Even after forty years attending them I still get nervous when a coveted item approaches sale. No matter your experience or determination, an anxiety occurs which must be similar to those stories one hears about actors, even famous and distinguished ones, who vomit before every live performance in the theater. I have worked out elaborate personal rituals over the years both to minimize anxiety and to operate efficiently, for myself and in pursuing the interests of my clients. One often must make instant decisions and one must be prepared to revise estimates on the spot, so a careful dealer must never relax.

In my early days, Waddington’s on Queen Street, an old established general auctioneer, had been purchased by Ron McLean, one of several auctioneers who had learned their trade at the old Ward-Price Gallery on College Street.

Every Wednesday and Saturday morning Waddington’s had estate sales where anything could appear. Nobody cared then about books and often one could buy a whole wall of books as a single lot and usually quite cheaply. It was perfect for a used bookseller, providing large lots of general books, cheap. I went to every sale and often did quite well.

One Saturday morning I had just bought two shelves of rather seedy looking books when Richard Landon wandered into the rooms. Landon, not long then at the University of Toronto’s Rare Book department, was already a serious private collector, regularly frequenting all the used bookstores and socializing a lot with much of the book trade.

That morning Landon looked at my two shelves of unappetizing looking books and said with some disdain, “What did you have to pay for that pile of crap?”

“Eighteen dollars,” I replied. “Why?”

He said, “You’ll be lucky to get your money back from that junk. Why would you do that?”

A bit nettled, I made my first grievous auction error. “Because of this,” I replied a bit testily, pulling off two thick quarto volumes lacking covers. They consisted of just the text blocks but they were in very nice condition otherwise, without the soiling generally to be found on books which have lacked their covers for many years.

Landon searched past the preliminaries to the title page of the first volume. The coverless book was an eighteenth century edition of Johnson’s Dictionary, dated 1775. It was some twenty years too late to be the first edition and besides, it had a Dublin imprint, which indicated it was probably a Dublin piracy, although I didn’t know anything about the Dublin piracies then, or even that books could, and often had been, pirated.

“Oh,” said Landon, in a subdued voice, comprehension sinking in. In those days his favorite author, whom he quoted incessantly, was Samuel Johnson and so enamoured was he of Johnson and his world that he had even named his cat Hodge, after Johnson’s pet. “Well, what do you expect to get for that?” he asked in an entirely different tone of voice, no doubt wishing he had got there ten minutes earlier.

I was caught – one of my earliest bookselling lessons about keeping my mouth shut. (I’ve had 10,000 others since then, none of which has ever sunk in, it seems.)

What could I do? It wasn’t just that he was a friend, he was a librarian – in the rare books department of the largest university in Canada which then was the only institutional client I had. And it didn’t take a lot of insight to be aware that his ambitions as a librarian were considerable. He was going to rise and I needed to rise with him.

I saw no way out. He knew what I had paid for the entire lot, because of my big mouth, and I didn’t think it would be in my interests to come back to him later with a price of ten or twenty times what he knew I had paid for them.

I bit the bullet. “OK, to you – right now – $36,” I said reluctantly, doubling my investment. (Maybe Richard will think that booksellers always only double their purchase price, I thought.)

“OK,” said Landon. “I’ll pick it up when you get it back to the shop.”

When he picked it up, he asked for an invoice claiming lack of cash. Landon then took the book to Michael Wilcox, the great bookbinder who had recently quit his job gluing bird skeletons together at the Royal Ontario Museum to return to his first love. This was some years before Wilcox began to do design bindings for which he is now justly world-famous. The standard trade bindings Wilcox did then were lovely and technically perfect; I always buy them when I see them. And, of course, I’ve been beggaring myself for his design bindings ever since he started doing them, at the behest of Roderick Brinckman of Monk Bretton Books whose specialty was finely printed and bound books.

It turns out the Johnson was the first Dublin edition in quarto and it preceded the London quarto edition of the same year, making it the first quarto edition and, as Landon constantly likes to boast, worth a fair bit, especially now that they are housed in lovely Wilcox bindings.

However, some two or three years later, sorting papers, I found Landon’s invoice with no markings to indicate it had ever been paid. I called him.

“I just found the invoice for the Dublin Johnson. You never paid me.”

Landon replied brusquely and firmly, “I always pay cash.”

That has been his regular defense in the many instances when I have brought it up in the years since.

And I have been bringing it up periodically ever since – often at the Landons’ dinner table with foreign dignitaries from the book world present. I’ve had a lot of fun doing this but I finally stopped when someone told me privately that Marie Korey, Richard’s wife, had said she was so sick of hearing about it, and that she was going to pay me the $36 herself, if I did it once more.

I guess I should admit here that all the evidence points to Landon’s probable innocence. For $36 would have been a lot of money for me then and it’s unlikely that I wouldn’t remember that it was owed. Once I suggested that we could rectify this unfortunate misunderstanding by Richard leaving the Dictionary to me in his will.

He replied, “I always pay cash.”

My first serious auction was also at Waddington’s, one of their rare early sales entirely devoted to books. They had acquired a very good library of Canadiana which attracted all the collectors and dealers in Eastern Canada.

I was then still apprenticing with Joseph Patrick who specialized in Canadiana. I knew nothing about Canadiana and, in truth, very little about books at all. However, my ignorance didn’t matter because I didn’t have any money anyway so I was hardly in a position to be competition for anyone. But, in spite of my complete lack of any qualifications or money, I already had the instincts of the player and I wanted to participate badly and was determined that I would. The excitement generated by visiting dealers in the shop and talk of great rarities caused me to want to be involved as well. Most of the major dealers in Canadiana in Canada were in town for the sale.

I studied the books, not knowing which were the $10 books or which the $1,000 books. But I was hooked on the action, wondering how I could possibly compete.

I had been studying modern literature and learning how to ascertain what was, or might be, a first edition. I realized that my only hope of buying anything was to focus on what the other dealers ignored.

There were two books I did know and which I ascertained were first editions. They were the three-volume first edition of Prescott’s Conquest of Mexico (1845) and the two-volume first edition of Conquest of Peru (1847), both important historically and both in stunning, almost new condition. I was too inexperienced to know then that this was very unusual. That period, from the 1830s to the 1870s, was a period of some of the ugliest book production ever, especially in America where these were published. The cloth used in America at that time was ugly and cheap. It chipped easily at the extremities, cracked at the hinges, and the gilt titling usually was so shoddy that titles regularly became tarnished or simply disappeared. And the paper, because of the reactions of chemicals in the still time-untested experiments of paper-making from wood chips, often turned dark brown, and worse, became so brittle that turning a page could cause the page to snap into pieces and crumble like a stale cracker. Institutional libraries now find themselves needing to deal with these books, which are literally in danger of disintegrating at any handling whatsoever.

These two copies had none of these defects. In fact, in the forty-some years since that auction, I’ve seen many copies of both those books but never have I seen either in such fine condition. I guess they were included because they were technically Americana even though they dealt with Central and South America. This is not so strange when one realizes that until after the American Revolution all books dealing with the Western Hemisphere were considered Americana, including books on Canada. Even after the revolution there were many books which legitimately were considered both Americana and Canadiana (and there still are) but Prescott, being an American writing on Central and South America, was collected as Americana.

I decided my only hope of participation was to try and buy them. I asked my boss Jerry Sherlock what I should do and what he thought. “I haven’t a clue, Dave,” he said, not even attempting to hide his indifference; he was too busy preparing for his own fights with his competitors for the prized Canadian rarities to care about a couple of books that weren’t in his field. I was on my own.

And here, of course, is the lesson. None of the other dealers cared either, as I found out. Both books came up very early in the sale, luckily for me, because of the level of my anxiety.

Mexico came up and I can still feel the frozen, time-suspending terror I felt as the auctioneer said, “Now we have a set of Prescott’s Conquest of Mexico. What am I offered? Let’s start with $15 for the three volumes. Do I have $15?”

I timidly raised my hand – my first bid at a real auction! I was both terrified and exuberant – indeed the only difference between then and now is that I lacked any sense of what I was going to do next. I lacked any sense of determination, which is the real key to an auction.

No one else bid. Ron McLean, the owner and chief auctioneer then at Waddington’s and the best auctioneer I’ve ever dealt with, didn’t fool around. He barely paused, then knocked it down to me. I was stunned, still shaking with excitement, but aware that I had another book right after it.

“OK,” said McLean. “Here’s the sequel, The Conquest of Peru. How much am I offered? $10?”

I raised my hand again. Ten seconds later it was mine, too. I remember nothing else of that auction. No doubt there were many great struggles for the desirable Canadiana but I missed it all, savouring my great coup. I got them only because no one else bothered to consider them, not the last time I profited from the carelessness of others. After much research and considerable trepidation I priced Mexico at $75 and Peru at $45. After around ten years, by which time the prices had risen to around $350 and $250 respectively, they sold. In case ten years seems like a long time I should say that in those days, with neither the customers nor the knowledge of how to acquire them, that was not at all unusual. From that and many other similar purchases I learned another very important lesson: a good book, especially in fine condition, will always sell. I believe it is foolish to expect it to sell immediately, and I never fall into the trap common to many dealers of thinking I have failed if I don’t sell it the next day.

Of course, a real businessman would point out – as my father, the banker, regularly delighted in doing – that any merchandise, even if you get it free, which sits on a shelf in rented space for ten years is hardly a bargain, or even feasible for any real business.

That lesson, compounded some time later by a second lesson, caused me to formulate a system I have used ever since.

The second lesson occurred when I was much more experienced at auctions, but it was still a confirmation of the first. At Waddington’s they would often put up the least desirable books early on, the principle being that bidders, especially dealers, will bid carelessly before they have spent serious money. The more they spend, the more serious – and cautious – they become. Sitting there at this auction the first lot was a set of the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (1911-12), known as the Scholar’s Edition, probably the best general encyclopedia ever done and still the only encyclopedia that serious booksellers buy for stock. Like everyone else, I had assumed that one of the many collectors or dealers present, knowing that, would pay around $300-$400, its going price then. But it was knocked down for $30 because no one had the sense to bid, all of us ignoring it because we were concentrating on the exciting rarities awaiting us. Really we were making assumptions, presumably assumptions based on logic and common sense, but our error was in entertaining the notion that common sense had any part in the equation.

And that was the lesson. Don’t assume that the obvious will occur. Don’t assume that people, even dealers, will assess everything sensibly and act accordingly. Once, as we were packing up at the end of a bookfair I idly picked up a book from a neighbour’s table. It was a good book on the Klondike which everyone knew was a $200 book. This man had priced it at $15. No one had bothered to look at the price during the entire fair since we all assumed that he too would be aware of its value. Same lesson. Ever since that day I have always used the system that those two incidents taught me, and I never deviate no matter how boring the material or how broke I may be. I look at every book and never reject a book – even the ones I’m not interested in – unless, or until, I have a satisfactory reason for doing so. There are books one can reject because of serious condition problems but even those need to be studied closely in case their intrinsic value or rarity could justify today’s high cost of restoration. So I am always prepared. After viewing two to three hundred lots your memory will be faulty so I depend on my notes. Therefore, when a book reaches $200 and my note says $300, I will drop out if the bidder is a friend or a client, otherwise I go up to the limit as noted. I cross out any book I don’t want at any price, and, using my code, I note the minimum under which I will not allow anyone else to buy that lot.

All dealers have a code, used to provide themselves with details of purchase, etc., while hiding them from others. Many dealers enjoy attempting to break their colleague’s codes. Sometimes such information can be helpful, but I think the real motivation is simply for the fun of it, like solving a puzzle.

These codes are usually formed from a ten-letter word with no letters duplicated – that informs a dealer what they paid for a book. It is usually accompanied by the date and the initials of the dealer they bought it from. This allows them to consider discounts or deals when they are sick of looking at a book.

I have two codes, one of which, after so many years, I can read as though it were the actual numbers. In fact, so deep is it imbedded in my brain I can actually add totals in code as easily as if it were the real numbers. This is a necessary defense and I do all my written business using it. And here’s one reason why. Once, I was sitting behind a close friend – another bookseller at an important auction – and as this dealer turned around to say something, I could see written beside the next item in their catalogue the notation “So and So [a very prominent London dealer] $15,000.” He obviously had a commission from that dealer. What a slip, I thought. If that dealer hadn’t been a close friend, and if that prestigious London dealer had been guilty of some perceived sin against me, even jealousy, it could have been a very costly mistake for my friend and his London client.

Ward-Price, the old firm on College Street, held occasional book sales generally handled by a man called Lee Pritzger who lived out around Hamilton and came in to run the sales.

Things would be bundled at Ward-Price sales and it was necessary to carefully count the books in any bundle before and after the sale, even though the lots were always tied together by string.

Once I bought a lot, its only desirable book a fine early T.S. Eliot. I successfully bought the lot but when I went to pick it up, the Eliot was missing, even though the lot was still securely tied together.

I told the man in charge “There’s a T.S. Eliot title missing from my lot.”

“How could that be?” he wondered.

“I don’t know,” I replied. “Maybe my lawyer might, though.”

Off he went, returning a few minutes later, handing me the Eliot. “It must have slipped out of the lot” he said, carefully not looking at the still tightly tied bundle.

Yes, indeed. I heard quite a few instances of that curious “slipping out” of books from Ward-Price lots, escapes worthy of Houdini, one could say.

Iattended many Waddington’s auctions over the years. A very colourful part-time dealer and school teacher named Robert Russell had come to an arrangement with Waddington’s and took to running their book sales.

With Russell in charge of the books the sort of “slippage” found at Ward-Price took on a whole new meaning, culminating some years later when the publisher Charles Musson consigned what in a later magazine article he called a priceless collection of 4,000 books formed by his grandfather, the original Charles Musson. The whole collection slipped out of the bundle, so to speak. Some four thousand books, lost in this “slippage,” later appeared at Memorial University of Newfoundland donated by Bob Russell who, coincidentally, had received an honorary degree from the University.

Even those of us who knew Russell well remained skeptical of Musson’s accusations. Amongst other things, Musson claimed there were many first editions of Charles Dickens, inscribed to the original Musson, who hadn’t even founded his company until 1903 when Dickens had been dead thirty-three years.

