Bookman's Log

Is it a Truth Universally Acknowledged?

2012-01-29T06:13:00.000-08:00

RARE! Details below

As I may have mentioned I’ve been working on a book about the American explorer John Ledyard for about a year. Basically, the “plot” of the book is that I trace an early journey of Ledyard’s - down the Connecticut river from Dartmouth College to Hartford – by walking along the river and meditating on John Ledyard as I go. His America in 1773 and our America now. You get the idea.

After dropping out of Dartmouth College, Ledyard secured a position as Corporal of the Marines aboard Captain Cook’s Resolution on its third and final voyage to the South Seas. In 1783 he returned to Hartford and wrote a narrative of his adventures with Cook. A Journal of Captain Cook’s Last Voyage was the first American travel book, and its account of Cook’s murder in Hawaii differed substantially from official British reports. It is now a rare and valuable book.

I’ve owned Ledyard’s Journal once before.

Early in the 1990s I got a call from a gentleman on the west coast. He told me he had an assortment of rare maritime voyages and, because he was moving to smaller quarters and had reached the limit of his interest in such books, he wished to dispose of his collection. The standard chitchat ensued, in the course of which he disclosed that he was happily married, the father of children with no interest in his library, and that he had little tolerance for auction gallery b.s. He simply, sensibly, wanted a fair price for his goods so he could get on with his move.

I asked him about the books.

He named half a dozen high spots in the literature – Hakluyt, Cook, Vancouver, several Drakes, Anson, Frobisher - then mentioned John Ledyard’s Journal of Captain Cook’s Last Voyage to the Pacific Ocean.

I’d heard of it, never seen it, but knew that it was a rarity. Furthermore I knew from studying the catalogs of my betters that it had been published with a map delineating Ledyard’s travels with Captain Cook, but that few copies containing the map had survived. (Ledyard, with typical lack of foresight, sold his groundbreaking copyright to his publisher, who probably elected to save a few dollars by omitting the map from the rest of the edition.)

“Does it have a map?”

“Why, yes. It does.”

“I’ll be there in two days.”

The gentleman turned out to be as reasonable as he’d sounded on the phone. I was able to purchase the library, including Ledyard’s book, which soon sold to an institution for what I thought at the time was a magnificent sum. I’d pay twice that to have it back now. It had the map.

So, over the past year, as I researched Ledyard and thought about his life, that book has been much on my mind. I wondered if I’d ever own another copy. Then, sure enough, one came my way.

My new copy lacks the map, as almost all copies do. It’s in a crummy black buckram binding and it’s trimmed close, with partial loss of a page number or two (indicating its prior owners had no idea of its value or importance, and just sent it off to a cheap binder, who butchered it). But it is indisputably genuine, and indisputably mine. For as short a while as possible.

This reminds me of an aspect of our trade that I’ve been wanting to comment on for quite some time. It was true when I had a retail shop. It was true when I was selling used books in quantity on the Internet. And it’s true now that I am dealing in (or attempting to deal in) rarities. It is simply this:

Any real money I’ve ever made at this game has come from a big find, a lucky hit, a long-awaited score. Whether it’s a library or a single book, the sale is clean and the profit huge. However, these opportunities are few and far between. True success in the business has always been a matter of managing my affairs in such a way that I avoid starving in the interval between one big find and the next.

Over the years I’ve spoken about this with colleagues at every level of the trade, from scouting yard sales to the international book and antique circuit, and they all agree. The real trick is finding a way to survive between those big hits. Maybe I’ll call it “Gibson’s First Law of Bookselling.” Or maybe I’ll put it in the Ledyard book, right at the beginning. “It is a truth universally acknowledged…”

At any rate, the Ledyard is headed for California, where I hope it soon finds a home.

Ledyard, John. A JOURNAL OF CAPTAIN COOK’S LAST VOYAGE TO THE PACIFIC OCEAN IN SEARCH OF A NORTHWEST PASSAGE... Nathaniel Patten. Hartford. 1783. 208 pp. First edition of one of the rarest American travels. “This adventurous American enlisted as a corporal of marines under Captain Cook, who was then about to sail on his third voyage... Not only was he the first New Englander in the Pacific, but he went there under... Cook, and was with him when Hawaii was discovered. Ledyard visualized in great detail how the northwest coast-China’s trade should be carried out... The author’s narrative... includes a detailed account of the death of Cook.” - Hill 991. Streeter 3477. Howes L-181. Old ink writing on title page, pages evenly tanned, but clean. Lacking map, which Howes says is “usually missing.” Rebound in modern black cloth. $20,000

Next week: Report from the San Francisco Book and Paper Show

The End Game

2012-01-23T08:11:00.000-08:00

I started this blog in June 2010, with the idea of making it a weekly record of my activities in the antiquarian book trade. And I’ve pretty much maintained that schedule. It’s just that some weeks are more active than others. This past week was one in which almost nothing happened. However, in keeping with my original intention, I’m making a record of it, too…

Spent all week packing for the SF/LA book fairs, a tedious procedure in which a few new items are hopefully cataloged, shined up, and put in mylar, and the remaining items – tired goods from past catalogs and fairs -- are sent like ageing streetwalkers into the world to try again. A rather depressing exercise, all in all. When it was done I had about 75 books and 200 flats – ephemera and the like -- in eight boxes. A little shy of $400K.
I drove these down to Washington DC, stopping Thursday night at a cheap motel outside Hartford. This wasn’t a rest stop. I usually do the 8 hour drive in one go. But I’ve got a writing project in hand, and I like to write in motels. So, after a walk through the snow to my favorite restaurant on Thursday night I put in a few hours of writing. Then another four hours the next morning. Hey, Nabokov wrote all his books in hotel rooms. My digs at “America’s Best Value Inn” would’ve done Humbert Humbert proud.

By Friday afternoon I was down in DC, delivering my load to John Thomson and Karen Griffin of Bartleby’s Books. They’re driving across the country to the fairs, and since we’re sharing a booth at both the San Francisco Book, Print & Ephemera Fair and California International Antiquarian Book Fair in Pasadena the next weekend, they kindly offered to chauffeur my books.

John and Karen have been through some changes of late. They lost their lease in Georgetown last year and decided to get out of retail and move their operation home. They refurbished their basement into a cozy and efficient work space and rented a couple of storage units to house what remained of their stock. Then they sat down and began quoting books to institutional and private customers. A catalog is coming soon. They’re making a go of it, but the transition has been hard work for them both.

They were on my mind during the ride back to Gloucester next day, and I had plenty of time to think about them, because I was driving through a snowstorm that covered the entire east coast. The trip took 11½ hours. Etta James had just died and, as I pushed my way north, I heard tributes to this wonderful singer on every college and NPR radio station in five states.

Maybe it was Etta’s death, or the Bartleby downsizing, or all the rolled over 18 wheelers and spun-out cars that sent my thoughts a strange direction, I don’t know. But the drive turned out to be a day-long meditation on the End Game. How will John and Karen exit this business? What comes after the move to the basement? What happens to Ten Pound Island Book Co. when I become too feeble for maniacal road trips?

Some people in this game have been careful enough to map out an exit strategy. Some have spouses with pensions. Some have been sufficiently disciplined to maintain IRAs. But many of my colleagues, I suspect, are like me. All our equity is tied up in our houses and our stock. Definitely not fungible assets. We plug along a day at a time. Our balance sheets are fairly healthy, but if something bad happened and we needed cash, we’d be in a tight spot.

This spring, when my new building across the street is finished, I reckon my monthly nut – including taxes, insurance and utilities -- will be increased by another $2500. There’s a 25 year mortgage on the place, so I’ll be hustling until I’m 91. And, seriously, folks. I don’t have a clue how I’m going to get that done.

I finished my white knuckle drive just as darkness was descending upon Gloucester, and I can’t tell you how good it felt to be home. By that time I’d come around to the happy realization that I do in fact have an end game, as simple and eloquent as the best financial planner could ever have put together. My retirement plan is to just keep working. My end game is to not stop.

And, as plans go, that one will work perfectly well until it no longer does.

So I suppose you could say I actually accomplished a lot this week.

Next week: California here we come!

Amazon’s Plan for Us (and Other Matters)

2012-01-15T09:10:00.001-08:00

Rare whaling pamphlet (see below)

I like to have lunch every week with my pal Anthony Weller. He’s a novelist whose latest effort, The Land of Later On, was purchased and published -- as an e-book -- by Amazon. This is part of Amazon’s entry into the publishing world which, knowing them as we now do, pretty much equates with taking over the publishing world. The question is how they plan to go about it. Based on Anthony’s weekly narration of the adventures and misadventures of his novel, a picture begins to emerge.

On the good side Amazon did a Kindle special sale promo of his book in the UK and it sold thousands of copies in a single day. This pushed the Kindle edition up in the Amazon ratings, which called it to the attention of more potential buyers, which resulted in more sales. This cascade effect lasted several weeks.

On the bad side they steadfastly refuse to send review copies to ANY of the trade publications or influential journals such as the New York Times Book Review. They insist that the Amazon peer review process, in which readers critique the book in short reviews (ranked in a 5 star system -- 0 stars, bad, 5 stars, good.) is sufficient.

Poor Anthony is driving himself crazy trying to figure the reason for this apparently self-defeating policy. Don’t they want his excellent novel reviewed? Wouldn’t that result in still more sales? Every time he asks Amazon he gets corporate robot double talk. But I’ve got an idea about what’s going on.

It is Amazon’s aim to completely subvert the traditional publishing process. Not sending out review copies signals their belief that literary journals and trade publications are becoming, and soon will be, obsolete and irrelevant.

Instead of paying Anthony a five figure advance, then spending more tens of thousands on production and marketing, and hoping against hope that his book can earn back its advance, Amazon pays Anthony a very low advance backed by a very generous royalty on electronic sales. Amazon has practically nothing invested in its Kindle edition, and it’s making a profit of three or four bucks a unit after paying Anthony his share. Supposing The Land of Later On ultimately sells 20,000 copies. That’s a hefty return on a minimal investment.

Multiply that by hundreds, or thousands -- once Amazon gets rolling with its program to sign mid-list writers -- and you can see what they’re up to. Almost all of those authors will at least break even. Most will return a good profit. Such a model kicks the stuffing out of the way business is done in traditional publishing. And, when you think of it, the whole concept proceeds from their experiment in letting self-published authors put their own “vanity” productions right up there on Amazon with the “real” books. Some genius of a bean counter took a look at the numbers this business generated, and saw the future.

Here’s the interesting part as far as we book dealers are concerned. As a sop to its hired authors, Amazon promises to publish a hard copy edition, at some time after the Kindle edition has been released. Inevitably, it will be a small edition. Why? Because no one in the traditional world even knows it exists -- remember, Amazon has refused to send review copies to Publisher’s Weekly, Library Journal, Kirkus Review, or any of the other standard trade organs. Furthermore, bookstore owners are so pissed at Amazon, they generally refuse to stock Amazon products.

Now, suppose The Land of Later On is recognized as a classic in fifty years. There will only be a few thousand, or even a few hundred copies of the first hard copy edition in existence.

Thus, the Modern First Edition dealer’s dream will have been fulfilled.

Prior to the Internet they made their livings plugging modern firsts as rare. The Internet exposed that as fallacious, and the Modern Firsts trade collapsed. Now, thanks in a roundabout way to the Internet, the Modern First Editions of the future truly will be rare, and the trade in them will skyrocket.

Too bad we won’t be around to see it.

On the “other matters” side of things, my excellent book Hubert’s Freaks is currently weighing in at #158,381 on the “Amazon Best Sellers Rank." The book is in large part about legendary American photographer Diane Arbus, and that pitiful ranking got me wondering if Arbus has become chopped liver among photo collectors.

