The Pope's Bookbinder

by David Mason

  In spite of her weakness Debbie’s sense of humour hadn’t diminished. Looking at the crowd she quipped that it had been quite a while since she’d had that many men in her bedroom at the same time.

  Off we went to the hospital, where after extensive tests she was diagnosed with a blood clot in her lungs. The doctors couldn’t understand how this could be with a person her age, especially when she lacked the normal symptoms, the main one being chest pains. She ended up being in hospital for some twelve days and I ended up increasingly demented. Any small business of any duration learns that any problem remains festering in the mind until it’s solved. During a move one must make probably a hundred decisions a day, twenty of which will be wrong and need revising on the spot. Norm, my trusty assistant, only with us some months and beginning to use his long-practiced computer skills to set up our website and electronic system, found himself doing the kind of physical labour he probably hadn’t done since he was a kid.

  He measured up, his unfailing good humour and incessant wisecracks lightening the usual tension. Norm and I would pack up books for a few days and take down shelves until it became impossible to move (I was still doing business then), then I would rent a truck, call in my crew of four and we would move it to Adelaide.

  But I was, along with being obsessed with the move, worried sick about Debbie, visiting daily, but incapable of dealing with the real implications of her illness.

  Her condition was very serious, but I was essentially in denial; there’s only so much the mind can deal with, so I found myself counting on the great doctors in our great hospitals. It became a bit more difficult one morning when I came into her room to find her talking to a sixteen-year-old Chinese man who was about five feet two inches tall. Turns out he was not sixteen, he was a heart specialist, and according to Deb and the nurses I questioned, a very good one. I remembered my old friend and early Church Street client Dachling Pang, who when I first knew him during his residency at a Toronto hospital also looked sixteen years old, in spite of having many years of schooling (he was, and is, a brain surgeon). Meeting Dachling at a San Francisco book fair a couple of years ago, I found that even though he now has grey hair, he still looks sixteen years old.

  Debbie, with the hospital stay and the necessary follow-up rest, didn’t get back to work for some three months after the move was complete. My obsessional preoccupation with the horrendous move had caused me to be in denial about the real possibilities of what could have occurred. Long after the move, when the actual implications about what could have happened finally sank in, I had a bad period where I became thankful for whatever genetic reaction keeps us going in the face of seemingly insurmountable pressures.

  Debbie spent twelve days in hospital while I became even more unstrung, visiting daily but obsessively plowing ahead with the move. I had given my notice to the new owners of the Queen Street building, and rudely too—angry at their years of slippery promises, which they had never intended to keep—and I needed to be out on time or who knows what legal complications could have occurred. By this time I was afraid I wouldn’t make it in time, but in the end I did, with two days to spare.

  When Deb was released from hospital she went to her parents’ for a couple of weeks while she recuperated and finally came home when the move, if not the chaos, was complete.

  In all she was off for some six weeks, but the horror of all that plus the exhaustion, no doubt due to my age, made me all too aware that I wouldn’t be up for this again, and certainly not when I would be ten years older.

  It’s a sad state for used bookshops now, not just in Toronto but in every major city in the world. When Debbie and I decided we were city people and intended to stay that way, we knew this decision would be costly. And it has been. We have our main stock in our large two-room shop and live in a tiny heritage house on a residential street, a ten-minute walk away, and it suits us perfectly. But with the considerable overhead this entails it costs us plenty. So many of my colleagues have bowed to economic reality and moved to the country or into their homes, their only access to customers now the Internet or book fairs. Of the glorious days when Queen Street West had seventeen bookstores, only Steve Temple remains, hidden on a second floor in a seedy building, probably the only thing that saves him.

  So, I sit here in my mostly empty shop, visited now only by my oldest and most loyal clients, who are still aware of and drawn by the treasures they know I have. Also by the occasional chance visitor, who wanders in and voices their awe by stating, “Wow, I never knew there was a place like this in Toronto.” Or those who have been directed to me by other members of the fraternity of book people everywhere, just as I direct those same people where they should visit in all the places and cities in the world where book people can go to find their books.

  I’ve been here now for some six years, isolated in a basement, on a side street, surrounded by what one of the most respected specialists in America has called the best general stock in North America. (And perhaps it was his true view for he said it, not to me, but to someone else; I only heard it at third hand.) That comment cheers me up, as I have always considered myself a generalist. One of my favourite maxims, voiced for many years is, “A good $5.00 book is just as important as a good $500.00 book.” And I believe that. One of the inevitable consequences of my lifelong compulsion to buy books whenever I have any money (and, in truth, even when I don’t have any) has resulted in me no longer having any $5.00 books. There’s no room for them, and even if there were, I get no young browsers anyway.

  This is probably an inevitable stage in a bookseller’s life, just as is the next stage traditionally followed by older booksellers; move into a bigger house and deal from a separate room, necessitating a small, very select and hence expensive stock, which in itself limits clientele to the upper strata of the collecting crowd, just as it did David Magee when I met him thirty-five years ago.