Musson also claimed that the collection had resided at his cottage in some thirteen or fourteen wooden crates for some years. A curious way to deal with a priceless collection, some of us thought, storing it in a cottage, unheated for six to seven months of the year and infested by mice and other rodents. Not to mention that such crates might hold fifty to sixty books each at most – more would make them impossibly heavy – but certainly very many less books than Musson contended were stolen.

At an auction, any number of things are going on to which you are completely oblivious. For instance, you, a stranger, will be getting checked out at the preview by dealers, trying to decide if you might be a threat to their interests. They were, also unbeknownst to you, watching you to see what items you looked at. If you looked more than fleetingly at anything which they believe to be in their territory, they took note.

Some people seem to think they can go to an auction and need only outbid a known dealer to get a bargain. Such people could be in for a rude surprise. For a hundred years or so, any outsider thinking that way who entered, say, Sotheby’s or Christie’s in London, might leave with books for which they had paid three or four times the value, because the English book trade believed that auctions were their territory and they made any fool who didn’t accept that pay very dearly.

Here is an example of what can happen if a dealer follows the old rule of always watching and always trying to figure out what’s going on.

One evening I went with a couple of dealer friends up Bayview Avenue to a new auction which was small enough that you could easily preview it in the hour before the sale. While we were looking at the material I checked out the other viewers, as I always do. I noticed one man who was meticulously examining every item with great concentration. It seemed strange to me that a man whom I had never seen in any bookshop should be acting like a sophisticated connoisseur, so he kept my attention.

After the viewing my friends and I went out to eat before the sale and, it not being a significant sale, I relaxed and allowed myself a couple of drinks, something I usually would not do, for a lengthy sale demands intense concentration and instant decisions, sometimes involving real money. Not to mention that it is unwise to place yourself in a position where you might need to visit the washroom at an inconvenient time during the sale.

Back at the sale all of us were in a jolly mood, not really dangerous for pros in that kind of sale. My earlier focus of interest was seated in the row ahead of me so I was curious to see how he might conduct himself. At previews everybody is equally important. It is common to see people, who looked at everything in an apparently knowledgeable manner, who then bid on a few items but miss everything by dropping out at a very low level, thereby demonstrating their entire lack of understanding and any sense of the value of things.

At about the fourth lot in the sale the auctioneer said, “Now we come to the Canadian whaling log and drawings.”

The whaling log – what whaling log? I hadn’t seen any whaling stuff, nor any manuscript. As the floorman lifted a large bundle, string-tied, I turned to the colleague beside me.

“What’s the whaling thing?” I said, a bit confused. “I didn’t see that.”

“I don’t know, I didn’t see it either,” he replied.

The dealer on the other side of me shrugged, “Me neither. I must have missed it too.”

Suspicious.

The bidding began and who should start bidding but my strange, over-attentive gentleman of earlier. That son-of-a-bitch, I thought. He hid it under the table. I’m going to buy that whatever it goes for. I started bidding, too. When the only other bidder, that unknown gentleman, finally dropped out, it was mine. I think it went for $200, not a fortune then, but not a small amount either.

“What was so good about that?” one of my friends asked.

“I don’t know,” I replied. “I had a hunch. I’ll find out later whether I was smart or stupid.”

Examining it the next day I found it was a hand-written diary/log of a seaman from Quebec who had shipped out on a New England whaler in the 1870s. It was incomplete but substantial, including quite a few drawings in a competent hand of ships and scenes of whaling.

It turned out the only Canadian connection was that the man had been from Quebec and shipped out from there. I shopped it around some Canadian institutions first, but no one wanted it. So I raised the price to reward myself for my cleverness and nerve and sold it to one of the many New England institutions who collect whaling history.

I was very pleased with myself and secretly thanked the two or three drinks I had had which no doubt contributed to my sense of adventure and to the nerve to follow my hunch.

I got, if I remember, $4,000 for having the confidence to trust my instincts and so I should have, for I could just as easily have lost my investment.

And, of course, I never saw that mysterious unknown man again, who thought he could outsmart the pros by hiding something under the table. But ever since I have paid as much attention to the people at the previews as to the material.

So if you think auctions are logical and straightforward you should think about that story before you venture into unknown territory. Why do you think it is that knowledgeable librarians or collectors never bid for themselves at auctions? They always hire a dealer at the usual 10% commission which must be one of the great bargains in all bookselling.

One of the most relevant such auction anecdotes I know was told me by Justin Schiller, the acknowledged preeminent children’s book dealer in the world.

Two copies of the true first edition of Alice in Wonderland came up in Paris – the 1865 printing which had so dissatisfied Lewis Carroll because of the inferior printing of Tenniel’s illustrations that he had suppressed it. His publisher had withdrawn the entire edition, excepting the very few copies sent out before publication. They sent the whole edition to America where it was issued with a new titlepage as the first American edition. So rare is the real first edition (there are twenty-two recorded copies of the 1865 Alice, of which only five were then still in private hands) that the new, 1866 printing is generally referred to as the first edition, the true first edition being almost unobtainable.

Two copies of the 1865 Alice (as it is generally referred to amongst the cognoscenti) came up at a sale in Paris run by Drouot, the major Parisian auction house.

There are so many bizarre details in this anecdote I hardly know where to start. Both these copies were extraordinary.

One of the copies of Alice had ten of the original Tenniel drawings tipped in and was then believed to be Carroll’s own copy since it had markings in it in the purple ink Carroll habitually used. The other copy was inscribed by Carroll to Dinah Mulock Craik, the Victorian novelist who wrote John Halifax, Gentleman, and was rendered even more important because her husband, a partner in Macmillan, was Carroll’s editor. Not only two copies of a great rarity but both copies enhanced by stunning associations.

Both copies were together, as the last lot in a sale which mostly contained very early and important books in other fields.

These Carroll books had been purchased by the great dealer Dr. Rosenbach and sold to a collector named Eldridge Johnson. How Johnson handled these priceless treasures is so amusing and eccentric that I cannot resist recounting it. Johnson would travel with them on his yacht, carried in a solander case, and he would place them in a special waterproof safe he had anchored in his stateroom. If ever the ship were to sink a huge buoy attached to the safe with a long thick rope would rise to the surface. On the buoy, in bright red letters, was painted “ALICE” so that the world could locate the safe and rescue these priceless treasures. The Alice’s would be saved even if the humans weren’t. Who said collectors are eccentric?

Justin wanted these badly, one of them for his personal collection. But how to deal with the competition? He learned through a colleague that his biggest competitor was likely to be John Fleming, a prominent New York dealer, who had worked for Rosenbach and wanted to buy them for the sentimental connection. Rosenbach had, in fact, bought them twice at auction over the years.

Justin very cleverly approached Fleming, who agreed to act for him – a brilliant ploy – thereby eliminating the competition at the mere cost of a 10% commission.

And then it got more bizarre.

It is said that a private offer was made before the sale of $250,000 for the two Carrolls but the French auctioneers made an exchange mistake and the catalogue estimate was shown as 250,000 francs (then between four or five new francs to the dollar). It was a long sale and the auctioneer must have been weary, wanting it over. He announced the last lot and started it at 220,000 francs. Fleming raised his hand and the auctioneer banged down his hammer instantly, and departed. Justin got both books for well under one third of what he had been prepared to bid.

But more important to a dealer is the lesson which can be learned from wrestling with such a dilemma and I have factored the implications into many of my own business strategies since. “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em,” goes the old adage. For a bookseller, revise that to, “If you can’t beat ’em, have ’em join you; hire ’em.”

At a San Francisco bookfair a couple of years ago, a man stopped to examine books in my booth, and in the ensuing conversation it came out that he was a surgeon who collected early medical books. After chatting for a bit, the subject of rarity came up, which in turn led to talk of what happens when really rare books appear at auctions. He mentioned that an important book in his field, one he badly wanted, came up at auction on an afternoon that he had a heart surgery scheduled.

“Did you have a dealer bid for you?” I enquired.

“No. With really scarce books I like to do it myself. Sometimes it’s necessary to revise your upper limits on the spot.”

“So, what did you do?”

“I bid myself.”

“And you had a colleague do your surgery?”

“No, I did that too.”

“You mean you interrupted an operation to bid at an auction?” I enquired, intrigued, picturing the anesthetist, and the assistants and the nurses, standing around someone with their chest open, waiting for an auctioneer to bang his gavel.

“No, I did both.”

“Both? You mean you bid while you were operating?”

“Yes.”

“Where was the phone?”

“On my shoulder. You need both hands with a heart.”

“You mean you were operating on a man’s heart and buying a book at the same time?”

“Yes,” he said grinning sheepishly.

The only response I could think of, to an anecdote like that, was to say, “Well, I was intending to avoid heart surgery anyway, but you’ve given me an added incentive.”

“I would strongly advise you to avoid heart surgery – if you can,” he said, his grin wider.

Especially one done by a serious book collector, I thought, but didn’t say it out loud.

“And did you get the book?”

“Yes! It’s a beauty. But it cost plenty.”

But in spite of his sheepish grin, he still spoke with the quiet confidence of a man who knows his capabilities. I knew he wouldn’t have said such a thing if he didn’t know he had the goods to handle whatever might ensue. There’s bravado, and there’s the confidence that comes to all pros and I could tell he had the latter. This was not Dr. Benway in The Naked Lunch calling for the toilet plunger; this was a man who had performed many, many such procedures and knew he was in control of his operation. It was that sort of professional who landed his plane safely on the East River, not long ago, arousing admiration and pride in all of us who still admire human capabilities and pure nerve. Or, like the airline pilot who has three hundred people on autopilot and is talking with his second officer about his mortgage or his daughter’s despicable boyfriend, but is never unaware of his airplane or his duty.

Still, I thought, I’m going to start dieting and taking regular walks tomorrow.

Any auction, indeed any interplay between dealers in general, will contain elements of envy and spite over perceived advantages or old grudges.

No outsider can understand, even partially, most of these factors. Obscure reasons can be in play: the other bidder, another dealer, could be his sworn enemy and he may have decided that his despised opponent will not buy that book no matter the cost. Vanity and malice are emotions which will defeat common sense every time.

The story of my own favorite auction triumph gets complicated because it operated on several of those levels. The auction I refer to here, with the attendant subtleties, included a rivalry between two dealers, who had once been friends, but no longer were by the time of the auction. It also includes one of the greatest examples in my experience of the kind of cooperation between a dealer and a librarian which can occur when both parties are operating in an area where they understand each other and each carries, in regard to the other, a professional respect and trust.

On viewing the offerings in the preview, a few days before the sale, I found a copy of Robert Service’s rare first book Songs of a Sourdough. The copy offered was bound in plain paper wrappers instead of the cloth it was issued in, making it appear to be a book missing its covers, which had had brown wrapping paper pasted on. It had come from the estate of Fay Fenton, a journalist who had lived in the Klondike, and it was immediately obvious to me that it was a proof copy and probably unique. It made sense to assume that she would have known Service and that he had undoubtedly given it to her. Service’s first book, for which he had paid the printing costs, at least for the first 100 copies, was already a legendary rarity selling, even then, for $2,000 or so.

Like many another hopeful scout, I had always been looking for it. For many years every time I went into the Old Favorites Bookshop, I went first to “S” in the Canadian poetry section hoping that one day it would be sleeping there, waiting for the handsome prince (me) to come and wake it from its slumber. One day I walked in and there it was – priced at $10 – another example of why scouting is so exciting. It was a fine copy and I sold it for $2,500 the next day.

The people then in charge of Waddington’s book sales were a little short on experience and they had not realized that it was a proof copy and had it described as “in plain wrappers,” and had estimated it in the catalogue as selling in the $100-$200 range. I knew it was worth very much more than that and left hoping that other dealers might go past it without seeing it, or if they did see it, would also be too inexperienced to know its importance. I knew that was unlikely, but . . .

I thought about it for some time and arrived at what I considered should be a proper retail value – $30,000 to $35,000.

But unfortunately I knew who would be very unlikely to miss it: my ex-friend Steven Temple. Still deeply hurt by and smarting from his actions over the Canadian Editions debacle, I was determined that he would not get it. But in spite of my continuing anger I knew he was far too good a bookseller not to know exactly what it was and what its value should be. His specialty was Canadian Literature then and I had no doubt that he would be my most dangerous adversary.

I knew that my anger towards Temple was both childish and unbecoming but it was still there and my whole strategy was influenced by those feelings.

I figured it would take around $10,000 to buy it if Temple saw it and I figured he would try to raise that amount, maybe by borrowing, or maybe by taking on a partner.

Given the threat from the competition and my financial state I wondered if I should contact Richard Landon and work on commission for the University of Toronto. If I did that and he commissioned me I would get only a 10% commission for my trouble. But recently I had done that for a very scarce early Canadian Literature item which was about a $750 book. Not caring much, but my still-hurt feelings demanding that I not let Temple get it, I mentioned it to Richard and got his commission, which was a sad result for me, since Temple didn’t attend and I had no knowledgeable competition at all and bought the book for the University of Toronto at $90 . . . making a profit of $9 instead of the $700 or so I should have made. So with this one it could work both ways. My cowardice could do me in as easily as my spite.

Checking my credit line I found I had a $15,000 credit limit, still unused, at the bank, which was about exactly what I felt would have to be my uppermost limit if I bought the Service on spec. So it would take all my available resources of credit, an uncomfortable situation. Even though I firmly believed it was a $30,000-$35,000 book, any book in that range becomes problematic, for any such price demands the resources to pay it. And, of course, when books get up in that price range, customers are limited; one might sit on such a book for several years until a knowledgeable collector appears.

Finally, two days before the sale, I decided I was too close to the edge and I decided to contact Landon. By this time I was far more concerned with just getting the book than with any potential profit. The problem was that Landon was in England. I knew he usually stayed in London with Ian Willison, a retired librarian at the British Museum, but they didn’t have Ian’s phone number at the Fisher. On a hunch I phoned Marie Korey’s assistant at Massey College to find that Marie had left Ian’s number for any emergency. I phoned. It was evening there and Ian was home alone. He informed me that Richard and Marie were in the Lake District and he expected them the next day. I explained my dilemma: a unique format of the first book of a very important Canadian writer (before you dismiss Service as a writer of doggerel, remember Kipling). As we spoke, Ian became more and more excited himself. My God, I thought, a real librarian, who actually cares about books and understands their importance – what a wonderful surprise. I hadn’t yet met Ian. The next year when I did, it was at the Landons’ dinner table and I could see instantly that he was indeed that wonderful rarity, a real librarian, who was a real bookman. And to compound my pleasure at meeting him, he had known one of my youthful intellectual heroes, Colin Wilson, when they were both young and Wilson was writing The Outsider in the reading room of the British Museum.