The record sale price for a single Arbus photograph is about half a million dollars. Just recently Andreas Gursky (also mentioned in my book) took the world record for a photograph at $4.3 million. Here’s what the photo looked like. Nice, but I’ll take Arbus, thanks.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

Anon. PECHE FRANÇAISE DE LA BALEINE, DANS LES MERS DU SUD EN 1829. Havre. 1829/ b/w lithograph frontispiece and folding litho plate. 55, (1) pp. A rare pamphlet on French whaling. According to a prefatory note the text was originally published in an equally rare periodical, "Le Navigateur, Journal des naufrages." This edition is more than an offprint, having its own title page, pagination, and table of contents. It features a frontispiece lithograph from "Le Navigateur", and a handsome folding lithograph plate, measuring 8 1/4 x 12 inches, done for this edition by Periaux in Rouen. Not in Jenkins or Polak. According to Worldcat only the Bibliotheque National and University of Glasgow Library hold copies. A fine uncut copy bound in original blue wrappers. $2500

Half Full

2012-01-09T08:52:00.001-08:00

Ed Arno Archive (see below)

Poor old Hartford. Poor old Papermania. I just don’t know what to think about them anymore.

Traditionally the first and strongest ephemera show of each New Year, Papermania been ticking along since the 1980s. I’ve been doing it for twenty years or so. It took me at least ten years to figure out what “paper” even was, but I got my mind around the concept just in time. The Internet killed books, and ephemera took off. Ephemera was fun! Visual, visceral, and almost always unique, or close to it.

I eat breakfast every morning during the show at Papa’s, a little joint across from the train station.

Jane, the waitress, is a prodigy. She remembers every customer from the year before, and she remembers every order – “Two over easy, hash browns, tomato juice, coffee and wheat toast, right?” I ask her how it’s going. She says, “Hartford is dying.”

Maybe it is. I walk back from breakfast and all down the main drag I see big plate glass windows full of emptiness. Realtor’s signs trolling for tenants. Mc freaking Donald’s has shut down for lack of business.
The lovely old Goodwin Hotel is shuttered.Even the bums have left.

My worries are not lessened on the floor during setup at the show. We’re missing half a dozen dealers, with only a couple of newbies to replace them. There doesn’t seem to be much to buy unless I want first issue TV Guides, a zillion postcards, or tired $300 political broadsides priced at $750. Oh, and don’t forget two zillion snapshots. Vernacular photography. The new rage. The other new rage is to just dump them in your booth and let the buyer do the work of sorting and picking.

Sometimes it feels as if Papermania is on its way to becoming Toiletpapermania.

But then I find a cache of seventy-three letters from an American merchant in China to his girlfriend, 1860s, in the booth of Tom Stanford, who’s been missing so long I thought he was dead. But he wasn’t dead. He was pursuing his career as an artist and gallery owner, and covering half his body with eye-popping tattoos. And now he’s back. Salut, Tom!

Then an unrecorded shipwreck account, illustrated, eight pages long, imposed on its original folio sheet, folded, but uncut. A 1753 chart of the New England coastline I’ve never seen before, and the final terrific piece – out of my field, but who could resist? – an archive of one thousand original cartoons for the New Yorker and Playboy, along with ten New Yorker cover designs in color, a sheaf of correspondence, and an idea file of five hundred punch lines, prior to their illustrations, on file cards, by the great Peter Arno. A dealer is offering each item in the collection individually, but it occurs to my pal Lin Respess that some enterprising bookseller might buy the whole lot, as an archive. Which we do, at considerable expense.

Only to realize, after we’ve coughed up the dough, that the artist was Ed Arno, not Peter Arno. I point this out to Lin and he replies, “Who cares? They’re great!” A half full guy, if ever there was one. Coincidentally, colleague Rich West of Periodyssey, comes up to me right after this and thanks me for providing, in my blog, a corrective to his “perennially half-full mindset.” Jeepers. I didn’t think my blog entries were that bleak! Anyway, the Arno cartoons ARE great.

Then the show opens and the crowd is as large and hungry as it’s ever been. People fill booths, heads bent, muttering quietly, like monks at prayer.

And I wonder what I was worried about. We’ve come through another year. And we’re back in Hartford, under that same lovely bad lighting, in a paradise of paper, and all is as it should be.

Rich West’s glass is half full, and mine is… far from empty.

(Just FYI, the Arno archive is $22,500. And don't forget to check our website at http://tenpound.com/ for Maritime List #208 - "Wet Paper." This is a catalog devoted solely to maritime ephemera. No books!)

Time Travel for Dummies

2012-01-02T09:08:00.000-08:00

The Whaleship Essex Lost in Translation. See below

When my accountant said, “Hey, you’ve had another good year,” my response was, “You’ve got to be kidding!” But then, looking back, I remembered some happy referrals, several fascinating consignments and, in general, quite a bit of successful book scouting. Ten Pound Island’s invoices and check stubs (all digital!) told the story in detail. My "new business model," concocted so painfully over the past year, paid off. I dropped the California, Florida, and New York book fairs, cut expenses way back, moved from hard copy to web based catalogs, and quoted a lot more books using specially tailored, richly illustrated e-based catalogs.

About 400 transactions pushed income to a new high.

And what did I do with my riches? Signed up for the California, Florida, and New York book fairs, and went back to printed catalogs. As a result, my costs of goods and business expenses were a scary percentage of my income. Still, on paper at least, there was a surplus. I was left wondering, as I wonder every year, “Where did it all go?”

Well, among other things it went to paying down debt, to inventory, and to development costs for My Big Hole (the new gallery across the street) as well as toward funding my several writing projects, which consumed hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars in expenses – while grossing a cool $3750 for 2010.

A more perplexing question was, “Where did the time go?” It seems like just a few weeks ago I was sitting at this very desk, in front of this same computer, same coffee, same cup, writing my blog entry summarizing the year gone by. Now here I am again.

The feeling is less “Groundhog Day” than a kind of time travel, a state in which the only thing separating January 2, 2012 and January 2, 2011 is the thinnest membrane of a miraculous, selectively permeable fabric. Memories get through; sensations, thoughts, and feelings pass from then to now effortlessly. But my knees aren’t coming back, nor is that whaling log I should have bid on more boldly.

Another property of this strange boundary is the condensation of time. I reach through the membrane to grab a memory from last year, and find my hand full of 1990 or 1970. I watch my granddaughter dancing in the living room and I see my own daughter dancing in the same spot twenty-five years before. For the past few years I’ve been saving my date books. But it isn’t “the past few years.” Suddenly it’s a mighty tall stack.
All this puts me in mind of an excellent novel by colleague Stuart Bennett. It’s called A Perfect Visit and the “visit” involves excursions back through time to the eras of Jane Austen and William Shakespeare. There’s adventure, romance, and just enough bookish content to keep a smile on my face. Come to think of it, isn’t that kind of time travel every book dealer’s dream? Imagine walking into a printer’s workshop and picking up a First Folio! I don’t need to worry about spoiling the ending for you because I haven’t gotten there myself.

But that’s just a matter of time.

Meanwhile, back in the shop, the present churns away – a phenomenon for which I am, and will continue to be, most grateful. And grateful, too, for the cool things that come my way.

LE NAVIRE AMERICAIN LE SUSSEX CAPT. POLLARD ATTAQUE PAR UNE BALEINE MONSTRUEUSE... 1820. The whaleship Essex left Nantucket in 1819. On November 20, 1820, while cruising the offshore ground, the ship was rammed sunk by a large sperm whale. Twenty-one survivors set off in three whale boats for the coast of South America, 2000 miles to the east. The mate, Owen Chase, published an account of the harrowing sail which featured agonizing deaths, madness and cannibalism. His book, which Melville recieved from Chase’s nephew during his whaling career, accounted for the key plot point in Moby Dick. The incident became one of the best known sea stories, inspiring the likes of Philbrick’s “In the Heart of the Sea.” This is a rare early French lithograph, probably contemporary with news of the incident. Charmingly, in the excitement of the moment, it has the name of the ship wrong - “Sussex” instead of “Essex” - and shows a baleen whale rather than a sperm whale ramming the ship. Rare. Not in Brewington. No holding on Worldcat. Image size 12 1/4 x 16 1/2. There are a few spots of light abrasion on the right end of the caption, partially obscuring the name of the lithographer. Otherwise this print is in very good condition, with rich, strong tones and generous original margins. $4000

All I Want for Xmas is a Droid with Apps

2011-12-24T05:10:00.000-08:00

Here is my blog entry from last Christmas, back by popular demand. It made people smile a year ago, and I hope it rings in a chuckle this time, too. Happy holidays! We'll see you on the other side.

I’m old, and have made peace with myself, mostly. I suppose you could call it “set in my ways.” Hence, I feel no need to adjust my wardrobe choices to the dictates of whatever modern fashion might be sweeping the country at the moment. For the past thirty or forty years I’ve worn loose-cut jeans, plain or striped oxford shirts, and well-broken-in jogging shoes. I keep my cell phone in the left pocket of my pants, along with my car keys. No cell pouch. No man bag.

I own a modern primitive cell phone. I bought it a few months ago because my old phone, which was as battle worn as Han Solo’s Millenium Falcon, died…R.I.P. When I went into the Verizon store I told the kid I wanted the simplest model he had, that I didn’t want to do anything on it except make and receive telephone calls. He nodded knowingly and put me into whatever geezer model Verizon was offering at the time.

But even that phone was way more precocious than I wanted it to be. It was like having a sinister bug or a hyperactive child in my pocket. It loves to take pictures of the inside of my jeans and is constantly beeping and chirping when it bumps up against whatever else happens to be in that pocket. When I yank it out and flip it open to try to quiet it, a voice comes out of it and asks me “What would you like to do?” The first few times I shouted back at it, “I’d like you to shut the fuck up.” That didn’t work. The wife of a colleague has a phone like mine with duct tape up and down the sides. The tape covers the holes where the buttons had been. She told me the most fun was digging the buttons out with a strong, sharp needle. It empowered her.

Usually, the phone in my pocket bumps up against my key ring. The key ring contains the key to my car which, like my cell phone, enjoys doing things on its own. Last night I went out on the porch for a smoke and it all came clear to me. My phone was making noises and photographing the inside of my pocket. I reached down to throttle it, and bumped into my car key, which promptly locked, or unlocked my car. At that moment I was able to imagine a day in the not-too-distant future when the book trade has slowed and I spend more time on my porch, saddled with more and more “smart” devices that, just by wiggling my butt in my chair, will be able to lock my car, take a picture of my pocket, start my oil burner, turn on my TV, order some new goods or services from Amazon, speed up my pacemaker, download sports results, and cast my ballot for the winner of Dancing with the Stars.

Future, here I come!

He's Got a Scrooge Loose

2011-12-18T07:26:00.001-08:00

Almost Christmas. Flurries outside my window. Sweet scent of balsam fir from our little tree downstairs.

I can feel my inner Scrooge coming to life as it does this time every year, rather like the monster in Alien bursting out of that poor spaceman’s abdomen. Kane, his name was. Just before the creature exploded from his innards he was euphoric, and very, very hungry. Kept exclaiming how delicious the grub was. I’ve been eating a lot lately, myself. Everything seems tasty!

So maybe it’s just me, but I’m getting awfully fed up with the landslide of Christmas catalogs and Special Holiday Sales on offer from my colleagues. They’re all as tacky, tasteless, and predictable as plastic Santas at the mall.

Without fail the rich guys want to hook you up with a Winnie the Pooh, or House at Pooh Corner, first editions, five figures, or the entire Pooh oeuvre in morocco for about the same. Don’t get me wrong. I loved Pooh when I was very young. I even named my dog Pooh, much to the delight of the neighborhood bullies. Various James Bonds, for sure. Eloise in her jacket is mandatory, as are the Grinch and assorted other Seusses, Jane Austen and Frankenstein first editions, bumping up into six figures. And how can we forget Dickens and his parts? Oy.

