The Pope's Bookbinder

by David Mason

  But the major change with the Queen Street shop was that it became the last of my shops which could be seen in any manner as an old-fashioned used bookshop. For better or worse I am now solely an antiquarian bookseller. I continue to make pathetic attempts to pretend that I still have a used bookshop—a small gift section with pretty $10.00 and $20.00 books that no one looks at, a small “clearance” nook with books at 80% off (the old quarter box ploy) but even I can now no longer deny that I’m in the same zone that David Magee was in when I met him all those years ago.

  The trouble is, I miss the cheap books, both buying and selling them. And I don’t like gin and tonic.

  The used book business is in great peril. If the rare book trade seems less precarious, the implications for it are just as ominous because the used book business is the base of the pyramid, of which the rare book is the apex. If the used bookstore survives it will be in a very different form from now. About the only used bookstores that seem to be operating successfully are those where the proprietors seem to know virtually nothing about books. Nor care. They buy for a buck and sell for five, and seem to me entirely lacking in discrimination or any sense of quality. I suspect that even they can only exist by owning their building. I drop in to some of them occasionally, but they are so boring I can seldom force myself to look long enough to find something. I hope they are not the future, but I fear they are; at least in the cities.

  Rents in the rejuvenated centers of most North American cities have outpaced a bookseller’s ability to pay them. Used bookstores need a lot of space and they need it cheap. After all, used bookstores dealing in recent books at half price, or out-of-print books which are still fairly cheap, need, by their very nature, browsers to seek them out. That means ample space and time, for the books must wait for the person who wants them to come in and find them.

  Used & Rare was once a generic term for anything not brand new, although in recent years it has been superseded by the designation Antiquarian (another futile attempt to confer respectability). Used bookstores in the past would usually contain the leavings from the previous hundred or hundred and fifty years—from last year’s bestsellers to the reprints of the works of famous writers, the purged books of people moving house, and the libraries of the deceased. While the bulk of the stock in a typical used bookstore would consist of such books, in the last sixty or seventy years the space which paid the rent was the area in front, which sold used paperbacks, the common reading of the young and the impecunious, which heavily outbalance hardcovers in sales. Paperbacks in our time have fuelled the used book business, while the larger general stock of hardcovers gathers dust, sometimes for many years, until the right person finds them.

  With the Internet now rendering most used books unsaleable, one finds dealers like me not even buying almost all books from the last hundred years or so. While I hate this, I now have no choice. When we check the Internet sites to find one hundred and fifty copies of a modern book, we begin by not bothering to list our own copy, and it doesn’t take long for us to realize that we shouldn’t even be buying them in the first place. So now instead of Used & Rare we increasingly find Used disappearing and Rare hiding in offices and homes, appearing only at book fairs.

  When the worldwide web started to function, there was a state of near ecstasy in the book trade. Books started to sell to people

  in places like Tokyo, Singapore, Australia, Eastern Europe. Good books, but ones which previously we would have anticipated might have taken fifteen years for the right person to come along. Pessimists like me weren’t so sure this was a good thing, and now we see why. Rare books, being established by their scarceness and intrinsic importance, are less endangered. But there are many cases in the last few years where the Internet has demonstrated that some books, once considered rare, are considerably more common than current owners find comfortable. What I’m saying is that many so-called rare books are not rare. Last year, obtaining a first edition of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language, I priced it at $30,000.00 and offered it to one of my most serious clients. “No thanks,” he said. “I was at the Los Angeles book fair last week and there were three copies there.” Johnson’s Dictionary is not a rare book; it is an expensive book, as it should be, being one of the literary cornerstones of western civilization. Because it was expensive when it was published in 1755, it would have been purchased only by the wealthy, and instead of being read and tossed aside, it mostly languished for a couple of centuries on the library shelves of those huge country houses and survived in great numbers.

  But the great books always sell, in fact they are now more saleable than common books. Most dealers will tell you that they can sell a $2,000.00 book more easily than they can sell a $20.00 book.

  But what used bookstores need, even more than space and cheap rent, is customers; people who actually come in and browse and find books they weren’t looking for but can’t resist; or books they didn’t know existed by authors they never heard of; or simply a newly discovered book that appeals to their curiosity. The Internet seems to have affected even people’s visits to stores. The consensus amongst those colleagues I have talked to seems to be that store sales have been down over a lengthy period, from anywhere between 20% and 50%. It seems that almost everyone uses the Internet to buy most, if not all, of their books. The intricate and I believe essential connection between the buyer and the dealer is thereby threatened, to me perhaps the worst aspect of the entire current situation.

  So, used bookshops are closing at a speed which is scary to people who care about learning and civilization. Right now this is mainly booksellers, and perhaps the habitual customers, but the implications seem to me to far exceed the economic concerns of a few guys like me.