  Curiously, while I was so impressed with Magee’s way of dealing towards the end of his life, now that I am faced with the same I find it a bit sad.

  I guess I didn’t count on the fact that one of my greatest pleasures as a bookseller has been meeting young collectors and recognizing their book-lust and watching them develop their taste and perceptions as they become increasingly sophisticated. I have for most of my career (it actually embarrasses me to refer to bookselling as a career, but you have to refer to a lifetime spent doing the same thing as something) understood how important the traditions of the trade are and how imperative it is to pass them on. But it took me until I had lost most of my contact with the young browser at the beginning levels, where they are still just seeking books to read and to own, to grasp this.

  I always have understood my mandate to counsel young dealers, to guide the beginners in the proper direction so that they can educate themselves, but I guess I didn’t really understand that the collector’s progress so closely mirrors that of young dealers.

  While I have handled a few important rare books, my aim was never to excel in the flavour-of-the-month sweepstakes. I have tended toward disdain when every travelling dealer who came in asked after Rackham, or those eighteenth-and-nineteenth century coffee-table books with steel engravings, or the hand-

  coloured botanicals, as those types of books became popular. Even early photography, when it became of interest and then highly sought-after—though I found it fascinating and did pursue it, my pursuit was because of my interest and not the huge rise in prices that all those fads bring along with them.

  I have always preferred the out-of-the-way, the curiosities, the areas where I am curious but ignorant, where one buys something and educates oneself researching it.

  Every dealer who has written of it (or spoken of it) whom I have respected, has usually mentioned how great is the pleasure of buying a library in an area about which one is fairly ignorant and the enormous pleasure and learning which results. There have been many dealers I’ve known who
chose a specialty all those years ago and stuck with it. These people now have a depth of knowledge in their specialties which will seem incredible to the outsider, but I prefer the excitement and challenge of the new and unknown.

  A specialist will spot books in his field in unlikely places and will know their value, and most importantly, he may have a ready customer waiting for that book, but he will also tend to ignore anything outside the range of his specialty. The generalist, on the other hand, will tend to look at everything, seeking books in many fields but, more important, he will be studying everything with the view of its potential. I am of the school which believes that dealers should always be starting and building collections, which only a dealer can properly do, for it takes much searching in shops, at fairs, anywhere in fact, to build a good collection. Actually, I believe collectors should do the same, using the principle Stillman Drake propounded in his marvellous talk to the Amtmann Circle: that a collector pursuing costly important books should also have some minor collections which he pursues just for the fun of it, where the books, when found, are cheap. Doing this affords a lot of fun and ensures that the collector will always have a chance to find something in any bookstore, no matter how humble.

  Most important, all book scouting teaches. The lessons learned looking for $5.00 books in junk heaps will teach a collector never to ignore or overlook, no matter how unappetizing the venue seems. That will provide the skills and hone the techniques which will pay off for expensive books too. To think that all the great books are already on the shelves of the greatest dealers and properly priced is a misconception that only the very wealthy can safely entertain.

  I have many such collections. Some are serious, like the very good collections I’ve formed over thirty years of Bulwer Lytton and Marie Corelli. Both these nineteenth-century writers had enormous popularity in their time, meaning they were much reprinted in various secondary editions, and were both pretty cheap when I started. It didn’t stay that way, of course, but I got a good head start.

  Bulwer was as popular as Dickens in his time and Marie Corelli was perhaps the most popular writer of her time, even though you probably have never heard of her. She was a fraud—short and dumpy, she only published photos of herself as an ethereal young girl, and her spectacularly vicious attacks on anyone who dared contradict her or criticize her became famous, as she often published them herself. I have large collections of both writers, meant to ease the financial problems of my old age. But I also have quite a few minor collections which afford me great pleasure, and cheaply. There are several twentieth-century writers whom I read and greatly admire, but not enough to pay the enormous prices their early books in fine condition command. So I collect their paperback editions, always in first printing and only in fine condition. But even with those two strict rules it is still a very cheap form of collecting and one becomes both knowledgeable about the advent and progress of the paperback revolution, and astounded to find how many different editions have been issued of the books by such people as Waugh, Greene and Orwell, three people I collect in this manner. And it gets more complicated—as collecting always does—when one discovered that many publishers changed covers every once in a while, opening whole new problems. Penguin does this sometimes with stunning design and cover art so one can have twenty or twenty-five different versions of the same book.

  The first three hundred Dell paperbacks I collect not because of the famous “mapbacks,” for which they have been collected for years, but because the cover art on those early editions is truly impressive, a perfect example of the use of art to further commerce. And I collect the first two thousand Signets, arguably the most influential of all the American paperback houses. But I collect them not for that reason; my reasons are purely

  sentimental. For these were mostly my reading of choice when, as a teenager, I would stop at the cigar store on the way home from the poolroom every night, seeking the promise of sex which they offered, often fraudulently, but more than compensated for as they introduced me to much real literature. When I spot yet another cover of one of those that I remember choosing and reading it brings back wonderful memories of both my naïveté and lack of discrimination, but also the enormous sense of awe when, as I often did, I inadvertently discovered yet another great writer.