Then there are the Holiday Specials offered online by the not-so-rich-guys. As in, “Special Holiday Sale!! 50% off on ALL books under $10.” Good only through the holidays, of course. As if they wouldn't give their eye teeth to be rid of that crap any day of the year.

Gimme a break. It is a fact that people generally don’t buy used or rare books for Christmas. Unlike the retail new book trade, where December can be the month that generates the profit for an entire year, no used or rare book dealer ever turned giant numbers on Black Friday. Collectors, bibliophiles and gentle readers are much more likely to pleasure themselves with books after the holidays. The week between Christmas and New Year’s eve was also good, as I recall from my retail days at Ten Pound Island Book Co.

Helen Kelly of Boston Book Company, Ken Gloss of the Brattle Book Shop, Joe Phillips of Commonwealth Books, and Peter Stern of eponymous represent a pretty good spread in the retail trade, from used to rare, and they heartily confirmed my opinion at lunch last week. People simply do not buy gobs of used & rare at Xmas.

Why hog up holiday bandwidth or murder trees with your cheesy attempts to cash in on L.L. Bean’s market? Leave that to Harry and David.

Lunch was our reward, as Boston Book Fair Committee members, for paying Boston parking fees in order to spend two hours dissecting last November’s successful Boston International Antiquarian Book Fair and scheming on how to improve next November’s event.

One of the byproducts of the recent book fair was a video short produced by Nina See of Commonwealth Promotion. It gives a wonderful overview of the Boston fair and of antiquarian book fairs in general. Check it out.

You’ll notice that, consistent with my Scrooge take on holiday commerce, I am not offering any goodies from Ten Pound Island Book Co. this week.

Instead, I’ll leave you with another link. This one about “happiness” – as in “Happy Holidays” from one of my favorite writers, Jenny Diski.

And seriously, folks… Thanks for being such wonderful customers, colleagues, and friends. I feel truly blessed because of you, and wish you a healthy and, yes, happy 2012.

Showing Up for Work

2011-12-11T09:01:00.000-08:00

Captain of the China trade ship Vancouver takes on three chests of opium. See below.

In the past couple of weeks I’ve bid on multiple items at auctions in Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Ohio, and New York. Just about everything I bid on sold -- not to me -- at what I considered high retail prices. When all was said and done, my only purchase was a 17th century English pamphlet on the fisheries. If I make $200 on it I’ll be a genius.

I have noted before that the ascendancy of the Internet and the resulting decline in the retail bricks and mortar book trade has been accompanied by, and is possibly related to, the precipitous rise of auction houses in the rare book and manuscript market -- most notably Christie’s and Sotheby’s, but also dozens of second-tier firms, as well as Internet auctions like eBay.

All these venues offer the attractive illusion of transparency and of sales driven purely by market forces. In fact, all kinds of shenanigans go on behind the podium, but the auction industry as a whole has been very successful in promoting auction houses as honest brokers in an open market. Where, a generation earlier, private collections and estates might have been consigned to book or antique dealers, now they are routinely sent to auction.

Because of the Internet there is, at least in theory, no auction whose contents can not be universally known. There are even web sites that connect you with online catalogs of every auction in the country. Now that auction houses have followed eBay’s lead and commenced online bidding, I don’t even have to leave my computer to be outbid by customers with more money than brains.

I still place bids, but my expectations are low. If I had to rely on auctions as my primary source of new material, I’d starve.

Meanwhile, I blunder bravely on, throwing up a new blog entry every week, dropping Twitter and Facebook notes here and there, distributing thousands of catalogs a year at book fairs all around the country, posting Internet only e-lists, and sending out traditional hard copy catalogs with links to extra-illustrated online iterations.

And once in a while, I’ll have a week like the one I just had, and I’ll think that maybe, just maybe, I’m doing something right.

Over the past eight days, while I’ve been getting my butt kicked at auction, I’ve managed to purchase from private individuals
Drake’s Universal Collection of Voyages, Brandt’s 1698 biography of Admiral de Ruyter, a clean “spare parts” copy (lacking title page and folding map) of Montanus and Ogilby’s magisterial Atlas Japannensis,an American China trade journal from the 1840s, the journal of a surgeon on an American merchant ship during the capture of Buenos Aires in 1806, and a colored lithograph, “View of New Bedford,” circa 1846, by Fitz Henry Lane.

Every one of these transactions, except for the purchase of the lithograph, came about because the seller had seen comparable material on my web page, had googled similar items from catalogs archived on my website, or had been referred to the Ten Pound Island web page by someone else.

Each year the Internet becomes a bigger part of my business. And if the web is reducing my chances of success at auction, it seems to be compensating by attracting the attention of an ever-wider range of people. I don’t really know how or why this happens, and I don’t know how to increase the beneficial aspects of the Internet except by trial and error -- by finding new ways to get text and images out there in front of people; by using the technology to find new people; by trying communicate to them the excitement of the wonderful material that comes my way. The truth is, I don’t know what I’m doing, but I’m doing it as hard as I can.

Sometimes it seems as if the most important thing is just showing up for work every day.

Brandt, Gerard. LA VIE DE MICHEL DE RUITER, DUC, CHEVALIER, LIEUTENANT AMIRAL GENERAL DE HOLLANDE & DE OÜEST-FRISE. Amsterdam. 1698. b/w full and double page engraved plates. Folio. (4), 717, (17) pp. First French edition of this biography of the famous admiral de Ruyter, who vanquished the French and English in the Anglo-Dutch wars. “De Ruyter” is actually an adopted name - “the Raider.” He was also a successful whaler. This is a very nice copy, bound in old full calf with gilt spine decorations and spine label. Text and plates (three of them are sea battles) are fresh and clean. Front hinge cracked at bottom but holding. $2000

Drake, Edward Cavendish. A NEW UNIVERSAL COLLECTION OF AUTHENTIC AND ENTERTAINING VOYAGES AND TRAVELS. Lon. 1770. b/w plates, maps. Folio. 706 pp. “A collection of voyages and relations of experiences by travelers from the time of the Portuguese navigators to the middle of the eighteenth century, including those of Magellan, Drake, Cavendish, Olivier van Noort, William Dampier, Woodes Rogers, John Clipperton, George Anson and Lionel Wafer.” Hill 492. The buccaneers are well represented in this 18th century compilation. Handsomely bound in half antique style morocco over boards. Two of the plates have been partially, clumsily, colored. Otherwise a good copy, complete with 64 maps and plates. $1500

Montanus Arnoldus and John Ogilby (translator). ATLAS JAPANNENSIS: BEING REMARKABLE ADDRESSES BY WAY OF EMBASSY FROM THE EAST-INDIA COMPANY OF THE UNITED PROVINCES, TO THE EMPEROR OF JAPAN Lon. 1670 b/w engraved plates. Folio. (2), 486 pp. First English edition of first major work about Japan. This copy lacks the title page, folding map of Osaka, and final leaf (pp. 487-488). The twenty-four double page plates and seventy half page engravings are present. Bound in half calf over boards, with spine label. $2000

VIEW OF NEW BEDFORD. FROM THE FORT NEAR FAIRHAVEN. FITZ HENRY LANE. Hand colored lithograph. A lovely view of the harbor, by America’s great luminist painter. Original colors are strong. A few spots of foxing and one small abrasion in the upper right quadrant, else very good condition. $4500

Manuscript. (China Trade). JOURNAL OF EUSTIS BACON, SALEM, MASS. ABOARD SHIPS GAMBIA AND VANCOUVER, 1844-1848. Folio. Unpaginated. Approximately 250 pp. manuscript entries. This is the personal journal of Eustis Bacon of Salem Mass., in which he records his voyages on the brig Gambia, 1844-1846, and the ship Vancouver, 1847-1848, as well as his activities ashore between and after these trips. An excellent account of the American China trade as it existed between the two Opium Wars, narrated by an intelligent, chronically depressed, observer. $3500

Manuscript. A PRIVATE DAILY JOURNAL KEPT ON BOARD THE SHIP PIGOU, BY JAMES WATSON, SURGEON. JUNE 1806 - MARCH 1807. Small 4to. Unpaginated. About 200 pp. manuscript entries. According to Fairburn p. 2767 the Pigou was a 359 ton ship built in Philadelphia in 1783. Watson’s journal contains an account of the British invasions of the Río de La Plata during which a detachment from the British army occupied Buenos Aires for forty-six days, then were evicted by Spanish troops. Watson’s medical entries are quite specific as to malady and remedy, and make up a good part of the journal. As well as military and medical action, a vigorous slave trade is taking place during the months the Pigou is detained in port. Watson also keeps track of the books he is reading, which include such diverse materials as the Naval Chronicle and Fanny Hill! Binding broken, old calf covers detached but present. $4500

Wool Gathering Season

2011-12-05T07:34:00.001-08:00

"Wet Paper" -- More below

I love the interval between Thanksgiving and the New Year. I love to watch the world pull back inside itself, awaiting winter’s rigors. The lowering sun; the late afternoon blaze of orange through gray clouds; the cheering wood stove (soon to wear out its welcome); the holiday feeds; the Sunday couch-potato football games; the silhouettes of naked trees against the sky, each reaching for the sun in its own expressive way.

I’ve got a stack of receivables that will trickle in over the next six weeks -- enough to see me through the holidays. And I must confess, although I’m excited by the idea of my next catalog, an assemblage of maritime ephemera to be called “Wet Paper,” I have little desire to work on it. The same goes for my next book. I’m deep into the third chapter, but am finding it difficult to bang out the necessary letters, words, sentences and paragraphs. There’s an old saw about writing that has to do with applying one’s ass to the seat of the chair every day. Believe me, after forty-five years of practice, I’ve got the chair amply covered. But in this season, the moment ass hits chair, brain wanders off.

I find myself staring out the window for extended periods, watching my son and his crew work on the new Flatrocks Gallery building across the street – known to all, for obvious reasons as “My Big Hole.”
Occasionally I’ll return to consciousness in the midst of some strange, uncharacteristic activity, like organizing my files or cleaning my room, and wonder, along with the Talking Heads, “Well, how did I get here?” I spend hours wondering who will bat cleanup for the Red Sox next year, or pouring over high end auctions and rich-guy vanity catalogs daydreaming about material that that would cost me a year’s gross income.

I’m reading Moby Dick again. I guess that says it all.

Occasionally, in the midst of my day dreaming, I’ll realize once again how lucky I am to be self employed. No clock to punch, no boss standing over my shoulder, no performance standards to meet. I’m free to spend my time as I wish and, by God, if I wish to stare out the window for an hour at a stretch, I’ll do it.

Thus I puttered through most of November and the beginning of December, not really getting much done, but enjoying the mellow feelings that accompany this time of year for me. Then one night I read chapter XXXV in Moby Dick, called “The Mast-Head,” in which Melville describes a man keeping watch from the masthead, slipping into a distracted, philosophical reverie not unlike my own, and losing himself in a waking dream. Here’s how it ends:

“There is no life in thee now, except that rocking life imparted by a gently rolling ship… But while this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror. Over Descartian vortices you hover. And perhaps, at mid-day, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek, you drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise for ever.”

That was when it all came rushing back to me with a half-throttled shriek.

Cash flow!

Who am I kidding with all this talk of reveries? I’m like a small creature of the fields. I have so little mass that I must eat constantly to maintain my metabolism. Nothing wrong with a bit of sitting around, but if I gobble through that stack of receivables and there’s nothing behind it, I’m going to be in big trouble in the early months of 2012.

Colleague Rusty Mott describes the experience as a pendulum swing between complacency and terror. There’s little margin for delusion, less for self indulgence. One simple jolt of reality is a better motivator than any boss could ever be. These are the true benefits of self employment.