  A famous writer once said that the degree of civilization of a country could be measured by the number of used bookstores it could sustain. I read a magazine piece, maybe ten years ago, about the British trade, which pointed out that in the previous ten years Britain had gone from 3000 bookshops to less than half that number. This was attributed to high rents, the high streets of British towns having become too pricey for used bookstores. The Internet has exacerbated this situation, but now it is apparent that the Internet is only part of the problem. Friends and colleagues who closed stores to deal from home thinking they could feed their families from the net and the occasional visitor, have often had to send their wives out to work or seek other means of supporting themselves.

  But what is most troubling to me in all of this is that collectors need some years of experience collecting to be ready for books in the higher price ranges. And it is my deep conviction that only in the used bookstores can they educate themselves to obtain that level of sophistication which will prepare them for when they are faced with a high price for a book they need for their collection or their library. And what will happen to the education of new collectors when there are no used bookstores? Who will teach them what they need to know?

  The large chains, after decimating many of the independents and capturing the average new book-buyer, have staffed their stores with young and ignorant, minimum-wage staff. A friend of mine seeking Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall was told “try ancient history, you might find ‘her’ there.” Another, wanting Maugham’s Cakes and Ale, was referred to the cooking section. No one expects a kid working for low wages to have an encyclopedic knowledge of our literature, but your average used bookseller not only knows these things, he can lead you to them or find them for you, and more often than not will recommend similar books that you might not know about. All these changes point more and more to the triumph of bland mediocrity over the personal guidance offered by a knowledgeable bookseller. Every serious reader and collector I ever knew knows that having a knowledgeable dealer to instruct and guide them, especially in their early years, is essential. A friend of mine, a long-time and astute collector, told me recently that years of experience had taught him to start with the best d
ealers. Although they will often be more expensive, they tend to get the best material and he found after various unpleasant transactions that the high-end dealers often end up cheaper in the long run. A very wise conclusion!

  Our job is to search out and buy from remainder tables, from garage sales and the junk heaps, those books which our instincts tell us someone should be looking for, and hold them until that person appears. In other words, we are trained to cull the worthy from the dross. We rescue the past to hold for the future, and if we’re wrong we lose money, so we learn to hone those instincts.

  Like the blacksmiths, we may be doomed, but let me make a prophecy. We are not going away. If we are doomed, it is only to more of what we have always had to deal with, and we will deal with whatever comes next in the same manner. Fairly soon we will no doubt be selling books as quaint artifacts like antique dealers and we will be selling fewer books to fewer people. But the truth is that most dealers I have known won’t much care as long as they can survive to buy another book tomorrow. And read another one tonight.

  Even after forty years I still wake up every morning wondering what exciting thing will happen today. And what book I will buy that I never thought I’d own.

  I opened on deadline and spent twenty years on Queen West watching the slow evolution (devolution, we thought) from a quaint, lively neighbourhood, with all sorts of great cheap restaurants and interesting neighbours, to the vulgar excesses of the clothes emporia run amok.

  Queen Street was vibrant, with more and more bookstores either moving there or opening, including some good small new bookstores, until we had at one count eighteen stores from University Avenue to Niagara Street.

  We then had several great years on the street until “progress” took over. The first clue was when the large store beside me, a Goodwill branch, where we all bought our clothes and household stuff, was evicted and a high-end clothing store appeared. It was the beginning of the end, although that wasn’t apparent until later.

  Within a few years almost all of the small interesting businesses got pushed out, replaced with yet another of the ubiquitous clothing chains, until there was hardly anything left of the old neighbourhood except The Stem, our local mom and pop restaurant where people in the area ate and met. Gossip about the latest outrageous rent one of these clothing empires paid fueled our gossip daily, astounding us.

  For several years we would sit on the patio of the Rivoli in the evenings, drinking and watching the passing show. But in the end the passing show became mostly young kids shopping for the increasingly bizarre fashions which told me that I was more and more out of the loop. I had been very lucky in my choice of building though. Pachter, over-extended, had lost most of his buildings in a real estate slump and mine was bought by a woman, Lynn Connell, who moved into the third floor with her three kids. Lynn became a friend and, later, during a bad period when everyone on Queen was going to their landlords with tales of woe, Lynn not only lowered my rent but capped it, never raising it again for the entire time she owned the building.

  But everything has an end. Lynn Connell, the closest thing to a perfect landlord I’ve had, eventually had other plans to pursue and put the building up for sale.

  I knew I was done on Queen Street.

  As our time approached, Debbie and I started looking for a new space. This was the first time that she had to do so and she learned what I and everyone who needs to find a new business location knows: looking for space is harder and ten times as depressing and takes even more out of you than moving shelves and 100,000 books.