We left it that he would have Richard call me as soon as he returned. And the next morning, the day of the sale, Richard did call. I explained the situation to him and said we couldn’t count on others making the same mistake that Waddington’s staff had. “What do you think it will go for?” Richard asked.

“I think it should go for $10,000-$12,000,” I said.

“OK,” he said, “I’ll go that high.”

A pause. I knew I had to say more.

“Listen, Richard, if it goes for $12,000 or less, it’s yours. But I have to tell you, if it goes higher I’m going to go on for myself. I want that book.”

Another pause. “What do you think it’s worth, Dave?”

“I think it’s a $30,000 to $35,000 book,” I replied. “And I think I can sell it for that pretty easily. And I’m going to buy it, if you don’t.”

A longer pause.

“Okay, Dave. I don’t have any money” (meaning his budget was exhausted); “Just buy the book. I’ll get the money somehow.”

I had an unlimited bid, every dealer’s dream. This is what can happen when a system of trust exists between two knowledgeable people, a trust which has developed over many years.

An unlimited bid – almost unheard of. An unlimited bid contains unlimited power in its essence, a wonderful feeling. Of course, I didn’t really have an unlimited bid, as both Landon and I tacitly understood. He was trusting my professional expertise. If some unknown fool had crazy ambitions I was expected to realize that and desist if necessary. Still, up to $25,000 or so, I was free to act. We had both understood this without any need to state it.

When I entered the saleroom that night it was full. I surveyed the crowd, noting several western dealers whom I knew would covet it too, and, of course, the entire eastern trade was there, including the one I saw as my real competition, Temple. I felt an almost benign affection for the lot of them. Poor guys, I thought magnanimously. Their dreams of glory, so soon to be shattered. So sad.

I looked, as I always do, for a spot where I could observe my presumed probable competitors without being seen myself. I sat two rows back and on the other side from Temple and the two most dangerous western dealers who were also plainly in view – including their hands, which you need to monitor most, since they not only bid, but give off the most effective indication of the buyer’s intentions.

The Service came up very early. Ron McLean, a very astute man, and as I said earlier, the best auctioneer I’ve ever encountered (his son Duncan is not far behind him), announced the lot number, adding, in a manner he often adopted – where he pretended to be dumb – that someone had told him that the next item might be unique.

“What do I know?” he asked with a shrug. “It’s estimated at $100 – $200,” he said slyly, “so in case that unique stuff is true, I guess I’ll start at $200. Do I have $200?” He knew very well what he knew and I’m sure he expected exactly what happened, to happen.

The room erupted, arms in the air everywhere, McLean pulling in bids as fast as he could call them, the place chaos. I didn’t bid; I watched. Sure enough, the West was bidding frantically. Then Temple raised his hand and kept it up imperiously, the gesture presumably intended to tell all of us that it was futile to thwart him, but telling me that he had indeed obtained money, a loan, or a partner, or both. The bidding died down in the $3,000 to $4,000 range – as always, an indicator of lack of imagination. I entered at around $4,000. There was only Temple, his arm still pompously in the air, and a couple of others. By $5,000 it was just me and Temple. He couldn’t see whom he was bidding against, but at $7,000 he started to get nervous – this wasn’t going the way he’d planned. At $8,000 he started lowering his arm, then it went up again, then down, then up again – but each time more hesitantly on the up part. McLean watched us both intently, back and forth, a small smile on his face, continuing now in $500 increments.

Down came Temple’s arm, a look of intense frustration on his face; a pause, up again, one more try, the hope born of desperation. I bid instantly every time, hammering it home. Finally at $10,000 Temple was at his limit and showed it. After a few seconds he made his last desperate move, one more bid, hoping his opponent’s level was also $10,000. I raised my pencil one last time and Temple slumped in his seat, defeated. It was mine at $11,000!

There was silence for a moment and then the entire room erupted in loud applause. I had always believed such applause at an auction to be vulgar and stupid. Imagine cheering just because some fool spends a lot of money? Crazy, I’d always believed.

But curiously this time I did finally see the sense in that just acknowledgement of the victor’s superiority.

In this case it clearly wasn’t the money spent they were applauding; it was my cleverness and courage they were celebrating. I positively basked in it. Then Ron McLean joined the game. A born actor, as are all great auctioneers and great salesmen of all sorts, he knew how to play a crowd. He knew how to turn any result to his advantage, to create a feeling that anyone could do it.

“That’s David Mason who bought that,” he announced. “I can remember when he would come in here as a kid to buy a wall full of books for $10 or $20 dollars. Who would have thought then that he’d be spending $11,000 for a single book today?”

Ron was still playing the room. He was telling them all that they too could be applauded. You too can be world-famous here tonight, all you have to do is stick your arm up and keep it up and we will cheer for you, too.

And so, the University of Toronto got a unique copy of the most famous book of poetry ever published in Canada. But I got the glory – and this story.

That photograph of Justin shows him with braces on his teeth but also wearing a warm toothy smile. Now Justin wears three piece tweed suits and is exhibiting signs of portliness (aren’t we all) but the toothy smile remains the same. But don’t make the mistake of thinking there isn’t a very determined mind behind that smile.

Not being much of a traveler anymore and seldom participating in foreign bookfairs, I don’t see many of the dealers of whom I once saw a lot. Justin I hadn’t seen in probably ten years and I expected from various reports I had heard over that time, the sort of visit one gets from a highly successful and very specialized bookseller. This is more or less how it works. Dealer enters, passes a few minutes with the amenities and catching up on old mutual friends, praises your store, spends a few minutes, (in this case) in the children’s section, asks if anything not readily visible might pertain to him. And then after a purchase, hopefully – even a token courtesy purchase is usually welcomed by both parties in this trade ritual – the visiting dealer departs. But on this occasion this standard ritual did not occur. Justin instead started in the children’s book area but then proceeded to look at every other subject section in my rather large stock. After a couple of hours he brought a foot high stack of books to my desk for the totting up.

On examination everything became clear. When adding up the total of a dealer’s choices the owner always takes mental note of another dealer’s purchases, both out of curiosity and, if he is smart, as a learning device. This is the time when many a dealer gets that sinking feeling which occurs when he suddenly realizes that he has missed the significance of a book and realizes that a sleeper – an undervalued book – has once again slipped through to someone with more knowledge. Or, in my view, more often because of a more lively imagination on the part of the purchaser. In this case every book in Justin’s pile, extracted from every part of my store, the religion, science, art, literature, travel, even mysteries, among other sections, instantly told me why he was buying them. Every single one had some connection to the world of children. It was a compelling demonstration of the consummate pro in action.

And so, after the goodbyes, Justin left, leaving me musing on how seldom these days one goes through that practiced ritual with one’s colleagues. And in the ensuing days I found myself musing more and more on the significance of this experience. For what Justin was doing was not simply buying a few books from another bookstore, he was scouting, the central preoccupation of bookselling to many dealers – including me – the part most like a game, where dealers hone their skills and test their knowledge and imagination against their colleagues, the prize being profit, a book found worth more than the seller realizes – sometimes a significant profit. And like professional gamblers and sports figures, while the profit is not negligible in import, the real significance is the feeling of winning. A professional athlete may earn or win millions, but the core of his triumph is in the winning, the feeling of being the best. Book scouting is no different.

So unlike some successful booksellers, who expect to be shown the best books in a bookstore, Justin Schiller hadn’t lost either his scouting skills or his love of searching out good books himself. His visit renewed my respect for his justly acknowledged depth of learning and more important it led to the ongoing philosophical meditation which has resulted in this essay.

I have been scribbling notes and meditations ever since, another attempt to make sense of my now lengthy time in the trade.

I officially started in the book trade in 1967 when I consciously decided to be a used bookseller and began buying books for the store I intended to open. A couple of months later I began an apprenticeship at Joseph Patrick Books while I continued to build up my stock and issue catalogues. But I now see that my scouting career really began one afternoon, probably in 1946 or 1947, when two pals and I were walking through the bush adjoining the Rosedale Golf Course, the prime spot for kids in North Toronto in winter for skiing and tobogganing, and in summer for exploration and adventure. On that late summer day my friends and I were stumbling through shrubbery when I suddenly came across a lost golf ball lying at my feet, shiny and white, perfect, glowing up from its hollow, no less beautiful than a diamond would have seemed to an adult. I was awed, then excited. If there was one, there must be more. Our aimless wandering now focused on the search for more of these treasures. We spent the rest of the day searching. I quickly learned the trick of not looking directly, but flicking my eyes over the surface of the rough, glancing from the side of the eye, which allowed that eye to register flashes of white on the brain causing movement to cease while each flash was investigated. Looking without looking, a skill which, when cultivated later, was essential to scouting books. Often the white flash would be nothing more than a discarded scrap of paper or an empty cigarette box, but by the time increasing darkness warned us we were in for trouble at home and we desisted, I had five shining white golf balls. My friends had not a single one between them. I was a scout; I had the eye. I had the gift. A shy, timid kid with not much self-confidence, I had found something I was better at than my companions, perhaps the first such thing. Selling the golf balls later in the caddy shack, my first monetary rewards for scouting, also led to me taking up caddying, which I did until I was around fourteen and discovered the pool hall. But during all those years I continued to scout and sell golf balls. A scout was born.

While a good part of the excitement in finding a significant book is the eventual profit, the imaginative scout comes to realize that he has a higher purpose; he is rescuing from obscurity something which has historical or aesthetic value to society as a whole. And having rescued it his next social function is to then place it somewhere where its contribution to the record of civilization will be understood. He is serving the future by saving the past, a noble activity.

There are two basic, but quite different categories of scouts. The first group – in which I include myself – is the one I am most concerned with here. It constitutes either booksellers or serious and very knowledgeable scouts who are often affiliated with a single bookseller in some sort of exclusive, or even partnership arrangement.

The second category of scout is much more common than the dealer/scout and will be found in every major city which contains used and rare bookshops. Most cities have several of these guys trolling daily, who deal in whatever they can turn over for a profit. They usually have a hand to mouth existence, buying in the morning and needing to sell in the afternoon. They are from a variety of backgrounds, although usually they are people who fit in to conventional society even less than most of the dealers they deal with. Often – but not always – bachelors living in weekly rented rooms, they have discovered scouting through scrounging at antique flea markets, the Sally Ann, garage sales, church sales, anywhere, in fact, where a book could be found. Most do not last more then a few years – some because they never learn anything, or because they don’t have the eye, or even an approximation of that essential skill, but mostly because they often alienate the dealers they depend on as their only customers. This sort of scout, even if they last, can be counted on to die broke, often with a room jammed with the detritus of their mistakes.

They are often eccentric and they are almost invariably real characters. They buy as cheaply as they can, a necessity when you don’t know much and since they depend on the goodwill of their dealer customers they generally settle on a few different dealers whom they count on to buy their finds. Some never learn anything even though most work very hard. It’s not easy to start at 7:00 a.m., hit the Crips and the Sally Ann, read newspaper ads, flyers for church sales, garage sale ads and posters. And run around a huge city trying to find a decent book especially when most of them don’t really know what a decent book is. And many of them cannot even afford to own a car. But the usual reason for their downfall is that their ignorance, and their need to sell quickly, means they are at the mercy of those they sell to. This, in my experience, often causes them to become a bit paranoid, which is a progressive disease, the results of which are too often resentment and anger.

Time after time I have heard scouts lament that such and such a dealer has cheated them, paying little or nothing for what they later came to believe was a valuable book. These accusations usually stem directly from their ignorance and it contradicts what I think smart dealers always do in their dealings with scouts, treat them fairly. Many dealers – and I am one of them – tend to overpay scouts, or to buy things they don’t really want, both practices an attempt to encourage the scout to bring you more.

For the good general scout, it is a balancing act. They need to take some of their better finds to all their main dealer customers so that the dealer will not assume that all the best books are going to his competitor. (It is obvious here that dealers suffer the same paranoid view that the scout carries, only in reverse – they also have to use the balancing act.)

The better scouts are quite different. They will generally be as knowledgeable as any dealer, indeed sometimes they are ex-dealers, guys who got sick of the responsibility of running a store and returned to their first love.

In forty years of observing the booktrade I have come to believe that deep in his secret heart of hearts every bookseller who runs a shop believes that he is one of the great scouts just taking a short break. On rainy days in a shop empty of customers and between raising the prices of books to keep his spirits up, his private fantasies are of the day when he will throw up all this boring, respectable crap and revert to his original vision of himself as a fearless scout pillaging the shops of his innocent and ignorant colleagues, exiting in triumph with their unrecognized treasures. No overhead except small rooms somewhere and maybe a car or van – often his hotel for the night – to transport the booty. In reality, the pressures of overhead and responsibility weigh him down more each day and each day his fantasy becomes more delusion, his escape less likely. Just as marriage, mortgage and children capture the young, narrowing their focus, so does success capture an older man with the bigger and more impressive premises, more staff to handle, the increased volume and extended hours to help absorb the escalating costs, and scouting, the freedom and excitement of the chase, is relegated to an occasional indulgence when responsibilities allow.

But no real bookman ever gives up scouting.

The better scouts are trained to see significance where others see only garbage. One night stumbling along Queen Street half-pissed, my drinking companion, another bookseller, stopped to examine some boxes of garbage outside a building we knew was inhabited by a group which was one of the warring factions of the Communist Party of Canada. I was too lazy to stop, continuing on to our destination – a pub of course. But I had second thoughts when my colleague came in soon after with an entire carton he had found in the garbage, which was full of pamphlets in Russian. We started to examine them. I quickly came across an imprint (an imprint denotes the place a book is published, in either a city or a country) which I recognized, which automatically marked the item as Canadiana. Although I knew no Russian I had had occasion earlier to research other such pamphlets so I knew that the city name in the Cyrillic alphabet was the Russian version for Winnipeg, Manitoba. Winnipeg had been the final immigration stop of a fairly large contingent of European Jews and Eastern European immigrants generally, in the early part of the 20th century. In fact a surprisingly large percentage of the major social reformers and even many current public figures in Canada came from that Jewish community’s offspring. One of my favourite ironies in being a Canadian is knowing that so many of our most important politicians and social activists, business successes and cultural figures have been either United Church ministers or the offspring of European Jews. And sure enough, a couple of pamphlets later I spied one which had the Russian version for Toronto. “I’ll give you $50 right now for the whole box, sight unseen,” I said. “Sold,” replied my drunken colleague, and then had fun for the rest of the evening informing our drinking companions of his cleverness in seeing the possibilities in garbage. He bought us all beer for the rest of the evening, announcing loudly every time he ordered another round to “Drink up. The commies are paying. There’s a lot more where that came from.” We spent the rest of a raucous evening praising “the commies” for providing half the pub with an evening’s drunkenness. And, of course, my friend blew the whole $50. Somehow I got my drunken self and my box of pamphlets home safely.