Back to “Wet Paper” for me…
Print. (Currier & Ives). AMERICAN WHALERS CRUSHED IN THE ICE. Handcolored lithograph. Paper size 12 ¼ x 15 ½ inches. Image size 8 ½ x 11 ¼ inches. This is an iconic image of Arctic whaling, capturing a sense of the devastation that resulted when, in 1871, thirty-three whaleships were crushed in the ice north of the Bering Strait. The subtitle reads, “Burning the wrecks to avoid danger to other vessels.” Brewington 5 says the image is attributed to William Bradford. Judged one of the “Best 50” Currier & Ives prints by the American Historical Print Collectors Society (AHPCS). The print is in good condition. Paper lightly tanned, colors strong. In old frame with glass.(Causing reflections in this image) $1750

Kendall, Edmund Hale. THE WONDERFUL ADVENTURES OF ABEL SAMPSON, RELATED BY HIMSELF; WRITTEN BY EDMUND HALE KENDALL. Lawrence City (MA). 1847. b/w engraved frontis. 12mo. 91, (4) pp. First edition of a rare account by an American seaman. He was born in Maine in 1790 and first went to sea on a merchant schooner in 1808. The next year he was pressed on board a British Man of War. He escaped and worked on a slaver for a time, shipped on the privateer Saratoga in 1812, then did a second, more successful tour on the Yorktown before being captured by the British. These adventures were followed by tours in the European, India, and West Indies trades. He swallowed the anchor in 1820, and went back to his original trade as a carpenter. Howes S-59. Not in Smith. Bound in original pictorial wrappers. Some chipping and old sewing loose, but still a good copy of a book that is quite scarce in the trade. The last copy for which I can find a record sold in 1979. $750

Used Books of the Future

2011-11-27T07:20:00.000-08:00

Sunday was a huge day for me.

At 7:55 a.m. I emailed my editor the corrected text of my novel, The Old Turk’s Load. This would be a happy event under any circumstances, marking, as it did, the completion of a long piece of writing, but in this case the occasion was given extra meaning by the fact that I had been working on the novel for forty-two years.

I began it as a short story when I was in the Navy in 1969. The story circulated among my swabbie buddies who liked it, and encouraged me to continue. I developed a basic theme, and pecked away at it for the rest of my Navy years, then in earnest when I was discharged, living on unemployment and welfare rations. When it was done I sent it in “over the transom” as they say -- no agent, no advance notice, no one to represent it -- to several publishers. In 1971 it was rejected by Pyramid Press in New York. Unlike the other publishers to whom I'd submitted the manuscript, they’d taken the trouble to accompany their rejection with a detailed letter explaining how the book, in their view, could be improved. They said they thought I had potential and invited me to come to New York and discuss the writing business with them.

Instead of being crushed by the rejection or thrilled by the invitation, I was angry. Who were they to think they could mess with my Deathless Prose? Come to New York? Fat chance! Let them hire themselves some other lackey.

Family life and a bookselling career ensued, both severe distractions, but that novel kept nagging me. I made another start on it in 1975, but wandered off course. Then again in 1985. The thing just wouldn’t take shape.

My son got killed in 1992 and to keep from going crazy I investigated his murder. This resulted in a book, a very good book, called Gone Boy that has been in print since 1999. In April 2011, the third edition was published, with a new introduction. This was followed by Demon of the Waters in 2002, for which I received a good whack of dough (those were the days!), and then by Hubert’s Freaks -- which was probably the most fun I ever had writing anything -- in 2008.

Each of these books was generously reviewed by critics and largely ignored by the American public -- I prefer now to think of them as “cult classics.” But the point was made. I could consider myself, with some justification, as a writer. In a way that would make Robert Frost proud, I had integrated my avocation as a writer with my vocation as a bookseller.

I was making used books of the future.

Other projects came and went, but that novel was still back there, bugging me in its incompleteness. In 2007 I had a huge breakthrough with the plot, and got the book to where the first half of it was alive, anyway.

Then, after Hubert’s Freaks came out I said, “All right, dammit. I don’t want to die wishing I’d have finished my novel. This time I’m going to get it DONE.”

So I stuck with it, working on it up in Nova Scotia on my summer trips, in my writing shed in Ireland when we went there each spring, and in a thousand identically anonymous motel and hotel rooms as my book travels took me around America. Early in 2010, I thought I had it, only to realize it was still fatally flawed. I worked on it, hard, all that summer, and by the fall it was finally, indubitably, finished.

By that time, of course, the traditional fiction market had collapsed, along with most of the publishing industry as we knew it. I sent the manuscript to my agent and she sent it back. Sorry, she said, I can’t sell this.

But other changes had affected the industry, and these worked in my favor. I came up with a book design, got my son to execute it on his fancy computer, stole some cover art from a wonderful old pulp fiction thriller, and sent it up to a printer in Maine. A few weeks later I had two hundred copies of a classic looking pulp novel – my novel – to be sent out to friends as that year’s Christmas present.

On a whim, I sent a few copies to publishers who specialized in the kind of stuff I was writing, and much to my surprise and delight, one of them bought it.

The book will be coming out in 2012, published by Mysterious Press at Grove Atlantic.

At last the weight has been lifted from my shoulders. I think I’ll take the rest of the day off.

Catalog as Collage

2011-11-20T06:40:00.000-08:00

Ross' Appendix. (See below)

Jed Birmingham is the son of an old family friend, and we became friends through our shared interest in the works of Charles Olson. Jed is a lawyer in DC, I think. I see him every spring at the Washington Antiquarian Book Fair, and at other east coast shows. I know he reads and collects postmodern lit so I sent him my catalog Olson in Print, which he enjoyed mightily. When I talked to him at the recent Boston antiquarian book fair he gave me a copy of the journal he is editing.

It’s called Mimeo Mimeo and, though it claims on its masthead to be primarily concerned with artists’ books, typography and the mimeo revolution, it has a lot more going on than that. The issue he gave me, "No. 5," contained articles about Robert Creeley’s library, Bukowski’s ascent to fame, record albums of modern poets, and Chicago poet Alice Notley. There was a lovely piece about Ed Budowski’s ultimately tragic devotion to his Buffalo gallery and press, and an article by colleague Bill Stewart about how he and Vicky started Vamp & Tramp, foremost purveyors of artists’ books in the country today.

It was a lovely mag. I was proud of Jed and delighted to see how far he’d taken his dream. But there was something else about Mimeo Mimeo that fascinated me.

In its look and feel, its broad intelligence, and its paratactic approach to subject matter, it was surprisingly reminiscent of two other things I’ve been reading lately: Catalog 13 by Lorne Bair,

and Catalog 11 – Printed & Manuscript Americana by Ian Brabner.

Yes, I know. As old fashioned categories go, one is a literary magazine and the other two are booksellers’ catalogs. But based on the evidence of production values and intellectual range, they’re more alike than they are different.

This raises an interesting possibility.

Everyone can see the book business is changing. This is probably its most dynamic era since the days of Gutenberg. But no one has any idea what it will change into. Jed, Lorne, Ian, and colleagues like Brian Cassidy or Adam Davis (Division Leap Books - about whom I blogged last year) may be showing us a way into the future.

The article in Jed’s magazine about Alice Notley begins with a discussion of the difference between “editing” and “curating” – a word Notley cordially and charmingly detests. She says, “Curator is a pukey word suggesting someone in an expensive suit with a clunky amber necklace.” Her definition made me laugh, but it got me thinking.

The Internet diminishes the book’s traditional function as a transmitter of information. The book becomes increasingly a marker of cultural value, more and more an art object, like a painting or an antique vase. As this inevitable change occurs, we book dealers will cease to be purveyors of masses of informational text, and become artisinal consultants, assisting clients in the acquisition of books-as-art-objects. Think of it this way. When everyone had horses, every town had blacksmiths. When cars replaced horses mechanics replaced blacksmiths and blacksmiths, if they survived at all, survived as artisans.

So, whether we like the words or not, booksellers become more artisinal. Their catalogs are less edited and more curated – not in the sense of clunky amber necklaces, but as the selection and arrangement of works that are already complete in themselves.

Catalog 11 and Catalog 13 are as much statements of individual taste as Jed Birmingham’s Mimeo Mimeo.

I’d like to see this trend continue. The selection of objects to sell and the narrative description of these objects can be as artful as the composition of any avant garde magazine. As the book morphs from information container to art object and the bookseller from merchant to artisan, the bookseller’s catalog has the possibility to be more an expression of the bookseller’s individual taste and creativity. More like a collage.

More like a work of art.

And speaking of catalogs, our Maritime List 207 is now available on our website at Ten Pound Island Book Co. The illustration at the top of this page, "Ross' Appendix" is from item #48.

Ross, John. NARRATIVE OF A SECOND VOYAGE IN SEARCH OF A NORTH-WEST PASSAGE... (AND) APPENDIX TO THE NARRATIVE OF A SECOND VOYAGE IN SEARCH OF A NORTH-WEST PASSAGE... Lon. 1835. Color and b/w plates, charts, fldg map. 4to. 2 vols. xxxiii, (1), 740; xii, 120, cixiv, cii pp. “...and of a residence in the Arctic regions during the years 1829...1833.” During this expedition, which lasted through 4 Arctic winters, Ross discovered the magnetic north pole. First edition. With 31 plates and charts, several colored. The Appendix, though it styles itself as such, was published and issued separately from Ross’ narrative, and it is scarcer than that work. It concerns the Eskimos and natural history of the areas Ross explored, and features 12 color and 8 b/w plates of natives and animals. Also included are biographical sketches of expedition members. Abbey 636. Arctic Bib. 14866. Hill 1490. Both volumes are bound in original patterned cloth. The “Appendix” is in VG condition; the spine to the other volume has been laid down, and shows light wear. A corner has been cut from the frontispiece of the main volume, without affecting the image. The plates in both volumes are clean, showing some tanning and foxing, as usual. The color plates are rich and deep. A Very Good set overall, not often found together in original bindings. $1500

The Pressure to Perform

2011-11-14T07:19:00.001-08:00

Not "Night of the Living Dead" - it's the scrum at the booth of Brattle Books during setup, starring Nicole Reiss

This was, by most accounts, a good Boston Book Fair. Not an all-time great, but not a disaster. Pleasant weekend weather, vigorous promotion, and the lovely human capacity to ignore looming global fiscal catastrophe resulted in frisky, interested crowds all three days of the fair.

Not a convention of undertakers - it's the frisky crowd on opening night

Let us pause a moment to consider this “promotion” issue. Show promoter Betty Fulton (Commonwealth Promotions), and the show’s Godfather Ken Gloss (Brattle Books), were tireless in their efforts at outreach and education in the greater Boston area. Radio spots ran regularly on WBUR, the Boston FM station most attuned to the book collector demographic. Both Fulton and Gloss used October’s widely attended Boston Book Festival (new books) to publicize our own old book “festival” at the Hynes. Dealers like Peter Stern, Commonwealth Books, and Boston Book Co. added to the drum beat, and even non-participating firms like Buddenbrooks made sure their local customers knew about the fair.

Most importantly, promoter and local dealers distributed hundreds, if not thousands, of free passes to the fair. This resulted in a strong showing by the under-forty crowd, upon whom we pin so many of our hopes for the continued health of our trade. The way Gloss explained it, these people might not want to spend $15 to get in to an antiquarian book fair, but with a free ticket the event becomes a destination, a convenient downtown location at which to meet friends, have a drink, and see (perhaps even purchase) some cool books. All this, mind you, is coming out of the pocket of the promoter in terms of potential revenue at the gate. But Betty shrugs it off, preferring to concentrate her efforts on building a stronger event. In fact, according to one of my cub reporters, Peter Stern, attendance was up a bit this year, edging 3500.

The Hynes is a pleasant, roomy venue, and Boston’s location makes our event a convenient stop for European dealers, who invariably add interesting material and good looking women to the mix on the floor. For some reason, perhaps because of Boston’s slightly provincial character, the “pressure to perform” is less than at Los Angeles, say, or New York. Also, this fair’s excellent comfort level arises from the fact that we’ve been in the same venue, with the same promoter, for a decade. The men and women who work the floor during move-in and move-out know the drill because they’ve been doing it for years. Many faces on the staff are recognizable from past fairs, and their relations with exhibitors are likely to be friendly and cooperative rather than adversarial – as they are at a show like Baltimore, where the promoter is new and many of the workers don’t “get it.”