  Chapter 21

  What Does It All Mean?

  In my early years, when I lived upstairs over my shop, I would generally work late into the night, and often I would spend the last hour looking around my shop while my family slept upstairs. I had built and arranged all the shelves myself, and my stock of books, carefully weeded of dross, I had purchased book by book. I would often walk the aisles looking at the books I had bought, remembering where I had plucked this treasure from some despised colleague, or suffering the embarrassing wince as I saw another of my mistakes or follies accusing me silently from its place on the shelf. Or see part of the library of one of my favourite clients, now gone, and remember so many of our wonderful conversations.

  These nightly rituals gave me great comfort and great pride.

  This is mine, I would think. I built this myself and it is beautiful. Others see only a bookstore, but I see my own creation, the result of my work, my planning, and my ideas. In times of great stress it would calm me; during periods of upheaval and calamity in my personal life it would sustain me. I have not a shred of doubt that without the stability it conferred I would have ruined myself with drink; it gave me, and still does, my reason and my justification for everything.

  Every book had its memories of where and from whom I bought it, what I had paid and how long ago. (These books inevitably resurrected my father, the banker’s lectures. A businessman is supposed to buy and sell. Sell a book for a change—sell it or get rid of it. A book you’ve had for ten years can never bring a profit, only a loss. If you can’t sell it get rid of it.)

  My father was a good man; he meant well; he just didn’t understand.

  Am I to throw Herodotus in the dump? Is Herodotus in Greek any less important just because hardly anyone can read ancient Greek any longer? Should I dump the obscure, the nut cases, the unpopular and ignored and forgotten novelists who thought they were composing undying art when they were really celebrating those truly undying human emotions, vanity, stupidity, ignorance and obsolescent human sentiments? Or just plain nonsense?

  Are we to deny the emotions and dreams which motivated all those silly genteel poets and poetesses who thought they were celebrating the highest human sentiments, when they were actually composing drivel which future generations would justly deride? But who weren’t really much different from us?

  Don’t forget that Newton didn’t just write the Principia; he also wrote learned treatises on astrology and near-demented polemics on God.

  Never forget that Arthur Conan Doyle, whose invention of Sherlock Holmes presented us with the most logical detective ever known, whose celebration of deduction by observation mixed with intelligence continues to fascinate generations, also wrote a book proving the existence of fairies. And that his book on fairies, complete with photographs of fairies fluttering amongst flowers, was based on a hoax perpetrated by two twelve-year-old girls, who sixty years later, while confessing their hoax, admitted that they could never understand how people could have been so taken in by what they had done so lightly as a childish lark. But the creator of Sherlock Holmes was taken in.

  Does that lessen the brilliance of Conan Doyle—never mind the pleasure afforded to several generations of avid fans of Sherlock Holmes, a creation so compelling that many otherwise imaginative, brilliant people meet regularly, dress up and inhabit Doyle’s characters and act as though Sherlock Holmes actually existed? Does this not truly elevate the human imagination no matter how eccentric it might appear?

  My old boss, mentor and friend of so many years, Jerry Sherlock, when we had all those wonderful dinners over the years—the food now long forgotten but the conversation, t
he ideas, still fresh—would always end up in his later years pointing out that we, he and I, and all the people we dealt with during those wonderful years, had been so lucky to be booksellers during the period we have come to believe was the Golden Age of bookselling in Canada.

  But when we had these conversations, only possible perhaps with people who have spent a lifetime honing their sense of historical perspective and sense of continuity, it hardly could have occurred to us that we might live to witness the demise of that golden age. Now, with the signs everywhere, we temper our pleasure at the memories of all our wonderful experiences with books and the people who pursue them and worship them with the sad realization that already what we experienced is no more and almost certainly never will be again, the advent of the electronic age rendering us as obsolete as the blacksmith.

  Except, except… for the core of it: what will never disappear, what will never be obsolete, what can never desert humanity no matter its latest superficial enthusiasms—the book. The book itself. The book that is, with the possible exception of the wheel, the most perfect invention man has ever created. The book, a small, thick object which one holds, turns a page and continues a dialogue that has existed since man learned to scratch symbols on wood or clay or stone, so that those who came after could know what he thought and felt and believed—and what he thought important enough to pass on. The Gutenberg Bible, the first book printed from moveable type, is considered by book people to also be the most beautiful book ever printed. What other invention of man has ever reached perfection on the first try?

  One of my father the banker’s favourite pronouncements was, “If a bookseller had invented the wheel it would still be square.” But to look on the Gutenberg Bible, or even a page from it—all that most of us will ever see—will stun one into an awed reverence. So beautiful, so perfect in execution, and surpassing all else, what it foretold for the future of man.