The next day, sober, I examined my carton and found, as I had hoped, quite a few more Canadian imprints. I sold several, all in Russian, right away for $300-400 and eventually realized a fair bit of profit from the rest of the box. But more important, I learned a serious truth, namely that scouts can’t be snobs. I also made it up to my colleague by buying him quite a lot of beer over the next months. “Thank the commies,” I would say when he thanked me for another free round.

When I started out, as ignorant as any other beginning scout, the obligatory first stop every morning at 8:15 was the tiny bookshop run by the Crippled Civilians on Jarvis Street, familiarly known to the regulars as “The Crips,” but now renamed more politically correctly Goodwill Services. It adjoined their large central headquarters which, like the Sally Ann, solicited free donations of almost anything. In fact most of us scouts and booksellers who frequented it, regularly furnished our homes and dressed ourselves in the cast-offs of people who had died, or just moved.

The tiny bookshop opened at 8:30 but arrival at 8:15 assured being close to the head of the line where one attempted to guess the prices of the new titles in the display windows and hoped the scouts ahead of them in line were ignorant of these titles. The first in would usually point at the four or five decent newly displayed books in the window making a pile which he would then sort through at his leisure, checking price and condition before putting the desirable ones in his pile to buy, and leaving his rejections for his fellow scouts.

Those not close enough to the head of the line when the door opened would dash to the special sections, usually the Canadian section, which most often would contain the sleepers. For this, of course, was what we all sought – the sleeper. The pricing system was as follows: Fiction 15 cents a book or 10 books for a dollar. This meant that if one found five or more fiction titles it was cheaper and certainly better to fill out the number to ten since between six or seven meant all the rest were free. This would be the first opportunity I had to learn how booksellers regularly out-fox themselves into buying unsaleable books by thinking they are saving money, when they are really just loading themselves down with useless crap that no one will ever want and they must give expensive shelf space to, probably forever.

Like everyone else who has read way too many books, I have many useless quotations culled from these thousands of books which pop unsolicited into my mind on almost any pretext. The one that fits here is from William S. Burroughs and I find it always pertinent. It goes, “Hustlers of the world, there’s one mark you cannot beat: the mark inside.”

A pointless aside: one book I had read and really liked was “The Ides of March” by Thornton Wilder. One day I found one clearly marked “First Edition” on the verso of the title. It was in a fine dustwrapper, and priced 10 cents. A week later I found another. And then another, and another, one almost every week. It took about 6 months for me to catch on that if an ignorant neophyte like me could buy a dozen copies of a first edition in fine condition, for 10 cents each, in one thrift store, in one city – there must be something wrong. And there was. In fact there were two things wrong. First, they weren’t first editions, they were the Book-of-the-Month Club issue, in spite of the printed notice of “First Edition.” (It took me ten years to acquire the true first edition, which in my experience is scarcer than the special limited signed edition, also issued at publication.)

Second, and more significant, nobody wanted that book anyway. No one, it seemed, except me, thought it was a great book. I probably still have ten of those dozen books somewhere forty years later and there is a very important lesson here. What value does anything have if no one wants it? One of the first book jokes I can remember hearing went like this: A book scout offers a book to a dealer, naming his price. The dealer hesitates, the scout gets nervous. After all, this is his dinner at stake, maybe his hotel room for the night too. “That’s a very rare book you know,” he says anxiously to the dealer. (Just in case the dealer doesn’t realize this.) “Yes, I know,” says the dealer. “It certainly is. Almost as rare as customers for it.” There are several lessons here.

Other books at this Crips store were priced 35 cents, or 50 cents, 75 cents or $1, and if really desirable up to $2, $3, or $5. The rarely asked $10 meant a really good book, or one thought to be so by Mr. Fraser, the pricer and head bookman, and a man not to be tampered with. He ran the place like a fiefdom and woe to the one who tried anything shifty which, of course, many did. But seldom twice, because Mr. Fraser would explode at any perceived insult, or any infringement on his unwritten code, and any behaviour which he considered uncivilized was grounds for instant and very loudly conducted banishment. In other words, like a teacher with a lot of unruly schoolboys. Mr. Fraser (I never knew his first name nor would I have ever used it if I had known) was in fact just that, a retired school teacher. He was also a bit of a snob. I think he didn’t want anyone to think he was the usual type of Crips employee. And he wasn’t. He was there because he was blind, or at least almost blind. He had a degenerative ocular disease which had resulted in his being blind in one eye and with only five percent vision in the other eye. So he could make out a face if it was very close, but mostly he recognized his regulars by their voices. He priced books by the same method putting his one decent eye about an inch from the title page to ascertain what he was confronting. Not too many years later even that eye deteriorated so badly that management supplied him with a helper, usually a not-too-swift young man whose sole task was to bring a box of books to Mr. Fraser’s desk, then to read him titles one by one, then hand them to him for pricing. Mr. Fraser had a distinctive writing style which was instantly recognizable by everyone who frequented that shop and I still occasionally open a book to find his price on the endpaper. This always causes a sensation of acute nostalgia.

The Sally Ann and St. Vincent de Paul also had shops but St. Vincent seldom got anything one would want and the Sally Ann was generally very poor because, as was widely known, the fix was in. That is, bribery prevailed. Every so often someone would complain loudly and an investigation ensued with the corrupted manager being fired. Then books would magically appear untouched, sometimes for as long as two to three weeks, until the newly appointed manager also succumbed to the blandishments of bribery. Then – no more good books. We all thought we knew who was guilty of the bribing, a local bookseller, but we never had any hard evidence. Curiously, although we were all officially incensed that this dealer was bribing the manager, I always felt that what really bothered the rest of us was that we didn’t actually know how to go about bribing someone. Our friend, of European origins, had centuries of custom to fall back on but the rest of us probably were too naive to even know how to attempt such a corrupt practice.

One day a woman, a friend of mine who had started scouting for an antique business she planned to open, saw that the door to the private back room was open and a man who she knew worked for a local bookseller was rummaging through books. Naturally, she assumed she could too, so in she went, only to be summarily kicked out by the Sally Ann employee. Her sense of justice sorely offended, she went right to the top with her complaint which resulted in the manager being fired, and we enjoyed another short period of economic democracy. But more important, when she told me who the rummager was, a long-time employee of a certain local dealer, we finally had irrefutable evidence as to which dealer was bribing the book managers. In those days the Toronto dealers socialized a lot with each other and at a bookseller’s party soon after I slyly positioned myself in a group which contained the briber (who was, and still is, a dear friend of mine, but the opportunity to place a barb in front of a receptive audience outweighs that). I waited for a lull, and suddenly interjected, “Hey guys, you’ll never guess. We finally have definite proof who’s been bribing people at the Sally Ann all these years.” I had everybody’s attention. We had all suspected this dealer for many years and his innate cunning showed itself again, as he attempted to divert attention by piping up instantly. “Really? Who is it? Tell us?” It couldn’t have been more perfect. Without a pause I struck. I looked him in the eye. “You, that’s who.” The roar of laughter from the assembled dealers drowned out even my friend’s embarrassed spluttering. Finally, even he sheepishly joined the laughter, but he never did respond to the accusation. Nor, come to think of it, was he embarrassed enough to stop the bribery which soon recommenced.

But back to Mr. Fraser. I was always very polite with Mr. Fraser and I never presumed to ask for any considerations. There was an ugly, fat cat in the shop, Mr. Fraser’s special favourite. It was horribly spoiled and cranky. It slept wherever it cared to, almost always, it seemed, stretched out over books you wanted to look at, and if you attempted to move it you could get clawed or badly bitten. Even worse if you riled the cat enough he might just piss on the books to teach you a lesson, ruining some pretty good books over the years. The whole place stunk of cat urine but it would be a fatal error if you had the temerity to complain to Mr. Fraser about the cat’s behaviour. Out you would go, banned for life. I saw this a few times when people unaware of Mr. Fraser’s affection for the cat spoke up about the stink.

As I said, I was always very polite to Mr. Fraser. Of course I had a serious edge because I worked for Gerry Sherlock, whom everybody liked and respected. Gerry was then the major Canadiana specialist in the country and Mr. Fraser acted like the three of us were the only cultured people to be found in that cesspool of hustlers and losers. Sometimes Mr. Fraser would break his own rules for dealers he liked and hold something for them. One day another scout saw Mr. Fraser bring out a couple of books, saying to me “Mr. Mason I put these aside thinking you might like them.” When he did that I always thanked him profusely and bought them, whatever they were, and whatever the price because I didn’t want to discourage him from repeating such gestures. However, I heard later that this unwise scout, seeing this, made the fatal error of asking Mr. Fraser the next day to hold books in a certain area for him. That was the last time we saw him in there. Sometimes a banned scout would attempt to infiltrate himself back in by using the ploy of not speaking, counting on Mr. Fraser’s blindness to protect him. But, someone would eventually call him by name or he would forget and say something and Mr. Fraser would recognize him by his voice, and recognized, he would suffer a second and even more humiliating ejection.

One day Mr. Fraser brought out a book, offering it to me by saying, “Mr. Mason I’ve put a huge price on this because it is the first edition of a Canadian classic and it’s in mint condition.” Even with his bad sight he could see that it was in very fine condition. It was William Kirby’s The Golden Dog, dated 1877, which indeed is a Canadian classic, and it was in literally new condition (Proper dealers never use the term “mint condition,” we leave that for the coin dealers). But it was not the first edition, although the date was right. I could tell this instantly, because on looking at the title page I found a long written tirade, signed by William Kirby, bitterly complaining that this was a piracy stolen by those despicable thieves who were intent on seeing him in the poorhouse. Mr. Fraser had not seen the inscription, nor the signature, and I thought it better not to tell him about it, not wanting to hurt a blind man’s feelings, especially one doing me a favour. He had priced it at ten dollars, a rare price in the Crips, but acceptable, given that I very quickly sold it for $500.00. For many years afterwards I boasted about buying a great sleeper from a blind man. “How disgusting,” the looks on the faces of my colleagues seemed to say, “stealing from a blind man.” But I knew better, I was aware those looks were actually manifestations of envy, the bitter chagrin of the loser. (The reason this was scouting, not stealing, was because of another old protocol of the trade; a priced book is fair game.)

The first edition of The Golden Dog was published in New York and Montreal in 1877. It was printed in Rouses’ Point, NY, just across the border, a ploy by the publisher to protect Kirby by securing a U.S. copyright, but which backfired, because Lovell, the publisher, after printing in the States neglected to register it for U.S. copyright. And then, because it was published first in the U.S., he also lost Canadian copyright protection as well, leaving Kirby with no legal rights at all. Many editions were issued for years, both pirated and legal ones, and it continues to be reprinted, but I have never seen any copy of any of those many editions, signed by Kirby. The whole story is fascinating and it can be found in the bibliographical essay published by Dr. Elizabeth Brady in the Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada, #15 for 1976 ( Toronto 1977). In fact I sold that copy to Elizabeth Brady’s then husband, as a gift for her, and as her essay shows it is part of her important Kirby collection which is now at Queen’s University.

Iwill say little about the scout as collector because a scout collecting is much the same as a collector collecting although his experiences as a dealer or scout will have taught him a few of the necessary lessons perhaps a bit earlier and perhaps a bit more forcefully because of his experiences in bookstores.

I will, however, reiterate what I concluded many years ago and state at every opportunity – my belief that one can’t really excel at any function which relates to books unless one is a collector and frequents used bookshops. That is, you can’t be a good librarian, a good archivist, or even a good academic if you have no experience amassing a collection on your own for your personal use, by frequenting bookshops. This said, it follows that I also believe neither can one be a good bookseller if one doesn’t collect. This view would be widely disputed in the trade. Indeed I would guess that a very high number of dealers would disagree.

I think many – maybe half – of dealers would claim that a dealer who collects causes problems with clients, especially a conflict of interest, and that it is generally not proper for someone who is supposedly trying to make a living. This view is often as vehemently held as my contention that the opposite is true.

Having considered all the arguments against the dealer/ scout as collector I remain adamant: A dealer who does not collect cannot experience the emotional passion which fuels all collecting, thereby omitting from the equation its very essence. And with that lack of perspective he loses the ability to emotionally connect with his clients – and for that matter, even with the books. We have all experienced the Doctor who is so accustomed to his own omnipotence that he has forgotten that he is also a human being and becomes so emotionally distanced from the suffering and fears of his patients as to get the reputation as “very good perhaps, but cold.”

When one considers the collector as a scout it is, of course, necessary to drop a major part of the motivation which we ascribed to the dealer/scout – namely the profit motive.

True collectors do not collect with profit in mind. In my experience that doesn’t seem to be even a long term concern with most collectors. Sometimes, in chatting with a collector about their collection, the collector might mention some horrendous price they have paid for a single item, but I can’t really remember ever hearing one speculate what their outlay for a fairly big long term collection may have cost them, even in general terms. And it is only with collectors who are getting quite elderly that one even has conversations about the eventual disposition of their collection.

I believe that profit is not a concern, nor ever was, of all the real collectors I have known. If this assumption is correct we can infer therefore that collectors who are concerned with and constantly stress monetary value are essentially speculators, not real collectors. Maybe that’s why so many of them disappear so quickly.