In any event, I would go so far as to say that there are moments when the Boston Book Fair almost seems fun.

Bernice Bornstein and Mardges Bacon

And speaking of fun, the “shadow show” over at the Park Plaza Castle Saturday morning was its usual goofy, poorly lit, but somehow exhilarating book-mosh. According to promoter Bernice Bornstein, setup was as chaotic as ever - saved, in the end, by the heroic efforts of volunteers Bill Hutchison and Garry Austin. The gates opened at 8 AM and a swarm of ravenous, slightly hung over dealers from the Hynes gobbled their way through the books on offer. Exhibitors I spoke with echoed the “good, not great” assessment coming from the bigger fair.

The only tussle I heard about involved a dealer who had a bone to pick with Bill Hutchison. It seemed, in this dealer’s paranoid version of how things proceed, Hutch had given him a bad booth and therefore he’d had a lousy show. Well, here’s a news flash, boyo. You had a lousy show because you had lousy books. End of story.

The end of the story for me came, fittingly, in the last hour of the book fair at the Hynes, during which time two hefty sales nudged my book fair questionnaire answer from “met expectations” to “exceeded expectations” and relieved, momentarily at least, that nasty old pressure to perform.

Here's one of my books that never quite made it off the lot:

LOG OF THE WHALING BARK JOHN CARVER. MAY 31 1875 - MAY 16, 1879. Folio, approximately 200 pp. manuscript entries. Complete log of a voyage to the Pacific and New Zealand. It has no whaling stamps, however two things set it apart. Midway through the voyage, a greenhand recruit named Joseph Fry went crazy, and the log follows his descent in dispassionate, grotesque, detail. This was a bad voyage for captains. The first Captain, Aaron Dean, died of a heart attack. All three of his replacements got sick and were sent ashore, and all of this is recorded in the log - including picking up Capt. Dean’s body at Talcahuano for shipment home, three years after his death. This log comes with original shipping papers, signed by each of the crew, with position aboard and lay specified, as well as a manuscript contract, signed by each crewman, agreeing to the terms of the voyage. These included charges for the medicine chest, insurance, interest on advances, guarantee of cargo and guarantee of pay (an astonishing 2½ %). Though such agreements were regularly struck with crews, particularly in later whaling days, documentation is scarce. $7500

The Eyes Have It

2011-11-07T08:15:00.001-08:00

Rare 18th century American whaling log. Details below

Next weekend, November 11-13, the 35th Boston International Antiquarian Book Fair will be held at the Hynes Convention Center. I’ve been busy for a week preparing to exhibit at this event.

After a spring and summer of provincial fairs (the last American ABAA/ILAB book fair was in April in New York) the Boston show provides an excellent opportunity to sift through acquisitions of the past six months, and do whatever is necessary to present them at a major league venue. Mostly this involves research and cataloging – describing each item accurately in terms of condition and bibliographic information. But it’s equally important to compose a concise narrative that places the item in history and explains why a potential buyer should spend his money to own it. A little Mylar and book grease help, and of course good paper people and binders are essential. I use Green Dragon and Currier Bindery .

After a week of thrashing around, I’ve selected roughly $475,000 worth of goods - about $100,000 on consignment, $75,000 co-owned with other dealers, and the rest mine. I like the stuff I’ll be exhibiting; in fact I’m damned proud of it. There are a few high spots, but I can’t really afford to play that game, so most of my material is offbeat, outside the box, and almost certainly not being offered on the Internet by dozens of other dealers.

It’s wonderful stuff. But experience has taught me not to have high expectations for this book fair, or for any book fair, in terms of sales. Given the quality of my stock, I might have sales in the mid-five figures. I might even bump into six figures. But it’s equally possible that I might sell just thousands in Boston, or even hundreds. It’s happened before.

I do my best to describe my material, display it in an attractive manner, and engage potential customers. Beyond that the matter is out of my hands, so I try to forget about sales.

When I see someone who is genuinely interested in the material I have on offer, there’s always something to talk about, and the conversation flows effortlessly – both ways, not just from salesman to victim. Usually these conversations are nothing more than conversations, and that’s fine. They help pass the time. But it happens often enough that, even if I don’t sell five figures at a big show, I’ll meet someone who will spend five figures with me over the years. I might even meet someone who has books like mine to sell. One of the best calls I’ve ever gotten happened in New York when man walked into my booth, saw a copy of Chase’s “Narrative of the most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex” and said, “I’ve got one of those.”

Which brings me to the meat of this essay. The most important thing about these fancy book fairs is that – as Willy Sutton said about banks and money – they are where the books are. I have no idea how much I’ll make selling my goods, but I can be certain I’ll see books I’ve never seen before. I’ll see books and manuscripts presented in ways and contexts that had never occurred to me. I’ll see prices that make me gasp, then double gasp when I see the item get sold.

Book fairs are my education. They are, as Melville said about his life on a whale ship, “my Harvard and my Yale.” But that’s not all.

I’m going to be looking hard, as I walk that floor, for items that I can buy and resell. There are tens of thousands of items of offer; no one can see them all. With any luck I’ll sell a good portion of what I buy on the floor, immediately, to other dealers.

I’ll be putting my Boston Book Fair stock in boxes tomorrow, getting ready to carry them to the Hynes. As I put each one away I’ll say good bye to it, and good bye to the expectation that it will sell next weekend - goodbye to any thought of sales - so that when I walk onto that floor Friday morning at setup, I’ll be clean as a whistle. Undistracted. All eyes.

And if, Saturday afternoon, a customer approaches me and complains that he’s found no interesting maritime books or documents to buy at this fair, I’ll commiserate with him. But I’ll be smiling inside, because that means I’ve done my job.

He’ll be seeing the good stuff in my next catalog.

Here’s an example:

LOGS OF THE WHALE SHIPS HARLEQUIN AND LEVIATHAN, BROOKHAVEN, NY TO DAVIS STRAIT, 1768 AND 1769. Folio, unpaginated. About 200 pp. manuscript entries. This log was kept by a New York man named Nicholas Bailey. The first whaling journal documents a voyage aboard the “Sloop Harlikin from New York” bound for “Davises Strates a Wailing.” June 17, 1768 - Sept. 23, 1768. It ends “att Nantuckit Bar.” It is followed immediately by “a journal of our intended Voige on Bord of the good Schooner Leviathen Jonathan Worth Master… from Brook Haven [Long Island, NY] to Davises Strates a Waleing.” The voyage began May 8, 1768 and ended November 4, 1768. Unlike the prior voyage, this one was very successful. The entry for September 13 gives what I believe to be the first description of a “Nantucket Sleigh Ride” aboard an American whaler.

American whaling logs of this vintage are rare. Sherman cites only seventeen pre-1800 held in American institutions. Very few pre-Revolutionary American logs have ever been offered in the trade, and most of these have been in poor condition or incomplete. The log of the Susanna, 1784, sold at Swann’s in the second Barbara Johnson sale for $18,000 in 1997. It was incomplete, sixteen pages in length. Swann claimed, “This log represents one of the earliest logs in existence and also one of the most complete of the early examples”

Folio in format, unpaginated and covered in a limp sailcloth binding. It contains about two hundred pages of manuscript entries documenting Nicholas Bailey’s career at sea and subsequent activities ashore. Forty-eight of these pages comprise the complete journals of two whaling voyages. Details on request. $105,000

Next week: Boston Book Fair Report

Saving Private Ryan’s Daughter

2011-10-30T06:46:00.000-07:00

This is the first weekend in a month that I haven’t had a book fair to attend, and I’ve been enjoying it.

Put the finishing touches on a killer rare book catalog that will appear in hard copy in mid-November, and started on my next project, a catalog of maritime manuscripts, documents and ephemera to be called “Wet Paper.”

But mostly I just mooched around in my bedroom slippers – reading, napping, catching up on junk TV shows like “Gold Rush,” and “Ice Road Truckers,” trying to stay awake for the most thrilling World Series in a decade (what does that tell you about baseball?), and eating and drinking too much, as always. Friday night Anne Marie and I had our Irish pal Mick and his daughter Nancy over for dinner. Anne Marie’s sister Mary Tess was there, and our daughter Celia stopped by too. It was a lively bunch, and we had a wonderful time.

As the evening wore on our conversation about good movies morphed into a running gag that we soon realized had potential as a contest or game. The idea is to combine the titles of two movies into a new, third movie, whose title is at once a syntactically correct and absurd combination of the original two. The farther apart the themes of the two movies are, the better. It’s my favorite kind of game. There are no losers, and when someone comes up with a good movie combo, everyone wins.

I started off with “Saving Private Ryan’s Daughter,” which gave the game its name. That hit was soon followed by the likes of Nancy’s “American Beauty and the Beast.” Celia, a Lara Croft kind of girl herself, came up with “Tomb Raiders of the Lost Ark;” Mary Tess with “Hannah and her Sisters Act,” and Anne Marie with the more down to earth “Sound of Music Man.”

Of course no sports fan would want to miss “Raging Bull Durham.” And, considering the season, “Hard Day’s Night of the Living Dead” is a must.

I guess you get the idea. I’m sure you could do the same with titles of the Great Books, but I’ll leave that for better minds.

Here’s an interesting item from “Wet Paper,” a whaleman’s shopping list. It’s hard enough to remember what you need at the grocery store when you’re shopping for dinner. Imagine shopping for supplies to last you four years!

Ephemera. OUTFIT BOOK FOR THE WHALESHIP DANIEL WEBSTER, 1858. 12mo. 37 pp. printed entries accomplished in manuscript and nine terminal pages of manuscript entries. The Daniel Webster was a 336 ton whaleship out of New Bedford, commanded by Dexter Bellows. According to Starbuck she departed June 11, 1858 for Cumberland Inlet in the North Atlantic, and returned November 23, 1859 with 50 barrels sperm, 1316 barrels whale oil, and 18,000 pounds whale bone. This book is dated in manuscript June 12, which corresponds roughly with her departure date. Outfit books listed products available from a provisioner or chandler that might be needed on a whaling voyage. These items were then marked, in manuscript, as to quantity or other specification, by whoever was responsible for provisioning the ship. In their day they served as handy shopping lists. To us they are esteemed as documentary evidence of exactly what goods in what quantities were taken on whaling voyages. This book is incredibly detailed. It lists thirty-seven pages of supplies, such as food, clothing, navigational aids, or whaling tools, each item marked as to whether or not it would be needed and in what quantity. In addition nine pages of manuscript notes give orders for slops and cordage. An excellent example, bound as issued in limp leather covers. $650

Next Week: "Long Day's Journey Into Nightmare on Elm Street?" - Nah...

Not Quite Ironweed

2011-10-24T12:52:00.000-07:00

Promoter Garry Austin did his usual above average job on publicity and advertising.Karen and Garry Austin, Mike Daum, Bill Hutchison discuss Mark Twain first edition points

As a result he got a good crowd for the 37th annual Albany Antiquarian Book and Ephemera Fair.
There were no major glitches at setup, and more than 400 people and two dogs kept things busy right through Sunday afternoon. Most dealers reported good results and several said they had very strong fairs. As usual, sales of cheap books predominated. I didn’t sell anything, but lunch at Hot Dog Heaven was to die from. Last year we had snow flurries. This year it felt like we might. Albany remains an interesting, funky town. Seems stuck in the same rut as Hartford.
Now for the interesting news.

My buddy Anthony Weller just got his novel published. This is good news, but not particularly surprising. Over the course of a long career Weller has published six novels and works of non-fiction. He’s also written innumerable articles for the likes of GQ, Esquire, National Geographic and the New York Times Magazine. What is noteworthy about Weller’s most recent book, The Land of Later On, is that he sold it to a publisher who’s new on the scene – a company called Amazon.

