.” And so on… “That’s Gail Wilson’s, that’s About Books.” We knew our colleagues’ handwriting—one of the reasons we caught so many thieves.

  We looked at Temple’s pile—it contained several of our books, Debbie said to the cops. “This is a mess. You’d better bring in all the other dealers so we can sort this out.”

  “Oh no,” said the detective, “we never do that. We used to do that with jewelry robberies, but we’d have ten jewelers in here all claiming that every piece of jewelry was theirs.”

  That won’t happen, we assured him. He was clearly skeptical, but finally, reluctantly, he agreed. Within an hour there were ten dealers there sorting the piles. “That’s not mine—I think it’s yours,” one would say, handing a book to another dealer. “Well, I think that’s your writing,” said another, passing another book from his pile to another dealer.

  Within an hour we had all new piles, entirely different from the thief’s sorting. Obviously he didn’t remember what he’d stolen from whom. By this time we were encircled by an audience of about fifteen to twenty cops, all of whom were astounded that we were consistently rejecting valuable books saying they weren’t ours. They could hardly believe it.

  Even more amusing was their consternation when, at the end, there was a fairly large pile of books that none of us had claimed. Maybe they were legitimately owned by our thief, but nobody was claiming what wasn’t theirs. The cops seemed quite impressed that none of us wanted to claim books which weren’t ours. We all took great pleasure in so impressing them.

  We suggested that they bring in other missing dealers who might be the owners. I believe that what was left over was subsequently auctioned at one of the periodic police sales.

  There was a further addendum to this incident. Naturally, we circulated details of the thief throughout the entire Canadian trade, especially in Nova Scotia, where he was from. About eight months later I happened to be in Halifax visiting my son, who lived there, and as part of my duties I was trying to properly describe our thief to our colleagues there, in case he still thought his methods of collecting acceptable. Several thought they might know him, but were naturally being cautious, not wanting to condemn the wrong man. On a Saturday morning I was in Schooner Books trying to describe our thief to John Townsend and his assistant when who should I see through the front window walking up the path to Schooner’s door but the thief.

  “Well,” I said, “forget my description. He’s coming in the door right now.”

  The door opened, he came in, greeted John and his assistant warmly, and then saw me sitting there, gazing at him. He turned white, quickly turned and pretended to examine a bookshelf behind him. After a few seconds we continued our

  conversation. A couple of minutes later he quietly slunk out. For a couple of years after that I would monitor him whenever I spoke to Townsend, but of course he had not been seen again in any bookstore in eastern Canada.

  It’s a little sad—he really did love books. His mistake was in conclud
ing that our casual trust was stupid and careless. He didn’t realize that our treatment of him was based on our concept that we are civilized people. We take great pride in this system of assuming people are civilized until they give us reason to believe otherwise. And, sadly, what he also didn’t realize was that like many people who like to confer trust on all we are ruthless when that trust is violated.

  Jerry Sherlock was involved in a incident with stolen books during the time I worked for him. I don’t believe that there has been a better example in my experience concerning the problems raised by theft.

  The hardest thieves to catch are the ones who are intelligent and have a feasible cover story. One day at Joseph Patrick Books a young man introduced himself as a salesman who travelled throughout Ontario selling his employer’s goods. Often, being early for appointments and being a history buff, he would explore the small towns he went to for used bookstores and Goodwill shops. His own interest, he said, was Ontario local history. Of the first lot he brought in Jerry bought about a third, and then spent some time as dealers do with a potential good scout explaining why he couldn’t buy the rejects—too common, not very good, etc. etc. He was educating, as good dealers always do, both customers and scouts being easier to deal with when they become sophisticated. And the time spent coaching is part of the mandate of the truly professional dealer.

  The next lot the young man brought in contained a higher percentage of decent books, and Jerry bought half of them and continued with the teaching. But by the third or fourth lot 80-90% of the books were desirable ones. Jerry became suspicious.

  “Nobody learns that fast, Dave. And nobody finds books that good by chance in some small-town Goodwill,” he said. (That was certainly true for me; I didn’t know which Canadian books were ordinary or desirable myself after months working for Jerry.)