Collecting is an emotional process, a hobby which seems to so engage the collector and which provides so much pleasure and comfort, that I believe monetary reward is of little interest to them. There are stories of collectors who put their books up at auction, or sell their collection. When this occurs I think the prices or price realized is for the collector only a measure for him – a tribute perhaps to his cleverness and passion – but not really a monetary concern. Some collectors plan to give their collections to institutions on their death – or sometimes before. And some are of the school that believes that they should return them to the open market to give later collectors a chance. Mostly though, a man who has spent many years acquiring books and assembling a coherent collection by imposing his knowledge, experience and passion on a subject will be very proud, and rightfully so, of his accomplishment and will want to have, what in effect is his creation, left intact, both for future scholars but also as a tribute to himself. For that is what a collection is. Whatever other value it might contain a collection is really a monument to the person who builds it.

We have a man in Toronto who obsessively collects all of modern philosophy (this would be from the early 19th century to today.) This man previously formed the greatest collection of the work of Bertrand Russell in the world. A professor of philosophy, unmarried and therefore free of many constraints, he generally spent every summer scouting every bookshop in Britain and would return with 3 or 4 hundred additions to his Russell collection every year, in later years mostly magazine appearances and often books where the index merely cited Russell, sometimes only once. Obviously he had the disease badly and incurably by this time, the compulsion for completeness now an obsession.

He once gave an address about collecting where he began by telling his audience that his collecting career started when he collected the printed cards used to separate layers in the old style Shredded Wheat boxes. The roar of laughter which this elicited from the audience indicated that most of the rest of us had done the same thing as kids.

Anyway, this man, when he pretty much ran out of Russell to buy, focused his obsessional habit on the entire field of modern philosophy with the same intensity he had applied to Russell. Both his Russell collection and later the philosophy collection were gifted to the University of Toronto and every five years or so two appraisers are called in to value the latest addition which is usually so large it generally takes most of a week to appraise. This Professor (his name is John Slater as almost any dealer in the world will have guessed by now) usually drops by when we are about to start on the latest batch to point out things which might escape our notice. This is usually necessary because much of it is so obscure only another philosophy professor might know who some of these people are.

It was very common for John to show us a book, the author completely unknown to us, and inform us what a sleeper it was at £1 or £2, or whatever. This would no doubt be a very scarce book, but the real point is that no one else seeing that book would even know who the author was, nor care. So it was a sleeper only to the man who found it, as in this case.

One year John casually mentioned to me, “You know Dave, my collection will now be the most complete modern Philosophy collection anywhere in the world.”

“Well John, I guess you mean the largest in private hands.”

“No, I mean anywhere in the world. I know that because I’ve checked my collection of American philosophy and it’s better than that of the British Library and my holdings of English philosophy are better than what is in the Library of Congress.”

As I meditated on that later I realized that it indeed would be true. An important point. What that means is that one person, on his own, with imagination and passion can supercede the resources of perhaps the two greatest public repositories in the English speaking world. Think about that before you dismiss the private collector as a befuddled eccentric.

The first really serious lessons I learned about scouting I absorbed without even being aware that I was learning anything. The young, starting as they do, with empty minds and little experience, begin by filling those empty minds with everything. But until their experience develops to the point where the deluge of data can be arranged into patterns of order – which needs time as its base – they often fail to see the patterns just under the surface. When I was just a year or two in business the University of Toronto hired me for a project which taught me more about scouting, collecting, and quite a few ancillary subjects, than perhaps anything else I experienced in my early years. The project was to supply the University with every piece of Canadian Literature they didn’t have. There was only one tool which existed then for such a project: a checklist compiled by a librarian named Reginald Watters (and referred to by everyone ever after simply as Watters – naturally). Watters and his student assistants had solicited from all the Canadian libraries and such general repositories as the British Museum and the Library of Congress and certain foreign libraries such as Brown University, which had large collections of Canadian literature, all their holdings based on their catalogue cards. This was published in 1950 and updated in 1960. It was, and is, imperfect but for a long time it was the only game in town.

The University of Toronto, like most Canadian libraries in the money-drenched ’60s, had bought major works by what were considered the major Canadian authors, but had ignored the minor, the obscure, the self-published vanity productions, the things which, while not individually important, help to reflect the mind of the country.

They hired me to find what was missing. It was a daunting task, especially for a neophyte who hadn’t, then, a clue about how to go about it. I was given a copy of Watters marked up by them with their holdings and carte blanche to supply what was missing from their lists. And also anything Canadian which had not been included in the checklist, which was plenty. Too naive to realize that I would be profiting by my acquired knowledge long after the project was completed (in fact I continue to profit, regularly, 40 years later) I concentrated only on seeking the needed books. After all, I needed to make a living. It was hard work but very rewarding – it got so every time I found something obscure it felt like it had seemed when I found that beautiful golf ball at seven years of age – a triumph! I became very adept at spotting, and then surmising what should be a Canadian writer, even though neither the book nor the author’s name was known to me. With no model to guide me, or even suggestions from more experienced dealers as to how to go about it, I was forced to invent my own systems for locating things which I couldn’t often identify, people and books which were not even known to be Canadian. The full account of what I did and how I managed it, can be found in an essay called “A Tale of Illusion, Delusion and Mystery: Booksellers and Librarians,” which can be found on my website.

I learned the names, for instance, of several English and American publishers who operated what are called Vanity presses, publishers who were paid by the authors to print the books which conventional publishers reject.

It made sense if one found a small book of poems by one of these publishers in Canada that the author should be Canadian, the logic being that the author’s only audience would be his friends and family, one of the reasons – aside from vanity – that such books often have lengthy presentation inscriptions in them. Such books often don’t stray far from the source, and about 90% of the time this premise would prove to be true. And I was often aided by flashing the pages to find Canadian place names in the text. Charles Everitt in his book The Adventures of a Treasure Hunter mentions that after a lifetime flashing books he got very good at spotting the word “America” in unlikely books which then rendered them salable as Americana. I practiced this idea to my great profit as well by flashing pages seeking Canadian place names and I still do.

Many important lessons were learned but for scouting the chief two were: look closely, then look again and never dismiss a book until you are sure you know what you are looking at. And look everywhere. In the usual chaos of a used bookstore, especially those with several employees, anything can be anywhere.

Whatever bitterness older dealers have about the depredations so prevalent on the Internet it does provide great benefits, readily accessible now, the lack of which tortured us when we were young. One can “Google” almost anyone and place their citizenship and importance in context in 30 seconds, instead of spending hours in a library consulting books. And we can check the holdings of every major institution in the world, also in a couple of minutes. On the other hand, while the young dealers have an enormous apparent research edge over those of us who suffered our way to knowledge, these young dealers don’t strike me as any smarter than we were and I now wonder what one retains from any pool of knowledge which is so easy to dip into.

I hope I’m not going to be one of those old grouches who goes around spouting platitudes like “No pain, no gain” and “the younger generations are hopelessly lost,” but I guess I’m guilty because that’s what I have come to believe.

I know many dealers who have made most of their living carrying lists of wants of their institutional clients around the whole continent. If my experience with the Canadian Literature project is any indicator, the permanent benefits of the things learned is far more profitable in the long term than whatever monetary rewards occurred at the time.

Another project, similar in style, if not content, to the Canadian Literature project was conducted with the National Library of Canada, our equivalent of the Library of Congress and the British Library, whose mandate is to acquire all things relating to Canada. But in learning the same sorts of things there was a significant difference. This project was virgin territory, an area which was almost entirely ignored till I happened on it as a very young scout and which, if the truth be admitted, I believe I invented. This is the field known now as Canadian Editions, that is books by foreign authors published in Canada. When I started it was an area almost completely ignored. This is a field which should be fascinating from a bibliographical point of view, but I can only remember one major bibliography which properly attempted to cite Canadian editions and that was James McG. Stewart’s Rudyard Kipling: A Bibliographical Catalogue (Toronto: Dalhousie University Press and Toronto University Press, 1959). Stewart was a Canadian, and would have been regularly exposed to the Canadian editions of Kipling’s books of which there were quite a few, demonstrating his importance at the height of the British Empire. Jacob Blanck’s Bibliography of American Literature, the major attempt to categorize American literature from its beginnings into the early 20th century, in 10 volumes (generally now referred to as BAL, or sometimes just Blanck) was a major achievement and they note Canadian editions when they located them. The single most interesting section of BAL for Canadian editions is the entry on Mark Twain, who was constantly pirated in Canada and some of whose true first editions were thus published in Canada. The Canadian pirates would steal the text from a periodical or sometimes directly from the English or American text, printing so quickly that they often were offering their cheap productions within a day or two of the American publication. And when they stole from periodical serials they were often out with their piracy before the proper first edition was issued and thereby usurped that position, becoming themselves the true first edition (a phrase loved by booksellers – it makes us appear knowledgeable). So incensed was Twain by his enormous losses at the hands of the Canadian pirates that he moved to Montreal for six months, the legal statutory period to gain Canadian copyright protection. He did this to protect Life of the Mississippi (Montreal, 1881) which is therefore a legitimate publication, although there is an earlier pirated version of part of it called Old Times on the Mississippi. A Canadian librarian once compiled from Canadian sources his own checklist of Canadian piracy’s of Twain’s books which is a good 50% larger than BAL’s. I have specialized in this field for almost 40 years and I have done well supplying foreign institutions, and collectors, with the Canadian editions of their writers. I believe the situation in Australia was similar although I am ignorant as to whether piracy was as prevalent there.

I have made a lot of money over the last forty years with Canadian Editions and so I should have, because, until I started buying them they were pretty much entirely ignored. I will tell the full story of this but the real significance, I believe, is not these variant issues themselves but the obscurity these editions rested in until I discovered and exploited them. The first one I discovered in a used bookshop was Scott Fitzgerald’s Tales of the Jazz Age. Pulling it off the shelf, thinking it was the first edition. I was surprised to find instead that it bore the imprint of the Canadian publisher Copp Clark, although the copyright page information was precisely the same as the Scribner’s U. S. issue. This was because one of the formats used was to simply print the Canadian issue from the plates of the U.S. edition, changing only the imprint on the title, the spine, and the dustjacket.

The second surprise was the price – $10.00. The first edition of that title at that time would have been $100-$150, the significance of the dustwrapper (which this copy lacked) not yet having reached the ludicrous point it occupies today. The dustwrapper is today considered essential, and even the common practice (at least in Canada) of clipping off the U.S. price has rendered a recent first edition pretty much unsaleable to collectors. It didn’t make sense to me that there should be such a discrepancy in price, so I bought it. These books were usually part of the first edition and I assumed, and later research confirmed, where print-run figures could be learned, that there would have been a very small percentage of an entire edition with a Canadian title page. Sometimes evidence shows the Canadian issue could have been as few as fifty copies, explaining the great scarcity of some of these editions. After some time I became very proficient at spotting these books on store shelves by spotting the Canadian publisher’s name on the spine. Indeed, I eventually got very proficient at guessing even with no imprint on the spine what foreign titles in a certain period should have been first Canadian editions. Pulling them off the shelf I would be enormously pleased when I was right most of the time; a good example of what I have come to call the “educated instinct.”

My Catalogue No. 2 issued in 1968 contained a section devoted to Canadian editions which I prepared with great trepidation. After much agonizing I priced some of my Canadian Editions right up there with nice copies of the First Editions and I was frankly scared as to what the reception would be. After all, I was exploring a field that had been ignored by everyone and had no established bibliographic foundation. This is why I priced the books with such trepidation. I, a relative newcomer, was setting the prices.

It was through my exploration of Canadian editions that I had a wonderful experience with one of the great 20th-century collectors and bibliographers, Matthew Bruccoli (referred to by some as “Mad Matt” for his passion and uncompromising dedication to the principles of bibliography).

He had visited my first tiny shop the year before in company with the well-known Faulkner scholar James Meriwether, a real southern gentleman. Both of them were a delight to meet, especially for a neophyte, and I was very impressed by both. After an hour-long visit both men bought a $10.00 book, which even I could see was really just a gesture of courtesy, which made this meeting even more important to me.

Shortly after their arrival Bruccoli took a large cigar out of his pocket and unwrapped it. But he didn’t light it. An incessant smoker myself then, I offered him a light as I lit my own next cigarette.

“Oh, no. I don’t smoke them,” he replied. “My wife doesn’t allow me to light them.”

He then proceeded over the next hour to eat the cigar, chewing it up bit by bit and depositing the refuse in his pocket and all over my floor. When they left it was a mere stub, and I had to vacuum the rug.

I had quoted Bruccoli the two Canadian Fitzgeralds in the catalogue before issuing it but he hadn’t replied. Naturally I took this to mean that not only was he not interested but was so contemptuous of my effrontery in my pricing that he didn’t even bother to reply. However when I issued the catalogue I got a frantic call ordering them; he had actually been out of the country and hadn’t seen the quote.

Shipping the books I included a note, my natural insecurity at the pricing causing me to make an apologetic reference to the prices. (This is a very common syndrome amongst young, or beginning dealers, especially the better ones. It takes many years and much experience to over-come this natural tendency to fear that your prices might appear too high.)

I received a wonderful note in reply from Prof. Bruccoli containing one of the greatest comments from a scholar/collector I have ever seen.

“Don’t ever apologize for the price of one of your books,” he replied. “Any scholar who won’t pay the proper price for a book is neither a true scholar nor a true collector. He’s a phony.”

What a gracious gesture to a neophyte! Thirty years later when I obtained the only known copy of one of those Canadian Fitzgeralds in the dustwrapper I took great pleasure in offering it to him. It was a considerable price I asked for it too, but true to his credo he bought it by return and thanked me profusely.

I was saddened to hear that Matt Bruccoli had died just over a year ago, but now that he has, it allows me to admit that, high as my price was for that still-unique Fitzgerald, I had purposely taken a couple of thousand dollars off the price in grateful homage to that civilized gesture he made towards me all those years ago.

People love rules and systems, as witness all the “isms” which in the 20th century have caused the slaughter of so many millions of people, and book collectors are apparently no different. But I hope that all these anecdotes demonstrate the importance of absorbing the rules and then defying them. The world is changed by people who defy the common view and apply their own experience and intelligence to life’s challenges.

When you are a beginner everything provides a lesson. Some of the ancillary lessons I learned with this Canadian editions project were difficult and in the end painful, although necessary lessons to learn.

The man at the National Library who hired me for the Canadian Editions project had to be convinced of the importance of these editions, both bibliographically and for what they illustrated of Canadian publishing, bookselling, and, more important, the reading habits of Canadians in that period.