That’s right, Amazon.

And I am not talking about a self-published text here, one of those vanity publishing products that have become so numerous in recent years. Weller’s agent drew up a contract with Amazon editors. Weller was paid an advance. He will receive royalties. The Land of Later On is a “real” book.

Amazon is now competing directly in the world of trade publishing. They’ve signed up a few high-profile non-fiction authors (this move received considerable publicity a few weeks ago) and they’ve added several novelists, of whom Weller is one, to launch Amazon’s publishing arm.

Under the terms of Weller’s contract, The Land of Later On will appear exclusively as an e-book until December, at which time it will also come out as a traditional hard copy book.

Anthony has been keeping me posted on the details of his dealings with Amazon, and they are fascinating - both in what they say about Amazon and what they imply about our future in the book trade.

Traditionally it can take as long as a year for a publisher to process a book. First, the text is subjected to a “copy edit” which may result in improvements agreed upon by editor and author. A “line edit” ensues, in which the text is fact checked, and spell checked, and the publisher’s conventions of spelling and grammar are applied. Then the text goes to a designer who devises a page layout that will be suitable for the book’s genre and content. While all this is going on, a jacket is designed and, the author hopes, a marketing plan is concocted, fueled by a healthy advertising budget. It is a prolonged process, and rightly so. Decisions about the design of the cover and the look and feel of the book could have a significant impact on sales and need to be carefully considered.

Or so we thought.

In Weller’s case, Amazon turned Land of Later On around in less than thirty days. He is a master of his craft, a meticulous workman, and was able to deliver a very “clean” manuscript. This was a important because Amazon seems to have dispensed with line and copy edits of his book. There were no lengthy conversations with an editor about plot points, no galleys to comb in search of typos. When Weller inquired about this startling omission Amazon told him that, because the text was electronic, changes could be made on the fly - even after electronic publication – at any time, in any quantity.

Usually, as publication date approaches, advance reading copies, or ARCs, are sent far and wide, soliciting reviews that can be used in advertising the book. Feature or starred reviews in trade publications like Kirkus or Publisher’s Weekly have a huge impact because such reviews can influence which other journals will review the book. Thousands of new titles appear every month; it’s damned difficult to get a review – even a bad one – in the New York Times.

Amazon eliminated this problem by eliminating ARCs entirely. No advance copies went out. No reviews were solicited. Weller got a wonderful “blurb” from John Casey, who won the National Book Award for his novel Spartina. This blurb will be the only extraneous text accompanying Weller’s book. As far as the traditional publishing world knows, The Land of Later On does not exist.

No one talked to Weller about marketing plans, book tours, or advertising budgets. The success of The Land of Later On will depend solely on the company’s ability to exploit its vast but hermetically sealed resources.

Weller’s book is a love story that spans space and time. The hero is a jazz pianist and, charmingly, his side kick is Walt Whitman. Much of the story takes place in the Afterlife. Obviously, Amazon will turn to its enormous reservoir of proprietary information about our shopping habits to promote Weller’s book - “If you’re interested in (Walt Whitman, jazz, the Afterlife, etc., etc.) you’ll want to read The Land of Later On.”

There’ll be plenty of reviews (as of this writing the book has already garnered half a dozen), but they’ll all be “peer” reviews, submitted to Amazon by people who have read the book and want to tell others about it. They’ll appear only on the Amazon website.

And if it turns out that Chapter Five was inadvertently omitted from the Kindle version, no problem! They just push a button at Amazon and the electronic text is corrected.

Incredible stuff! But it raises a few questions.

Where, and what, is the author’s manuscript copy of this book?

What constitutes the “first edition” of The Land of Later On?

Will the “first edition” include the Kindle it lives on?

What about later printings? How do we sell used copies of Kindle books?

When the paperback comes out will we be able to buy it at Barnes &Noble?

Will our local book stores carry it? Or will they be afraid of competing against the mighty Amazon?

Just in case to the answer to the last two is “no,” here’s where you can get your own copy of Anthony Weller’s The Land of Later On.

E book:
http://www.amazon.com/Land-Later-ebook/dp/B005J61DQA/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1316699383&sr=8-3

Paperback (available 12/14/11):
http://www.amazon.com/Land-Later-Anthony-Weller/dp/1612182259/ref=tmm_pap_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1316699383&sr=8-3

I give it a five star review.

Down in the Ghetto

2011-10-17T08:02:00.000-07:00

Dealer Will Money diverts David Whitesell of the AAS while Peter Stern sneaks rare pamphlets from a box.

Took a road trip this weekend with an affable Brit named Iain Sinclair. He’s presently a visiting writer at the Gloucester Writer’s Center and, because he’d been a book dealer in London before he became an author, (one of my favorite Sinclair books follows the adventures of a ring of sub-noir book dealers in search of the ultimate find, juxtaposed with an inquiry into the true identity of Jack the Ripper, dragging the reader through Londons dark and darker) I thought he’d enjoy visiting the Pioneer Valley Book and Ephemera Fair.

We got a perfect day for it. Blue sky and blazing New England foliage. Breakfast at Sylvester’s followed by a quick booth setup (I only brought one shelf of books) followed by two hours of diligent but mostly fruitless scouting.

I mean, I bought three interesting things – a whaling log, a tattoo artist’s sample card or “flash,” and a run of maritime periodicals including a Fitz Henry Lane lithograph – but all of those had been quoted to me prior to the fair. I could have stayed home and gotten them in the mail.

I also had an interesting conversation with Tina Bruno of Flamingo Eventz, promoter of this book fair. She was concerned that I’d described one of her earlier shows as having been done “by the numbers” and wanted me to know that she was working on some new and innovative book fair ideas.

I’m rooting for Tina, but let’s face it. Under current constraints of contracts and venues, promoters like the Flamingos or Garry Austin are locked into a formula that leaves little room for innovation. The same dealers keep showing up at the same places with the same kinds of books for the same customers, and everybody gets a little sleepy. The finances of these events don’t leave much surplus for advertising and, as yet, no one has figured out how to successfully link a provincial book fair with the dog show, beauty pageant or stock car race necessary to fill the aisles with new blood.

Indeed, there was a decent line at the door, especially considering that it was such a beautiful day, but they were all the same faces. Iain went out to walk around Northampton, and I spent the morning looking at the whaling log – which turned out to be about a ship departing from the Hudson River on one of the most hellacious whaling voyages I’ve ever heard of. Three captains died; men deserted, mutinied and went mad, and the hunt was continually botched by crews too green or dispirited to be of any use.

Not wishing to go down that road myself, I spent a good part of the afternoon talking to my colleagues about their sales – high, low and average – and learned that, for the most part, dealer sales yielded a higher average price per item than retail sales. Just what you’d expect, right? The surprising thing is the degree to which dealer and retail sales diverged at this event. Dealer sales averaged in the three figures, while retail sales seemed to hover around the low twos.

Colleagues Lin and Tucker Respess reported a booming trade in pamphlets about books. They sold over one hundred of these – at $3 each retail, $2 to the trade. The rest of the informants in my admittedly informal survey reported retail sales predominantly in the $15 range.

Compare this with results as reported by Malcolm Kottler from last week’s Seattle Book Fair:
1. 24 invoices (for 32 books), no $ total given, but described as a "break-even fair"
2. 12 invoices (for 17 books), more than $23K "fewer invoices than normal"
3. 7 invoices, $16K (new customers accounting for only $3K)
4. 6 invoices (to 3 libraries, 2 individuals, 1 bookseller), $15 K ("not our best or our worst ... largely to the same customers who visit us every year" )
5. 3 invoices, $10K

Although the samples are small, this seems to point out another difficulty faced by promoters like Austin and the Flamingoz. An urban fair is going to yield bigger bucks for participants than a fair in a lovely college town like Northampton. The Boston Shadow Show (side kick to the Boston ABAA International Antiquarian Book Fair) will yield bigger numbers than the Boxborough Book and Paper Show.

Smaller venues will be less expensive for dealers, but the yield will be lower, attracting dealers with less expensive books – Don Heald or Bill Reese won’t be doing Litchfield anytime soon. The attendees at these shows will be other dealers looking for stock, hard working librarians like David and Vince from AAS, devoted bibliophiles and collectors, random passers-by, and the occasional nutter. Big spenders will not turn out.

So another interpretation of “by the numbers” might be that “the numbers” tend to lock promoters like Tina Bruno into economic limits from which escape is difficult.

If anyone has ideas about how to break out of this provincial book fair ghetto, Tina and I want to know.

A Smashing Couple and a Healthy Scene

2011-10-11T11:28:00.001-07:00

“Back in Seattle again,” as the old Gene Autry song goes.

In the China and India trading days the Brits would send young men out to do their business, and if they didn’t die of disease, mishap, or loneliness, they’d ultimately make a bundle and then would be able to return to England and marry a proper girl, having established their “competency.” This weekend at the Seattle Antiquarian Book Fair I bought plenty and sold some too. So I suppose you could say I established my competency.

For example, how about this copy of J. C. Palmer’s Antarctic Mariner's Song? Ever seen it before?

Perhaps you recall a few blogs back when I described Thulia, J. C. Palmer’s rare book of poems about Antarctica. Well, twenty-five years after he published Thulia Palmer, who’d been a surgeon with Wilkes’s U.S. Exploring Expedition, wrote a second version of his poem about Antarctica, again with descriptive notes. And this one is even scarcer than the first. In fact, it is a genuinely rare book, not often found intact. Rosove states, “Antarctic Mariner’s Song is a far scarcer book than Thulia. Both editions were beautifully bound, but the bindings and paper have stood the test of time poorly; the majority of extant copies are worn or soiled, and the paper is usually foxed, often severely.” (See Spence 891, Rosove 246.B1a.) This copy has some foxing, and the covers show marks of old water staining. But the gold cover design is still fresh and the gilding on the spine, while worn, is intact.

Antarctic Mariner’s Song and Thulia make a smashing couple, and together they comprise a genuine Antarctic rarity. Both books $6500

Meanwhile, back in Seattle…

Thursday afternoon before setup, while walking around the city’s fine old Queen Ann neighborhood (also known as “the land of 10,000 Thai restaurants”), I stumbled across a nice little bricks & mortar used book store, Mercer Street Books.

It was the coolest thing. You walk in a doorway and there are shelves with real books on them that you can take down and look at, browse through if you want to… even purchase if you wish. Clean, well lit, with intelligently selected stock, no junk and no cats (their predecessor at this site had a bookstore cat, or cats – and you could always tell a book that had come from that shop. I’ll say no more…)

Had a brief chat with the owner, Deb, who is hard working, smart, and strong on customer service. She’ll let you browse her stock until you have a question, then she’ll do her best to answer it.

My question was, “How many books do you have on line?”

Her answer was, “See that section?” She pointed to a shelf with about 75 books on it.

So what we have here is something even rarer than those two lovely Antarctic books – a neighborhood used book shop with reasonably priced and carefully chosen stock, almost none of which is on line, run by a woman who is very happy to be living her dream, and shows it. Mercer Street Books has clearly developed its own “scene.” Every time I went past over the next four days, there were people inside browsing, standing up front talking to Deb, or milling around on the sidewalk chatting about whatever it is neighborhood bookshop patrons chat about. Deb had broken in to the trade by working for Wessel & Lieberman, (they and John Michael Lang are two of Seattle’s premiere antiquarian book shops), so there is a strong legacy factor here as well. To tell you the truth I find the whole Seattle book scene pretty lively. Maybe it’s all that coffee.

And I must say, this year’s Seattle Antiquarian Book Fair was lively too. As always it was smoothly set up (though Ken Karmiole apparently had a few rough moments)and run by impresario Louis Collins. But this year, for whatever reason, the crowd was extra big and plenty boisterous. The aisles were full for much of the day on Saturday and, though none of the dealers I spoke to had broken any sales records, most seemed happy enough. Ten Pound Island Book Co. had a total of three sales for the weekend which, as you probably know by now, is a splendid book fair performance for us. (We sold about $10,000 and bought another $15,000 so, by the Lou Weinstein bookfair metric, we had a $25,000 fair.)