  We looked at hundreds of places, some in locations so bizarre that guides would be needed to lead potential customers to us. And others, desirable, but way too expensive for lowly antiquarian booksellers to even consider. It became increasingly apparent that downtown Toronto had no room any longer for booksellers who had stocks the size of ours. We began to look well outside the city, exploring the arc surrounding Toronto in a radius of some twenty-five to thirty miles out. One horrible Sunday in a town a hundred miles from Toronto I stopped the car, we looked at each other in despair and said “What are we doing out here? We’re city people. We don’t belong out here, no matter how cheap it might be.”

  We went back to the downtown and started looking for an office in the converted factories still in our area.

  But most of them were no longer feasible for booksellers. We had agents offering us space, some so ludicrously inappropriate that we would have marvelled at the optimism of the landlords if we hadn’t been so depressed by our prospects. Spaces described as two thousand square feet would be five hundred square feet, and ‘newly renovated’ meant to some a single coat of paint which barely smudged a hundred years of dirt. The worst of them was a place that even we couldn’t find with precise directions, which had been described as a “multi-roomed executive suite.” It did have eight or ten rooms, none larger than closet size; shelves would have made any of them impossible to enter.

  By this time we were seriously depressed.

  We were reduced to wandering every street within a couple of miles of each side of Yonge, by now sure that we were doomed. We would end up, with our books, on the street; our books would be stolen or ruined by rain and we would expire in the gutter, perhaps an appropriate end for our effrontery in thinking that there should be a place in the world for a used bookshop.

  Then one day, walking along Adelaide Street West, we saw a sign offering space in a large converted factory. We walked along the hall in the basement (they call it the ‘Lower Level,’ of course). There were workmen putting up wall board in a large room with the huge two-foot square wooden pillars found in most of these old factories. As soon as we took one look, I knew I’d found my new store. One of the unexpected effects of being a used bookseller is that after a few years it becomes impossible for a bookseller to enter any room without automatically shelving it in his mind. This doesn’t just happen in commercial space, it happens everywhere. Women, especially, seem to set up their houses with the concept of how it will appear to their guests. I’m certain that none of my women friends are aware that every time I’ve entered their houses I’ve shelved in my mind every room I’ve entered, ruining their carefully thought-out plans, throwing out all their inconvenient furniture and filling every possible space with books.

  When we saw my new store Debbie was doubtful. “It’s not right,” she said nervously. I had already shelved it in my mind. But she was right in one respect: it was, at some 1800 square feet, smaller than we needed.

  I said to the foreman of the work crew who, in fact, was really the superintendent of the whole building and some seven others that the company owned, “It’s just what I want but it’s too small.”

  “Well,” he replied with a smile. “You can have the room across the hall as well, if you want.”

  He showed it to me and I began negotiating on the spot. I knew I had found my new shop. A bit of luck intervened here too. I was unaware that most of the upper floors, way too expensive for lowly booksellers, were empty, and that the owners were therefore much more amenable to a deal. We made a verbal commitment on the spot, but were told we needed to submit references and undergo an interview with the landlord before we would be secure.

  I made up a packet, a bundle of bullshit based on what I’d learned from dealing with real businessmen and bankers, including a few articles and columns journalists had written about me over the years, and two days later we had a meeting with the owner.

  The owner was amiable enough, but he began by informing me that he was a lawyer. Then he showed me one of the articles which had been published on me which he had marked with a yellow marker (which, naturally, booksellers consider a form of desecration). He had underlined a comment I’d made about how all booksellers are so impecunious that they can barely manage the rents.

  “We lawyers,” he began, laying out the parameters, “aren’t really fussy on renting to peop
le who boast that they’re not sure that they can pay the rent.”

  My whining, endemic after all those years, came back to haunt me.

  But I responded at once.

  “I’ve never, in forty years, missed a rent payment, nor even been late,” I responded bluntly, taking up the challenge. This was my new shop I was dealing with. Losing this negotiation was not an option.

  “How long a lease do you want?” he ventured.

  “Ten years,” I said, trying to hide the fact that I was bluffing.

  “Oh,” he replied, “we never give ten years. How about five?”

  We had done some clever homework—we knew what our two neighbours in the basement (sorry—the Lower Level) were paying, and we knew that one of them, the first basement tenant, had a ten-year lease.

  Debbie stepped in at this point with a blunt decisiveness which made me relinquish the entire negotiation to her.

  “We need ten years. Anything less is impossible for us. Do you think we’re going to go to all this trouble to move again in five years? No.”

  The landlord had visited the Queen Street shop—he knew what she meant.

  I shut up and left it to Deb.

  He realized he had met his match, and very quickly too.

  She was masterful, and I had the common sense to keep my mouth entirely shut while she not only beat him down on his asking rate, but secured our ten-year tenure.

  The deal done, we began our move. That’s when disaster struck.

  Debbie, who had stayed home feeling weak and dizzy one day, called me to say that she had fallen and was too weak to get back into bed—I’d better come home.

  I ran home, and immediately called 9-1-1. Within a few minutes we had six firemen, a couple of ambulance attendants and two cops in her bedroom.