I did not learn, until some years later, that neither this man nor his assistants and underlings were librarians – they were civil servants, bureaucrats in fact. So naive was I then that it never occurred to me that a library could be staffed by other than librarians but such was the case in Ottawa, in one of our most important national institutions.

It all began when, after considerable effort, I convinced this man that it was an important project to amass a collection which showed so clearly what was seen as culturally important reading in Canada during the period covered. I sold him a collection of some 700-800 titles I had formed but pointed out that, this being only a relatively small percentage of the total output – from, say, the 1820s to the 1940s – the really important part of our deal was to find some way of adding the missing titles to their holdings. After I managed to convince him that Canadian editions were a legitimate concern of Canada’s National Library, I suggested to him that he hire me to fill out the collection with new acquisitions. I explained that the only way to do such a project was for one person to have an exclusive contract to supply missing books.

It’s obvious why it needed to be exclusive since careful records would need to be kept to avoid buying unneeded duplicates. I knew that though Canadian Editions were ignored and cheap in Toronto stores then, they would not long remain cheap when the other dealers finally caught on to what I was doing. The man agreed, the principle being obvious, but he told me that he couldn’t put such a thing in writing because someone might consider this as fishy, even perhaps a criminal conflict of interest. As a public servant he needed to think of such things.

The way he put it was to say, “I can’t sign anything but I’ll guarantee that we won’t buy anything from any other dealer.” He then gave me authorization to send all books $25 or under without quoting them; I could simply send them with an invoice. Anything over that amount I had to quote. Within a year he had upped my blanket-shipping invoicing limit to $50; obviously I had passed the test.

I worked directly with his assistant, a young woman who had been present at all our discussions, and the project worked very well. It was a couple of years later when the young woman, with whom I had forged a very smooth working relationship, called me one day to tell me she was leaving the National Library. I was upset as she was very clever and our system of communication had worked marvelously. She had also become a collector of Edna O’Brien whose red hair and patrician profile she shared.

“Where are you going?” I inquired sadly.

“To the Treasury Department,” she replied.

“Treasury? What the hell is a librarian going to do in Treasury?”

“Oh,” she replied, astounding me, “I’m not a librarian, I’m a civil servant. They move us around like this all the time.”

That’s when I learned our national repository of printed material relating to our history is not staffed by librarians.

I kept a careful record of all transactions, compiling a list as I went which effectively became the first written record of the publishing of foreign titles in Canada. Indeed, I am now working on cleaning up bibliographic descriptions because I intend to make a book of it. It will be the first published record of actual foreign influence on the Canadian literary psyche.

But just as my scouting efforts for the University of Toronto were seen as a great success by both parties, the National Library project ended in disaster, based on the usual human failings, namely greed, envy, spite and a few more.

I learned a lot of lessons here too, although not ones I particularly wanted to learn in this manner. I will tell the whole story with all the sordid details in my memoirs.

Now it’s time to tell you about another form of scouting, one which I expect you will, initially at least, find silly. I refer to scouting my own store. You will say, but how can you buy from yourself and make a profit? Well, I shall explain and when I am done I hope you will see not only the logic and beauty of it but several other things relevant to human behavior.

One of the delights of starting a new collection from a fresh idea is to scout one’s own shelves for those books which fit in and it is surprising how much one will usually find in one’s own store. I have come to believe that this occurs because an unconscious factor has been, and is, in play here. The idea for a new collection, or catalogue, must have been gestating in the subconscious, maybe for years, causing the dealer to have a more than normal interest in that category of book, causing him to buy that sort of book over the years. When the idea becomes conscious and one pursues likely components which fit into the newly formulated pattern, it is not surprising that one finds one already owns a good selection in the subject. And more important, by imposing an overview on what had been considered unrelated objects, one creates a new perspective. That is what makes book collecting a creative endeavor. The vision of a collection by its very conscious formulation imposes a larger meaning on the individual components. Afterwards, everything is looked at differently.

An example. When I began collecting publishers’ bindings some 35 years ago the first thing I did was to scour my own stock for appropriate components. The binding publishers used, starting in the 1820s, is cloth, sometimes leather. Previously, books were issued in paper covers which the buyer was meant to take to his bookbinder, for binding in leather of his choice. I was initially shocked at how many lovely examples illustrating the evolution of publishers’ trade bindings in very fine condition I found, but on reflection it became apparent that I had been buying such things for years because I liked them. When the idea took coherent form the components were there waiting. This happens whenever one begins a new collection and I think my “subconscious” theory is the only one which adequately explains this phenomenon. More surprising is how frequently on searching one’s own stock that one finds books which one would buy in an instant from another shop. In fact it’s surprising how often one has. Which is why dealers regularly end up with several copies of books they like. Many times, having priced a new acquisition, I file it in its place in the shop only to find I have a copy of that same book already on my shelves and priced less than the price I had just paid a colleague for the second copy. Some people accuse booksellers of systematically pricing up their books but it is quite surprising how seldom dealers actually do this. It’s hard work and time consuming, in spite of the fact that it can eventually be the source of profit, I, for one, find it boring.

Vanity is the downfall of many scouts. The urge to boast of great finds often causes the scout to reveal his secret triumphs, especially late at night when the alcohol is flowing. And it’s not just scouts and dealers who do themselves in, figuratively – collectors do it too. A smart dealer always has his ears attuned for the verbal slips which mean useful knowledge for the future. But just in case you might think I am revealing these secrets out of some innate superiority, let me admit right now that this syndrome is so familiar to me because I share the character flaws which cause it. I am also guilty. The temptation to tell the story of a great find, especially when you are the brilliant hero of the story can prove overwhelming even when you know that in the telling you will be revealing things which would be better kept secret. An example: many years ago when the Canadian art-collecting market became popular it overflowed into books. The new collectors of art, educating themselves, sought reference and history books on Canadian art causing the field to become very expensive, rising prices reflecting both demand and intrinsic importance. Art collectors began to frequent bookshops. It became a common occurrence that an unknown visitor would casually inquire of a bookseller if he had any issues of a book-collecting magazine called The Colophon. We always knew what that meant.

The Colophon, perhaps the most beautiful and ambitious magazine on book collecting ever done, appeared as a quarterly from 1930 to 1950. It was originally issued in ornate decorated board covers, with a number of different articles in every issue, each one designed and printed by a different fine printer. It was a beautiful piece of work and because of the interest in book illustration it often contained etchings and woodcuts commissioned for articles, or simply on their own. So it was that in 1932 they commissioned a print from David Milne, a drypoint etching which has become very collectable, partly because it is one of very few signed Milnes that is accessible to a Milne admirer who is not rich.

The perhaps apocryphal story about it is that Milne did the etching by running the plate through the wringer of a washing machine which caused wear to the plate which ended up resulting in four states of the plate. This plate extracted from The Colophon readily sold from $1500-$2000 then and those of us who knew that often would put out feelers to American dealers and friends to supply us that issue. In those days single issues sold for $20-$25.

Some art collectors learned where it had been published which explains the seemingly casual inquiries for The Colophon we started to get. Some dealers would even buy a complete run of The Colophon, expensive even then, due to its importance and beauty – not to mention it’s very interesting content – just to get the Milne print. Even today when one see complete runs of The Colophon offered in the market they are usually described as “missing a plate from issue No. Five.” Once, scouting in a huge used bookstore in San Francisco, I went to the Books on Books section to find that it contained only one issue of The Colophon and it was No. Five! Probably part of a bigger run, it had remained unsold because half of the back-strip was missing. My great good luck, because it was priced at $7 and the Milne plate was still in it. That find paid for the whole trip.

All this was ruined by the vain boasting of Richard Landon, the Director of the Fisher Library at the University of Toronto, a known frequenter of bookstores and a serious private book collector himself. Landon once found in Michael Thompson’s shop in Los Angeles, a copy of No. Five for $10 or $20, and later over drinks couldn’t resist one-upping Thompson by boasting of the sleeper he had just bought from him. This was particularly galling for me because until then I had been buying an average of 2 or 3 copies every trip to Los Angeles from Thompson and other dealers – mostly for $20 each. Thompson being a very smart bookseller continued to offer them to me but rather than $20 I now had to pay $100 (US) and, of course, even that price rose in time. But I still bought them and Thompson and I continued to move them along for a while – a nice lucrative sideline for us both. However, gossip being what it is, that only lasted a couple of years before too many others caught on and another sleeper disappeared, the result of Landon’s loose lips. But that wasn’t Landon’s only sin. Another Canadian book often found cheaply in the States was Louis Hemon’s Maria Chapdelaine illustrated by the important Canadian artist Clarence Gagnon, published in Paris in 1933. Because the book had been first published in 1916 and the French-Canadian artist Gagnon was not well-known outside Canada it appeared to be just another of those later illustrated editions of literary classics that the French so love to issue, to the wonder of the rest of the world.

The bubble burst one year when the New Yorker published a profile of Larry McMurtry, the writer and Academy Award winning screenwriter, who has been an Antiquarian bookseller for some 50 years. One of the people the author of the profile chose to interview was Landon who could not resist boasting that he had bought a copy of Maria Chapdelaine from McMurtry’s Washington store for $10. Even worse he revealed its value, (it was then selling for upwards of $2000), to the entire readership of the New Yorker. Soon we were getting offered the Milne print for $1000-$1500 by our American colleagues and Maria Chapdelaine for even more. Landon seemed unperturbed when he was informed that his loose lips significantly lowered the average yearly income of half the dealers in Canada.

Now I find myself back where I started, the reflections fueled by Justin Schiller’s visit which prompted these musings and memories of my forty-some years in the trade.

While my general purpose has been to amuse, with some of the many stories that long-time dealers can relate endlessly, it seems clear to me that the real purpose in this, and all anecdotal histories of the booktrade, is to impart some sense of the sheer richness of the bookseller’s life and how important what we do is. I have come to believe that more important then mine or my colleague’s petty concerns about our personal ambitions, the true significance of our work is our social function, our contribution to the salvaging and retention of important artifacts of our civilization. The sense of continuity and the importance of the long established traditions of the trade are, I hope, apparent here, as they are so well-reflected in the sadly-few memoirs left by my betters in the trade.

For many years, in discussions about the literature of the trade, I tended to praise Charles Everitt’s Adventures of a Treasure Hunter as a wonderful book for booksellers. It has always been the first book I give to recently hired employees to introduce them to the literature of bookselling but it has always been received with a mixed reaction. Some liked it – or said they did – others barely bothered to mask their indifference, and quite a few have eventually expressed open contempt for my choice.

My choice for second best is David Randall’s Dukedom Large Enough, but the book most book people seem to prefer is David Magee’s Infinite Riches which is a delightful book by a delightful man, civilized reminisces by a very witty Englishman who transplanted to San Francisco and never left. That Magee personally collected Wodehouse will tell you what to expect from his own book. The first time I met Magee he welcomed me into his house where he was ensconced in a sunken living room space having a gin and tonic with a visiting collector exchanging gossip and witticisms. It was not yet eleven a.m. The book shelves in the area behind this space had huge gaps. “Yes it’s those Heritage boys*,” he said, “they’re up here buying books about once a month. I can’t keep the shelves full,” he explained. Magee was, by this time I guess, buying back the libraries of those of his collectors who had died before him and like many older long-experienced dealers he was either out-of-date with the aggressive pricing favoured by ambitious young dealers or perhaps – what I prefer to believe – he just didn’t much care about profit at this stage of his life. He was very cordial, and inscribed a copy of his book “To my young Canadian colleague.” I was so impressed by Magee that those images played in my mind for a long time. That’s how I want to end my so-called career I would think – not so much swilling gin and tonic at eleven a.m., but enjoying the fruits of all those years of struggle surrounded by old friends, cronies, and the learned and civilized people that booksellers get to deal with, ambition and money being relegated to where they belong at that age – down near the bottom of the list.

In closing I’d like to provide an answer to a philosophical dilemma which has haunted the booktrade, certainly during my time and probably since some Babylonian or Greek manuscript peddler hawked his wares in some early pre-Christian marketplace. For as long as I’ve been around there has existed a controversy over whether bookselling should be considered a trade or a profession. Well here is the answer and like all great truths it is succinct. Bookselling is a trade: Bookscouting is a profession.

* The Heritage boys: Ben and Louis Weinstein founded Heritage Books in Los Angeles in the early to mid-sixties. They were very aggressive buyers for many years, building one of the most impressive and successful bookselling firms of the twentieth century.

It isn’t easy being a bookseller these days. We are being assaulted from every side, by what seems to be progress, or at least that’s what people call it. A few years ago I referred in print to the current explosion of instant world-wide communication technology as the Electronic revolution, comparing it to the Industrial revolution of the 19th century. I continued by pointing out that just as people living in the midst of that industrial explosion of mass manufacturing could hardly have foreseen the long-term effects of that major cataclysm (the regimentation of the assembly line with all its droning boredom, industrial pollution, unions, the nouveau riche, etc.), so was it unlikely that we could see the implications for the future in a world where Tokyo or Timbuktu are, in a technical sense, right next door. The book trade today, along with lots of other long established systems, is now in a very precarious situation. Everything is changing and while we don’t know where it’s all going, we do know it’s out of our control.

There are so many changes occurring, and so quickly, with only slight hints as to the directions we are heading, that it’s hard to know where to start, but some things are quite clear. 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 traditional 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 centres 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.

I should here explain the difference between new and Used & Rare books. 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, 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 60 or 70 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 outbalances hardcovers in sales. Paperbacks in our time have fuelled the used book business, while the larger general stock of hardcovers gather dust, sometimes for many years, until the right person finds them. It should be clear from this that used bookshops, because of those long periods between pricing and sale, often contain what we call “sleepers,” books which time has rendered grossly underpriced. Another of the many reasons to frequent used bookshops.

Our new bookseller friends and our publishing friends, may not be aware that in the early 19th century and before there were no such categories. The Bookseller was everything. He published, then sold new books, but he also sold old books, so the entire world of bookmaking was often incorporated in one firm.

In the 20th century, with publishers already a separate entity, new booksellers and Used & Rare gradually split into two camps as well. In Toronto, for instance, Roy Britnell would be the last to actively participate in both fields, although the Beggs of Contact Editions kept their hand in with new books until they recently moved to a smaller store when they pretty much dropped the new books.