They tell me that back in the days of aircraft moguls and computer billionaires, wealthy customers roamed the Seattle Book Fair the way dinosaurs once roamed the earth. Somehow, even though the gazillionaires have departed, the Seattle event has managed to maintain its place in the city’s cultural life. Surely a lot of this has to do with the tireless efforts of promoter Louis Collins and his staff, but I wonder if there’s any correlation between the health of a place like Mercer Street Books, Seattle’s still vibrant book scene, and the continued success of the Seattle Antiquarian Book Fair?

Make no mistake, Seattle is one of the strongest provincial book fairs in the country. After weeks of reporting from the floors of book fairs on life support it’s a pleasure to be talking about one like this.

Thanks, Louis. Thanks, Deb. And thank you, Seattle!

Now, where did I leave that checkbook?

Next week: The Pioneer Valley Book & Ephemera Fair. Check the website for details.

There's a Reason for Everything

2011-10-03T14:33:00.000-07:00

Charlie Everitt, in his classic book about the trade, Adventures of a Treasure Hunter, (required reading for anyone with a love for old books and American history) claimed that he took a vacation from book selling every year and went off fishing with his wife. He said that while he was on vacation he never thought about books, not even for a moment.

In my younger days as a book dealer I found that hard to believe. I never stopped thinking about books. Family vacations were just excuses for book scouting trips. But as I got older I discovered that it was beneficial to take a break every once in a while.

Last Monday the wife and I headed up to our place in Cape Breton for a short vacation, but of course stopped in Halifax so I could look for books. There are two places I shop regularly, and these guys have often paid for my vacations, and then some. But this time both told me they hadn’t bought much since June when I was last there.

One fellow was leaving town to visit relatives, and the other fellow said, “I haven’t bought a thing in your line since you were last here.”

“Does that mean I’d be wasting my time if I looked around?”

“You could look around, but you wouldn’t see anything except what you saw last time. Why don’t you and your wife just go off and enjoy your vacation?”

I was a little surprised to hear myself replying, “That doesn’t sound like a bad idea at all.”

So my wife and I got a nice hotel down by the water,

Halifax PM

Had dinner at a Brazilian restaurant, walked around town in the warm evening, and watched TV until we fell asleep. The next morning

Halifax AM

we drove up to Cape Breton, and I spent a wonderful week not thinking about books, just like my idol, Charlie Everitt.

That’s why there’s no blog entry this week.

Next week – “Sleepless in Seattle” and other musings from the Seattle Book Fair where Ten Pound Island Book Co. will have a corner booth. Stop by and say hello!

You Can Quote Me On That

2011-09-25T05:17:00.001-07:00

THULIA: A TALE OF THE ANTARCTIC... more below

Got home from last week’s road trip in a fairly depleted state. I’d spent seven days banging around New England and I came back with a pocket full of traveling expenses, a head cold, and just a few interesting books to show for it.

Worse still, the Ten Pound Island Book Co. checkbook looked like it had been on a hunger strike and my receivables were spiraling down toward zero. As we try to impress upon the students at CABS (Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar) it’s all about cash flow at the end of the day. And my day was almost over. What to do?

Dan Gregory gave a wonderful presentation at the “New Tools” gathering in Dartmouth (see last week’s blog) about using his computer to create special subject catalogs. He searches his keywords and other fields, does a little judicious editing, adds the photos (already accompanying each book), runs the info through a template and prints it out on his company’s giant printer/binder. Presto! A “real” catalog tailored for a very few customers - perhaps those who like dogs or golf or southern authors. Or even just for one very special person. Wouldn’t it be a thrill to get a catalog made especially for you?

This is all well and good when you own 350,000 books, but what do you do when your stock in trade is 1/500th that amount?

The same thing.

Except my catalogs are shorter, each consisting a single item, and they are even more “special” since they only go to one person each – with photographs, but digitally. They are called “quotes” and they’re what little guys like me – specialist dealers – do instead of accumulating 350,000 books and hiring a prodigy like Dan Gregory to sell them. I suspect the act of “quoting” books has been around since 1455. In the old days we used carrier pigeons. Later, we graduated to postcards.

Kevin Johnson of Royal Books is a terrific bookseller. He makes the point that people actually like being contacted by dealers, especially if we’re offering material that stimulates their interest. He prefers telephone, but I’m too shy. I use email instead. Still, it amounts to the same thing – we put the book in the person’s hand and say, “Look at this! Isn’t it cool? I’m really excited about it.”

Yesterday I quoted a rare chart to a chart collector,
a yachting thing to a yachting guy, a photograph to a photograph guy, and closed the deal on a naval journal I’d recently quoted to a naval journal guy. All good. A week’s worth of receivables. While I’m waiting for those to come in I’ll go to the bank and deposit checks that came in from earlier quotes.

Yeah, I’m bragging. But bear with me. In order to do what Dan Gregory does, or even what I do, you need two things – books and customers. Everyone is always carrying on about the “books” part. How they bought this book, or how outrageous the price on that book was. But few people pay as much obsessive attention to the other term in the basic equation of our trade: books + customers = $$

I love my books, sure. But my most valuable possession, the most precious asset my company owns, is my mailing list. I’ve been working on it since 1976, and it has graduated from index cards in a shoe box to bits in a digital database.

That’s why I’m out there doing all those penny-ante book fairs, taking those seemingly pointless road trips, attending those seminars and book events, going to lunches I’d rather skip and taking care to medicate my inner sociopath every day. With even more attention and dedication than I put into my search for rare books, I’m looking for customers.

And I’m not just talking about rich guys in Upper East Side penthouses or special collections librarians high in their ivory towers. Through the years some of my best customers have been other dealers, and the only way I learned that was by hanging out with them - “You’ve got a customer for missionary imprints? No fooling! I think I have a book for you…”

OK, I’m climbing down off my pulpit now to show you something cool I learned from Terry Belanger two years ago at CABS.

We were all a little put off when he showed up with a hair dryer, especially since it was a device for which he apparently had little need. But boy, were we wrong! It turned out we all needed one, because a simple hair dryer is the safest and most effective method for removing things pasted into books.

For example, my otherwise lovely copy of Thulia was marred by kiddy stickers that some moron had allowed to be stuck onto the book’s front pastedown. Yukk!

A few minutes with Dr. Bellanger’s mighty hot air machine took care of that.

And a little cleanup removed every trace of old adhesive, leaving only the original acid burn from the binding glue.

Terry, you’re a Genius! (He actually has a MacArthur genius grant, but not for hair dryers.)

Palmer, J.C. THULIA: A TALE OF THE ANTARCTIC. NY. 1843. b/w frontis, plates, vignettes. 72 pp. One of the curiosities produced by the Wilkes Expedition, Thulia is, according to Rosove, “the earliest published Antarctic poetry.” It consists of two long narrative poems describing two years’ adventures aboard the schooners Flying Fish and Peacock, as they sailed Antarctic waters with the US Exploring Expedition. The poem is followed by notes and a prose summary of the ship’s adventures, which is the true meat of the book. According to the preface, the text is based on the journals Palmer kept when he served as surgeon aboard the Flying Fish. The twelve attractive engravings are by A.T. Agate, one of the artists on the Expedition, and there is even music written by James Dana, geologist on the Expedition. According to Rosove the Flying Fish achieved the highest latitude of any ship during the Expedition. He also notes that the book is “scarce.” Rosove 246. Haskell 186. Spence 890. (The book also receives extensive treatment in William E. Lenz’s “The Poetics of the Antarctic.”) This copy is bound in original plum cloth with the gilt image of the Flying Fish still bright on the cover. Owner’s signature on title page. Spine sunned, pastedowns and endpapers show typical darkening from binding materials. A very nice copy of a book that is usually found in poor condition. $2000

It's that day again - the one you've been waiting for all year

2011-09-19T07:09:00.000-07:00

What is this image doing here? Read on, me hearties!

Busy week.

Learned that Sotheby’s Oct 5 photography auction is featuring one of the Diane Arbus images Bob discovered. He and I and my book Hubert’s Freaks all got plugs in the catalog description.

Headed off to western CT Monday afternoon hoping to buy a whaling log at an auction out there.

The log looked good to me when I examined it during the preview. It only covered four of the five years of the voyage, but it had nice whale stamps and some accounts kept by the captain throughout the voyage. The accounts made a difference. I figured I could sell it for $8500 - $9000.

Nobody on the floor was bidding. I ran my telephone competition to $5700 and thought I had it, when an Internet bid came in at $7000. I’d been ready to go $6500. The next bump over $7000 was $7250. Assuming my virtual competitor dropped out there, I’d be paying $8337.50 with the commission. My evening at the auction was over. The world is flat!

Went back to the Stephen King Motor Inn, just down the road. Waiting for Diane Arbus’s “Twins” to appear at the far end of the hallway. Full moon, too! Had a few drinks.

Puttering around western Connecticut next day, I found a book shop I’d never seen before. But it was closed. Guess I was too late.

Then up to Dartmouth for Wednesday’s “New Tools” unseminar, organized by John Waite and attended by a surprising forty people.

The morning started with a tour of Dartmouth’s Rauner Library and a marvelous talk by Special Collections librarian Jay Satterfield. Unlike many of his colleagues who think it is their job to protect their rare books from users, Jay’s whole mission is about how to turn people – Dartmouth students especially – on to rare books and the wealth of knowledge they can provide. Though it’s not his primary purpose, Jay and like-minded rare book librarians are a powerful force in creating and educating the next generation of book collectors and bibliophiles. Thanks, Jay!

Then an intense four hours with Dan Gregory of Between the Covers, who shared his hard-won skills (he manages an inventory of more than 350,000 books) in digital book photography and new computer aided ways to create traditional hard copy catalogs.

After a lunch break Joachim Koch of Books Tell You Why gave a succinct and organized power point presentation (via telephone) on how to employ existing Internet tools to measure the effectiveness of your company’s social media campaign, and how to use these metrics to produce better results.

I gave a talk about blogging and Ten Pound Island Book Co., which seemed to elicit quite a bit of laughter. This was probably a necessary relief after six hours of fire hose drinking. I only hope they were laughing with me. (Send me an email if you want a copy of my talk. You can decide for yourself.)

Then Ian Kahn of Lux Mentis Books with a looping, soaring, diving, lurching presentation on the various kinds of social media available to booksellers. He used the word “interesting” in almost every paragraph. And his talk was, well, interesting.

Luke Lozier of Bibliopolis closed out the day with a low key warning to make sure we’re aware of where we’re putting all these resources. He made a differentiation all of us probably know but don’t necessarily think about - between a self-owned e-commerce platform, and one owned by a giant company that is constantly mining information and is capable of making unilateral changes against our best interests. He also made the wry observation that the single dominant topic in this “New Tools” seminar was hard copy catalogs – about the oldest tool we have.

As we were leaving campus, a giant celebratory propane-fired balloon was rising above Dartmouth Green. (It was the students’ first day back at school.) Don Lindgren of Rabelais Books professed amazement that, after our seminar, there was any hot air left.

Thank you, John Waite. I hope you can package this presentation and take it on the road.

Boxborough Ephemera Show Saturday morning – just shopping. This event is run by the personable Flamingos, Tina and John. They get the job done, but sometimes it feels like they’re doing it by the numbers. After the high of the Dartmouth event the lack of energy at this show was palpable. Maybe we’ve all done too many. Made a few interesting purchases, mostly thanks to Matty Needle and others who are better scouts than I am, and who know what I buy.

Then up to Concord for the 31st New Hampshire Antiquarian Book Fair.