We have now evolved to a situation where almost all new booksellers and publishers ignore the antiquarian book trade, and often demonstrate their abysmal ignorance of our side of the trade by blaming used booksellers for all their missing books. It is not uncommon to hear accusations from the new book trade about the sleazy used bookstores who buy books stolen from their stores. While there are such sleazy bookstores, just as there are crooks and thieves in any human activity which uses money as a means of exchange, in my experience, the percentage of crooks in the used book business is much smaller than in just about any other business I have experience of. Most used booksellers go to enormous lengths to avoid buying stolen books, and in fact, we have a very successful network world-wide devoted to just that. Every day we read new stories about the bankers and investment dealers who steal millions but I have yet to meet a wealthy used bookseller. There’s an old joke in the Antiquarian book trade that the only way to get rich in bookselling is to be already rich when you enter it. But the truth is that such sadly ignorant accusations really only accentuate the further splintering of different aspects of a trade, which once was unified.

And sadly, the current situation, which seems to me to threaten the whole trade is also eroding the already thin line between used and rare. Essentially used books would be all secondhand books from the last 100 years or so, while rare or Antiquarian would refer to those books which have rapidly become desirable because of their importance, for literary, scientific or historical reasons and, of course, scarcity. A couple of instances; called in to appraise the collection of a Biologist whose specialty had been genetics, myself and the other appraiser thought we were in for a quick job when we first surveyed the books. A third of them were in the familiar green bindings which denoted they were all original editions of Charles Darwin’s books, all books which can be dealt with quickly because they have extensive bibliographical and sales records. The other two thirds of the library contained very modern books, some from the 20s onwards but mostly from the 50s and 60s. This will be easy, we assumed, until we examined them closely. Every single one of the recent books contained the first appearance of some new scientific advance in genetics. It took a good deal of research for two dealers with little experience in that field, and even we were shocked to find how valuable some of them were. And in the literary field, the enormous popular success of Harry Potter combined with very small first printings caused the early first editions to quickly become very expensive. Thus we find that for quite different reasons, recent books become quite valuable.

With the Internet now rendering most used books unsaleable one finds dealers like myself separating themselves further by not even buying almost all books from the last 100 years or so. While I hate this (I have always believed that an interesting $5.00 book is the equal of the $500.00 book in all values except monetary), I now have no choice. When we check the internet sites to find 150 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.

David Mason Books, Toronto.

When the world-wide web started to function there was a state of near ecstasy prevalent 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 15 years for the right person to come along. Pessimists like me weren’t so sure 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 I priced it at $30,000 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 book more easily than they can sell a $20 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 20%-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. I will touch on this later.

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. Years ago a friend of mine counted all the stores on Queen Street in Toronto, including the small independents and specialty bookstores, along with the used ones. His count was twenty-seven; now there are four I can think of. Anyone who thinks such numbers are insignificant should read no further. I read a 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 300. This was attributed to high rents, the high streets of British towns having become too pricey for used bookstores. The Internet has exacerbated that, but now it is apparent that that is only part of it. 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 this, is that collectors need some years of experience in 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 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 things 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 dealers. 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!

One of my oldest clients, a lawyer, would often, early in our professional relationship with books, apologize for taking up so much of my time. As a lawyer he knew that what I was really selling was not just my books but my knowledge, my experience and my time, and he felt guilty that our lengthy talks were infringing on my time.

Since he is now not only a client but a close friend, who shares many of my personal interests and joins me during some of my scouting activities, and in fact competes with me in a couple of our shared collecting interests, I thought it wiser not to admit that these sometimes lengthy sessions discussing collecting tactics are enormously gratifying to me and one of my greatest rewards as a bookseller.

I thought that a bit of guilt on my friend’s part might be to my advantage on our scouting trips thereby giving me a slight edge in the acquisition of some book we both coveted. The truth is that in the end my greatest pleasures as a bookseller have come from these relationships and the excitement and pleasure of the great books I have handled is far less important than the periods of shared experiences I have had with my long-term clients.

What all this illustrates is that the experienced dealer prefers the knowledgeable collector, for what greater pleasure than to offer a treasure to someone who will instantly recognize it as a treasure. In those cases the book sells itself, no small benefit for a pathetic salesman such as me.

And just in case you think you have heard the worst, I have barely started. How about this as a side issue? An article in a major rare book magazine recently pointed out that Oxfam, that noble attempt to feed the hungry children of the world, operates many bookshops in England which are further decimating the trade. These shops operate with volunteers and, of course, their stock costs them nil since it is all donated. It was also suggested, in the article, that they were given preferential rents by landlords because of their charitable nature (although I believe that subsequently Oxfam refuted that). But it hardly matters; with free stock and free employees they could pay double the going rent and regular used shops still could not hold their own competitively.

Right here, in Toronto, most of the University Colleges hold yearly sales under the same principles. They use volunteer labor, get the books free – many, many thousands of them – and use the University facilities which, of course, are publicly funded, for free – not a bad deal. During the period from September to October that Trinity, Victoria, U.C., Innis College, St. Michaels, and Wordsworth run their sales hardly a book gets sold by the regular used bookstores in town. And furthermore I’m told the books are no longer very cheap since with all their free labor they check everything on the Internet, (like the ignorant back-room booksellers so prevalent on the net) and are pricing accordingly. Gossip filters back that indicate these college sales are taking in between $75,000-$125,000 each from these sales. I haven’t gone to any of their sales for 25 years, in spite of the fact that one with my knowledge and experience could obviously still buy very well and make a pretty good profit. But I don’t go based on the sensible principle that you shouldn’t encourage those people who are stealing your livelihood. One irony I find amusing in this situation, is that any group except booksellers, would probably organize themselves and raise a big stink about publicly funded institutions who are forcing them out of business. But booksellers generally choose to march to their own drummers and I don’t foresee them doing anything. A further irony for me is that were such a thing to ever occur, the Universities, who are contributing to the death of used bookstores so unthinkingly, would probably back down at the first hint of public protest. That is certainly true if their general moral cowardice in the face of several recent assaults on free speech and the democratic principle of the free exchange of ideas in universities, is any indication.

A famous bookseller in a talk to the Grolier Club (perhaps the most prestigious club for book collectors in the world) once said of bookselling, that it was “perhaps the last profession in the world where a man could still control his destiny.” This noble thought, which I never miss an opportunity to quote, and the mindset which causes it to be true, ensure that booksellers may fuss and whine at these gross assaults on their livelihoods but they won’t involve themselves in any organized protest. Myself, I have been considering setting up a tent on the lawns in front of those colleges during their sales and offering courses in Philosophy or Literature – and my fees will be much cheaper than the University’s.

There was a time, a century or so ago, where any town that had a university, never mind one that had 3,500 or so professors, as does University of Toronto, (never mind York and Ryerson) would be a guarantee that used bookstores would flourish. That this is not true now in Toronto invites significant questions. Perhaps someone should explore the question of Professors and their apparent indifference, even distaste, for books. During a recent conversation over drinks with some colleagues we shared opinions about why academics have all but disappeared from the used bookshops. Some interesting conclusions were arrived at. The general consensus was that many academics seldom seemed to be interested in anything outside their specialties. And being spoiled by many years of getting free books from publishers they don’t like to pay for books. Indeed, teachers, especially professors, are number two on the booksellers’ secret list of cheapskates by profession, just behind ministers. While teachers once were ill-paid this is no longer true so their protestations of poverty do not convince. And we, the booksellers on the frontlines, so to speak, can perhaps be excused for assuming that it is really just another indication of dreary mediocrity. But one of my colleagues thought it unfair that the good ones were not being mentioned; meaning those professors who do frequent bookshops. As we dropped names of those professors who do buy books (I refer to North America and Britain) it became obvious that those scholars we were naming were more often than not those whose work was considered the most important in their fields. This pattern was only momentarily surprising to people who believe, as we do, that it is culture that we are selling.

A club of which I am a member, which was founded many years ago by a number of librarians, booksellers, publishers, and writers, had no current member from the Antiquarian book trade when I joined. Roy Britnell, one of the founders, was probably the last member with a connection in the Antiquarian book trade. After a few meetings one of the publishers there asked me one day over lunch “Just what is it that you Antiquarian booksellers do?” In one of my all-time greatest one-liners I got to reply; “The function of the Antiquarian Bookseller is to clean up all the mess that you guys create publishing all the crap that you do.” That got a nice laugh, but in fact, funny though it is, it’s also true. 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.

But in spite of these things the main culprit is the Internet. The same principle which causes us to be more likely to believe anything, no matter how outrageous it seems, if we read it in print, also has a parallel on the Internet. For on the Internet, to the casual browser, all books and all booksellers are equal. But we, the pros, know better. We know, to paraphrase Orwell, that while all book dealers are equal some are more equal than others. For unfortunately, it seems to be, that all one needs to be a bookseller on the Internet is a name and some books. Knowledge, experience, some vague clue about the means of ascertaining edition, completeness, or even value are not seen as necessary. We find ludicrously inept descriptions which any good used bookseller can tell are ignorant and erroneous offered as accurate by fools completely unaware of the depth of their ignorance. A guy like me, after 40 years in the trade, will generally have a huge and valuable reference collection (in my case overflowing a very big office into our storage warehouse) but the average No-Name bookseller on the net probably has no reference books, nor sees the need for any. After all they can lift the description of their book from an entry on the net (at the same time they are copying the price). Of course, if their book is not quite the same, like maybe being a different edition or state or issue, what does that matter? It looks like it should be a first edition. And even worse, these people, who are so unaware of their own stupidity, are also quite incapable of discerning the equal ignorance of those they copy so assiduously, so that the errors and misdescriptions become compounded.

Another sad result of all this dumbing down is that some problems in the new book trade which used to be solved by the used bookstores, are now instead worsened. Once new bookstores would have in stock large backlists of the earlier works by popular writers. So that discovering a new author you liked, you could go and find other of his titles in your neighbourhood bookstore. Space concerns, (i.e. high rents, and too many books) have ruined that tradition too. It seems that new booksellers can no longer stock a writer’s earlier books, even in paperback.

Two recent personal incidents of my own illustrate this. A wonderful book by Amos Oz led me to recommend it to a writer friend who in turn informed me that another Oz title, was perhaps the best book he had read in the last ten years. I went to my local new bookstore, a very good one, but they had none of Oz’s earlier titles. I was forced to order it. (In an amusing but quite irrelevant aside I can’t help adding this. Soon after, in another Antiquarian shop, I saw and bought six or seven other Oz first editions (which at $25-35 each were still only the price of a new book.) When I returned to my shop my partner suggested that I might easily have purchased them cheaper elsewhere – from myself. Turned out I had five of them on my own shelves, but hadn’t thought to look there. There is no doubt a moral there, although I’m still trying to figure out what that moral is).

Most recently I discovered an Irish noir writer whose books I didn’t know and went in search of more. He has written, it seems, 15-20 books. My favorite new store had two, Chapters the same two, so I had to visit “The Sleuth of Baker Street,” the best of the crime specialists where I found ten more. The point being that now only a specialist can carry a writer’s backlist. In the old days such wants would send people to the used bookstores for these sought-after earlier titles. But now we are losing the used stores. Public libraries are wonderful but I want to own the books I love so libraries are not a solution for me.

Which brings us to one of the most confusing things one encounters on the Internet; why the wide discrepancy in prices? Many people are not aware that lots, maybe a majority, of the so-called dealers on the Net offering books, are not real dealers at all. Some offer their books more cheaply because they think that cheaper will trump condition (and it probably will – to the equally ignorant.) But there are many people who haven’t a clue that the same edition of the same book can have widely different prices amongst legitimate dealers – for one reason alone – the condition. After rarity and importance the most important thing about the book as an object, is condition. Condition, condition, condition. But the amateurs are fuelled by greed, and driven by ignorance, so we get a lot of descriptions which might be amusing if these ignorant fools weren’t tacking on a price, sometimes a hefty one, at the end. So we get descriptions such as, a book with a signature bound upside down, a fairly common result of machine-binding, and having no bibliographic significance nor any effect on value, will often be described as “a rare error book” and priced outrageously. Here is a not unusual description. “Covers shredded, but a lot still there – could be fixed with some tender loving care. And you could get a copy of the missing title page from the library and then you could tell exactly how old it is. But I know it’s old, maybe in the Eighteen hundreds and in wonderful shape considering it’s age.” These people usually don’t mention that along with the tender loving care you would need to spend several hundred dollars and it would still be near worthless because of the missing title page. And if you think I’m exaggerating, or just in a silly mood, look for yourself – especially on eBay. As I’ve mentioned I’ve met very few deliberately crooked booksellers but I’ve seen a lot of ignorance. And I guess being cheated by a fool as opposed to a crook may temper the anger a bit, but in the end you’ve still been cheated.

One Antiquarian dealer, whom I greatly admired, now sadly gone, a man called David Magee (whose memoir, Infinite Riches: Adventures of a Rare Book Dealer, should be required reading for anyone, collector, dealer or simply a reader who enjoys sophisticated anecdotes about books and bookselling) wrote a couple of small pamphlets humorously poking fun at the descriptions some dealers use in their catalogues to deflect attention from the defects, sometimes horrendous ones, in their offerings. In Magee’s satirical descriptions stains are always tiny (and only found in margins), annotations are always scholarly, plates in 18th-Century books are always naughty, and previous owners’ names defacing the title are always those of significant scholars (even if they are undistinguished clergymen from some unpronounceable obscure village). All defects, in fact, are proven of no consequence compared to the importance and beauty of the dealer’s copy of the book. Magee was poking gentle fun at some of the excesses of his younger colleagues, but his motive would have been to educate through pointing out the perils of over-enthusiasm in describing our wares. But I think he would have been appalled at what we are seeing on the Internet today. An ignorance of traditions going back almost 500 years is made almost respectable by being so widespread.

And there is more. Like the colour copying machine. Another example. At a small book fair a few years ago I found myself by chance in a booth with a fairly new customer, he was a well-read guy, had discovered First Editions and bought a few from me (and I presume from others). In other words he had discovered the joys of collecting and was pursuing his new hobby.

After greeting him I returned to my scouting, when he suddenly blurted out, with the delighted gasp of one who has found a sleeper. “This is a real bargain. I must buy this.” I looked over. He was holding a copy of Richler’s Duddy Kravitz with a nice dust wrapper. He showed me the price, twenty-five dollars, about a tenth of its value, but my trained eye instantly noticed that it had not been marked by the dealer “First Edition.”

“May I see it?” I asked, suspicious. I checked the verso of the title but indeed it was the first edition, so I proceeded to the next step in assessing a book, removing the dust wrapper to check if the binding had stains or wear. I saw instantly that the dust wrapper was, in fact, a colour Xerox copy, which explained why it was so nice. The book was much less nice showing the normal wear and tear on any book that has not been protected by a dust wrapper for a long time. “This is a fake,” I said. My new collector was stunned, speechless. I went to the woman manning the booth. “This is a fake, a colour Xerox, but you haven’t marked it as such,” I accused.

“I don’t know anything. He’s not here,” she said, “he” meaning the proprietor.

“That’s unacceptable,” I replied, walking away. So did my client. A little while later, “he,” a dealer I didn’t know, came up to me, very agitated, on the floor.

“I was going to tell any buyer it was a copy,” he said defensively.

“Well, that’s pretty hard to do if you’re not in your booth,” I replied.

And worse, this was an honest man, as I found out when I got to know him over the next few years. (Even that wasn’t so easy since he cringed in embarrassment the next few times we met.) He had made an honest mistake, an unthinking lapse, the kind guys learning anything tend to make and I doubt he’ll make another like that.

But the point of the anecdote is not that. It is that the new collector has not been seen again, by me or anyone I know. I think probably his collecting career, with all its new pleasures, is over. He probably left thinking, “These guys are all crooks. I want nothing to do with any of them.” And he hasn’t returned.

Another example: a book came in that I hadn’t had for four or five years. I remembered that I had sold the last one for $100. It was Western Americana of sorts, a book on the Mormons, usually a very saleable subject area and not an area about which I was terribly knowledgeable. But this was a subscription book which to the knowledgeable means it will be, no matter its historical material, what today we would call a quickie. These books were printed in enormous numbers and were sold door to door by subscription. They were quickly written compilations done to cash in on the latest fad or catastrophe. The modern equivalents are the paperbacks put out within a few days of such newsworthy events as say, the 9/11 tragedy. (For instance, there were hundreds, if not thousands, of such books on the sinking of the Titanic which are mostly still so common that we get regular calls from people who think they have a treasure, leaving us to let them down gently. It will be a couple of hundred years before these books even become scarce.) Books on the Mormons were very popular, not out of religious curiosity but, bluntly, because of sex. There’s nothing like books about a harem (the secret dream of every red-blooded young man) to arouse interest and sell books, as any honest publisher would admit. Anyway I asked an assistant to check this book on the net, just out of curiosity, even though I knew it was probably still only a hundred dollar book. There were two copies of this book being offered on ABE Books, one priced at $2,000 US and the other at $1,750 US (this when the Canadian dollar was still 60¢ to the US dollar, so say $3000 and $2600 approx.) You will be preparing yourself to hear me whine about the treasure I sold for nothing but not so; this was a hundred dollar book. So what is the point? Well, it must have gone like this: the first man got the book and thought to himself “Mormons. Everybody wants Mormon material. This book is from 1857, that’s over a hundred years old, it must be worth $2000” – and prices it accordingly. The second man, equally ignorant, sees the $2000 – and thinks. “Well I see this is a $2000 dollar book but I’ll be cunning and price mine at $1750 – and sell it before that other guy.” So here we have a $100 book priced at 20 times its value by two different apparent dealers (but who, of course are not really dealers at all). And, what if you want that book? And they are the only two offered? Well you may think that it is worth that, so you may buy it. Aren’t you likely to assume that they know what they are doing especially since there’s two of them? Well, good luck. And that’s only one example; I’ve got hundreds more.

We advise our clients very strongly not to buy anything more than a $25 or $50 book from people on the net unless they have initials after their name (meaning a professional affiliation which is world-wide and offers not just an assumption of professionalism but official recourse when disputes arise.)

But what may seem to the reader as carping at the larcenous nature of those who steal the hard-earned knowledge of long-time dealers like me isn’t actually true. Or at least not in the way it may seem. What bothers us is the ignorant misuse of our knowledge. For the good antiquarian dealer freely gives from his vast hoard of knowledge and experience to his customers on a regular basis. What normally occurs in a business like Antiquarian books is a student/mentor situation in the beginning, which is based on a shared passion – for the books, or for the subject. The client’s interests and the professional’s experience, result in shared experiences, and the collector’s increased sophistication.

This leads, more often than not, to friendship. When I say, as I often do, that most of my long term customers become friends, I am not exaggerating. Book collecting after all is an activity, which, while based on reverence for some of man’s noblest instincts, and regard for man’s greatest accomplishments, also operates in emotional areas which are fuelled by some of man’s least attractive habits. Greed, acquisitiveness, and profit based competition may be the foundation of collecting, but they are generally leavened by the mutual respect and regard that so often grows between the dealer and the knowledgeable collector.

I had a joke once that I used to test people with. I would point out that dealers and collectors were, or should be, by essence, natural enemies. After all, think of this; I have the book and you want/need it (and if you don’t understand that a collector needs the book the way you need your dinner, or sex, you haven’t grasped the basic core of collecting.) So not only do I have what you need, but I get to set the price that you have to pay to own it. The only constraints on my greed are my need for money to survive, and whatever civilized regard I have for the social contract. If this is essentially true (and I believe it is) surely it is a measure of our civility how we deal with this situation. When I would put it this way it usually elicits a laugh – but the laugh usually is followed by a thoughtful pause while the listener realizes the basic truth of my premise.

A very hard lesson for a collector to learn, or for that matter anyone buying anything which doesn’t have a fixed commercial price, is to recognize when it becomes necessary to bite the bullet and pay a price one is certain is too much for a coveted object. The value of things relates to need; a bottle of water in the desert is of obvious value; the trick with books is to learn to measure the level of your lust.

A few years ago a colleague showed me a proof copy he had just bought for a buck or two, of what I consider the greatest political novel of the 20th century, Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, to my mind more compelling then Animal Farm or 1984. Proof copies seem to be out of favour amongst collectors these days probably due to the modern practice of publishers issuing them like “review copies,” in very large numbers. But when Darkness at Noon was published, proofs were still issued in quite small numbers, mostly for in-house use. I wanted this one badly. I asked my colleague for first refusal hoping that the fact that he’d paid a dollar or two for it might mean I’d get a bargain. He said sure, but I heard no more for a couple of years. Then I entered his shop one day and he showed it to me in a special box he’d had made for it. I’d hoped that at worst it might be $2000 – and was prepared to pay $3000 – but he was asking $5000. I knew he would not have located any selling prices for it. Nor did I think he would even find selling prices for the first edition to use as a benchmark comparison. For some reason the first edition of Darkness at Noon is itself a rare book. No copy in dust wrapper has appeared at auction in 30 years and I have only ever seen two copies, one of them defective (note: in 2008 after this was written a copy of the first appeared at auction in a “restored dust wrapper.” It sold for £950. Today we find on ABE a reputable British dealer offering the first edition in the dust wrapper for Can. $6400.00. This dealer claims, perhaps accurately, that this title, noted by him as “of infamous scarcity,” was destroyed by enemy bombing in WWII. On the other hand, if all the stories of books which I have seen described as scarce because of the bombing of a publisher’s warehouse were true, there would have been little left of London after the war.) So I was forced to use the formula I suggest to my clients as the final arbiter, namely – “Do I want that enough to pay that price for it?” For there is no “real” price for a rare book, only a scale of factors to measure the personal value to you. It took me less than thirty seconds to buy it at about double what I thought its value should be. Of course, an old saw in the book trade says “When your competitor sells a $5000 dollar book it is criminally overpriced, when someone buys your $5000 book you sold it too cheap, in fact you probably gave it away for nothing, indeed it’s obvious you were robbed.” Such is human nature. In the case of this book I asked an English friend whose firm has been in business almost a hundred years and has kept a record of every book they’ve owned, if they had ever had a copy. When he informed me that his firm had never had a copy nor had he personally ever seen a copy, and that should I sell it, I would “do well,” my overpriced $5000 folly immediately became a $15,000 certainty, and now some 5 years later it is, in my mind at least, a $25,000 book. So far, my lapse into momentary insanity, has yielded a profit of $20,000, albeit untested yet by the reality of the market place. And it goes up almost daily in my mind. Who knows where it might end? But it hardly matters because I won’t be selling it. See how easy it is?

Now that I have established some of the horrors which the new electronic revolution has brought to the area I know something about (and if you think other fields where I share your ignorance might be different, let me say that experience tells me they won’t be), you will see our concern.

And, there are still factors that I haven’t even touched on yet.

Most days I feel like a blacksmith must have felt just after Henry Ford started making his assembly line Model T. Almost the only thing which rescues me from acute depression is my age. There’s not much more they can do to hurt me short of a major catastrophe and, curiously, this is mainly because of two character traits which in almost any normal business would be considered major defects.

The first is that I am one of those lucky people who don’t much care about money. It was once pointed out to me by a psychiatrist that there might be some connection between this and the fact that my father was a banker, a revelation which I found a bit disconcerting when it was brought to my attention, but which later became, and remains, a source of some amusement. But I am very grateful for the gift no matter the source. Richard Jessup’s The Cincinnati Kid is a small classic, which Norman Jewison turned into not a bad movie. In it the young gambler (played by Steve McQueen in the movie) is interrogated about money by his girlfriend’s father, a dirt farmer in the Ozarks.

“All my life,” says the old farmer, “I’ve been trying to understand money and I can’t seem to do it. But, you seem to get it.”

“The thing to know about money,” says the Cincinnati Kid (who is only in his twenties), “is that it’s necessary but not important.”

This quotation seemed to me at the time the best description of the true significance of money in our lives that I had ever seen anywhere, and it seems so still.

So, if you don’t need a lot of money you have an edge. We need enough to be free to pursue our destiny, as the Cincinnati Kid knew, but to waste time in getting more than is necessary, seems silly to me. After several years living hand to mouth in Europe, where I began to educate myself, I had trained myself to not want anything that I didn’t need. When I returned to Canada I found I could walk up Yonge Street without even looking in a window (except a bookstore window, of course) because I didn’t want any of the junk the stores offered, the junk which causes so many people to sacrifice their dreams for the security of an income.

The second factor which should save me for the ten or twenty years I might have left is my buying style. From the beginning all I have cared about is books and since I started bookselling I have spent every penny not needed for the necessities on books. So quickly did I build up a stock that word filtered back to me through the grapevine that it was believed that my father was rich and was funding me. My father loaned, not gave, me $500 which is all I had when I began and I never got another cent, so such gossip angered me at first. But I saw it didn’t matter what they thought, in fact it said more about their philosophy of bookselling than it did about me. For the fact is that I did it all myself, and the simple truth is that I want books, not money.

No, it was my love of books which propelled me and now I have a large stock of very good books all carefully chosen by me with all the skill accrued from forty years experience. For instance, because I bought obscure editions of many of the earlier writers, instead of only first editions, I now have a lot of books which are only to be found in the stocks of the best specialists around the world. Books that get regularly ordered on the Internet now, because they are becoming unobtainable. I also for many years bought books which I thought were good but which the world hadn’t yet caught up to. When you’ve been around for forty years you’ve seen lots of books go from being unwanted – “dogs” we call them – to much sought-after with commensurate rises in value. When I grew to recognize this obvious phenomenon I bought heavily in areas not yet held in esteem by other dealers, many of whom in my view spend much of their time competing for the latest flavour of the month. There are right now several areas where I buy heavily, although quietly. Since some of those areas are made up of things which the rest of the world (at least around here) doesn’t seem interested in, and since, given my age, the world view may not catch up with me before I die, I have taken to telling my partner Debbie that I am investing for her old age. A couple of years ago in an interview one of the questions was: “Are there any new areas that are overlooked, where one can still buy bargains? And if so what are they?” My answer short and succinct was: “Yes there are, but I’m not telling. Use your imagination.”

That I continue to get away with buying far more than I sell is now largely due to my partner Debbie, who operates under the delusion that if she sells enough, (and she is ten times better at actually selling a book than I am), then we might eventually enter the middle class. I do not attempt to dissuade her of this for it allows me to continue buying books, and this is all I want to do.

In retrospect, another of the many ironies I see in my so-called career is that my father, the banker, after working at the same job all his life and doing everything properly had a comfortable retirement, but in the end left very little. I, on the other hand, did everything wrong and am a terrible businessman (as are most booksellers), yet when I go I will leave behind a few million dollars worth of books (admittedly worthless until someone buys them). I will die a very rich man and I have had a wonderful time amassing these riches. And if I don’t sell them I have the pleasure of looking at them and of handling them. And of course, the most important pleasure, reading them.

Larry McMurtry, a highly respected bookseller for a very long time as well as a fine and prolific writer, won the Academy Award for his screenplay of Brokeback Mountain. When he accepted the award he cheered all us booksellers enormously, first by stepping up to receive his award in a dinner jacket, dress tie and jeans, the traditional garb of the trade (the jeans, not the dinner jacket, and certainly not the dress tie) But what most warmed us all was when he said in his acceptance speech: “And finally I’m going to thank all the booksellers of the world. Remember, Brokeback Mountain was a book before it was a movie. From the humblest paperback exchange to the masters of the great bookshops of the world. All are contributors to the survival of the culture of the book. A wonderful culture, which we mustn’t lose.” McMurtry also dedicated his most recent trilogy to the used booksellers, as follows: “The Berrybender Narratives are dedicated to the secondhand booksellers of the Western world, who have done so much, over a fifty-year stretch, to help me to an education.” This sort of public acknowledgement of our place in the grand scheme of things makes up for a lot of the humiliation and indifference to which we have being subjected in the last few years, makes it a bit easier to deal with what will probably only become worse.

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.

My father, the banker, despised the book business and despaired of the life he foresaw for his son. But, he was in fact very pleased that his son was doing something he loved so much, and for which he had so much passion. As a banker his conservatism was a given, but in the 1950s – that most conservative time in the 20th century – his advice to me was: “Never mind the suit and tie, never mind respectability and security, find some work to do that you can love and do it as well as you can.” I thought that trite at the time but I don’t now. It was the best advice I could have had, even if I didn’t catch on for many years. And it remains the best advice I could give to any young person setting out now. For doing something you love makes up for everything the world will throw at you. 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.