I could wax sentimental about the old days in the Highway Hotel, when the lines were long and the air was electric with possibilities. But why bother? This current iteration, held at the attractive Grappone Center, was flat – despite promoter Garry Austin’s best efforts. Yeah, I bought some stuff – even sold something. Yeah, dealers were scurrying around buying from one another as they have been since Hector was a pup. And yeah, I’d rather have a flat bookfair than no bookfair at all. He even fed us breakfast!

But golly, folks (and this is NOT a whine) I feel bad for Garry, who knocks himself out putting these things together.

According to him, only six dealers from the New Hampshire Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association participated in this fair.
It’s no surprise, given that lack of support, that Garry is pulling the plug on this show. He’s fulfilled his contractual obligation to the association and, he tells me, unless something changes, he won’t be promoting a 32nd edition of this fair.

But enough of this gloom and doom. Today is the 16th Annual International Talk Like a Pirate Day. Yarr!

Banning, Kendall and Gustave Baumann (illustrator). PIRATES! OR, THE CRUISE OF THE BLACK REVENGE. Chi. 1916. b/w woodcuts. 4to. Unpaginated - title, 15 folded sheets, endsheet. Humorous play in verse about the adventures of the pirate Captain Hawkes and his crew. Designed by Lawrence Woodworth and published in Chicago for the Brothers of the Book. Wonderful wood engraved illustrations. Black paper cover with scarlet Pirates! on the cover. A Fine, fresh copy of the first edition, one in a limited edition of 525 copies. $350

Captain Nat’s Waistcoat

2011-09-11T08:08:00.000-07:00

When you think of it, a printed book adheres to certain structural conventions, both as a physical object (lines read from left to right; ideas are developed in sequentially numbered pages, etc.) and in the abstract ways in which content depends on syntax for its expression, and genre is defined by rigid rules. Thus we know when we’re reading a novel as opposed to a textbook, and we can be delighted and surprised by the antics of Lawrence Sterne or David Foster Wallace, both of whom made careers of bending these rules ever so slightly. Descriptive bibliography aside, a book’s primary “meaning” – the information it delivers – is contained in the concepts it imparts rather than in the information contained in its physical being.

The point of this windy statement of the obvious is that although we get a great deal of information from printed books, the kinds of information we get are constrained by the structural conventions – both physical and intellectual – of that medium.

As I’ve said in earlier blogs, a manuscript – though it may follow many of the same conventions as a printed book – offers a different kind of information. Most importantly, a manuscript provides what TV shows always refer to as “forensic evidence” about the writer and about the environment in which the manuscript was produced. Whether we’re reading a one page letter or a Pepysian diary, the handwriting gives us clues about the author’s age, education, and fine motor skills. Furthermore it’s often possible to determine if the writing was done under duress, in adverse conditions, all at once or serially. The immediacy of a manuscript provides us with a kind of information that a printed book cannot provide.

These were my thoughts when I began looking over a little archive that I bought last week. It was a group of letters and documents from the family of Nathaniel Brown Palmer, the famous Antarctic explorer. Palmer was a daring and resourceful seal hunter from Stonington, Connecticut, and he pioneered the Antarctic seal fishery, which in turn provided valuable furs to be used as trade goods in the American China Trade. When sealing dried up in the 1840s Palmer, who was still in his prime, went into the merchant trade. Then in the 1850s he used all that he’d learned on the high seas to help design and develop the first American clipper ships.

Rugged as a bear, smart as a fox, with nearly superhuman powers of endurance, and possessed of more than a lifetime’s share of good luck, the guy had always been a hero of mine.
So I was pretty excited about this buy – not because of the papers, which mostly pertained to the career of Nat’s brother Alex, but because the lot contained a white polished cotton vest that had belonged to Nathaniel Brown Palmer. We know it was his because he wrote his name on the inside of the back strap in his distinctive signature, “NB Palmer.” How could I resist trying it on? Talk about walking a mile in someone’s shoes! I was slipping into the vest that had once warmed the heart of an American icon.
It didn’t fit.

By today’s standards I’m not a really huge guy – 5 feet 10 ½ inches, 190 pounds – just about a Cruiserweight. And I’d always pictured my hero Captain Nat as a heavyweight champeen. A burly terror who could keep the unruliest sailor in line. Just look at his picture. He’s a bear of a man.

Except he was a bear who stood barely 5 ½ feet tall and weighed in at about 140. My hero had the body of a fifteen year old.

The book never told me that.

Small archive pertaining to the family of Alexander and Nathaniel Brown Palmer, 1840s - 1880s. Approximately 30 billheads, letters and documents pertaining mostly to the business dealings of Alexander Palmer, but also containing a 3 page ALs from Nathaniel to his brother, and Nathaniel's polished cotton vest, signed by him on inside of back belt. The lot. $300

Please note that The New-England chapter of the ABAA is inviting members of the trade and all interested observers to a special one-day "unseminar" entitled "New Tools: Marketing Approaches, Platforms, & Technologies for Antiquarian Booksellers," to be held Wednesday, September 14, 2011 at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.

They plan a full day of presentations, speakers, and open discussion. Since all the panelists are either active book dealers or people serving the larger community of antiquarian booksellers, they are calling "New Tools" an "Unseminar" to emphasize the participatory and "bottom-up" character of the event.

I’ll be one of the speakers there, and this is the information I provided the organizers about my presentation.

Title: Blog Your Way to a New You!

Precis: Gibson unpacks forces driving brand lift through contextual commerce and strategizes around ways to incentivize, and ultimately to monetize core values and best practices going forward

A Matter of Luck

2011-09-05T12:18:00.000-07:00

Two interesting books on the War of 1812

Recently my blog has gotten a couple of inquiries (for me “a couple” is huge) from customers and colleagues (one inquiry each). These two kindly individuals wanted to know why I haven’t featured any books in my blog for the past month or so?

It’s flattering to know that at least two people read “Bookman’s Log” and that they are paying attention to the books the blog is supposedly advertising. But the sad truth is that I haven’t found anything worth writing about since I bought those excellent books at the Eldred auction last July 20th.

Bernice’s show at Searles Castle, while fun, yielded little more than a couple of prints. At the Vermont Book Fair I was reduced to purchasing an old trunk – a cool item, but hardly worth crowing about. The Summer Papermania Show in Hartford August 20th was good for nothing more than what we in the trade call “chowder” – relatively inexpensive books that, while interesting, will not yield big bucks. And, at the Baltimore Antique (and book) show last week, I bought one lovely thing from a colleague for $1750, but sold it to a retail customer the next day for $2750. Money in my pocket, but nothing to write about.

I’ve been stuck in a book drought of Saharan proportions.

And I’m taking it personally. All around me colleagues are buying good books in their fields. I keep firing blanks.

Over the past thirty-five years I’ve had many such periods. Sometimes, I swear, I can sense them coming, looming black holes accompanied by a sucking sound just at the edge of hearing. These periods of scarcity are no fun, but I’ve learned two things from them.

The first thing is that when you’re on a roll – when books are pouring in so fast you can’t keep up with them – you’ve got to pursue your good fortune with all the energy (and cash!) you can muster. I know, it sounds counter-intuitive. When you’re on a hot streak like that, why not just relax and let it happen? Because, Grasshopper, every hot streak comes to an end. And when the end arrives, the books stop. You’ve got to make hay while the sun shines. When things are going good you’ve got to have the focus and discipline to maintain a “pedal to the metal” attitude.

The second thing took me a little longer to realize. I’d always been told - and indeed it has always been an article of faith with me – that one makes one’s own luck. Diligence, perseverance, hard work, and unflagging attention are the true components of good fortune.

I still believe this, but over the decades something else has become apparent. No matter how hard you work, how much time you put in, or how much studying you’ve done, there is still a sense in which the outcome is beyond your control. You can go to places rare books have been seen before, you can study hard to know what a rare book might look like, you can train yourself to have the eyes that will pick that rare book out of a shelf of duds. But without luck, without fate putting that book there in the first place, you don’t stand a chance. You can’t find a book that’s not there.

No matter how prepared we might be, there are times when we just need a little luck,

While I’m sitting around waiting for my ship to come in (as it were), here are a couple of cool War of 1812 items. No, they aren't drought busters. The one on torpedo warfare was purchased last winter. It just came back from the binder. The Brannan book is a consignment item.

Machiavelli, Niccolo. THE ART OF WAR. IN SEVEN BOOKS. (with) HINTS RELATIVE TO TORPEDO WARFARE. BY A GENTLEMAN OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK. Albany, NY. 1815. b/w plans, ills. (1-3), 4-349 pp. This is an interesting assemblage. It features the first printing of any work by Machiavelli in America. It is followed by a collection of biographical anecdotes relating to Machiavelli, and then by a 27 page work on cannon and underwater mines. Judging by the “Gentleman of New York” attribution, this ought to be a pirated version of Robert Fulton’s 1810 work “Torpedo Warfare” or his subsequent lecture, “Torpedos.” But it is neither of those. Instead, it is a crib of Fulton’s theories, disseminated “for the public good” in “times like the present” - (i.e., the ongoing War of 1812) by a writer who admits, for example, that he “possesses no accurate knowledge of the manner in which ignition is produced by a mixture of sulphur and steel dust; he has merely read in old books...” Rink, 2144 says the work is “generally attributed to Robert Fulton,” but I doubt it. That this treatise was published in the year of Fulton’s death may have something to do with the attempt to popularize his ideas. At any rate, an interesting puzzle. A clean copy, attractively bound in half calf over marbled boards, with spine label. $500

And…

Brannan, John. (Editor.) OFFICIAL LETTERS OF THE MILITARY AND NAVAL OFFICERS OF THE UNITED STATES, DURING THE WAR WITH GREAT BRITAIN IN THE YEARS 1812, 13, 14, & 15. WITH SOME ADDITIONAL LETTERS AND DOCUMENTS ELUCIDATING THE HISTORY OF THAT PERIOD. Washington City. 1823. 510 pp. A scarce early documentary source, publishing material relating to the antecedents of the war, as well as the actual battles. This copy is extra-illustrated with an engraved portrait of Lewis Cass, a document signed by War of 1812 hero Charles Morris, first lieutenant on the frigate Constitution and severely wounded leading a boarding party during her victorious action with HMS Guerriere, and a second document signed by Samuel Smith, major general and the commander of the successful defenses of Baltimore during the abortive British attempt to capture that city during the War of 1812. Howes B-722. Sabin 7411. Neeser 8002. Smith II 602. Moebs 59. Bound in 20th century quarter calf over marbled boards with a leather spine label. $800

Finally, just a reminder that The New England chapter of the ABAA will hold an “Unseminar” at Dartmouth College entitled “New Tools: Marketing Approaches, Platforms, & Technologies for Antiquarian Booksellers.” The “Unseminar” will last all day Wednesday September 14. If you are interested in attending, please RSVP to hq@abaa.org. (Full details next week.)

and here's the hole where our bookstore used to be...

No Fighting, No Biting

2011-08-29T09:54:00.000-07:00

How many weeks start with an earthquake and end with a hurricane?

Up early Tuesday morning August 23 for the drive down I-95, which I’ve been doing for so many years that I can now do it in my sleep (almost.) Woke in time to shop Philadelphia Rare Books & Manuscripts in their lovely new home in the Armory in downtown Philly,

then stopped for lunch at Johnny Brenda’s - a great oldtime Philly bar on Franklin St. that has turned in to a big time music venue by night. By day they have killer oyster stew.

I’d just taken my first sip of beer, waiting for said stew, when the building began to tremble, then shake. After a few seconds (which felt like minutes) light fixtures were swaying. My buddy looked at his beer and said, “Wow. Powerful stuff.” Still uncertain as to how much more shaking we’d get, we beat a dignified retreat to the outside doorway, and saw Franklin St. full of people – all of them looking up. Why do people look up after an earthquake?

Well, the oyster stew tasted better than any oyster stew we'd ever had. We were alive to enjoy it.

Then on to Kennet Square and the shop of old veteran Tom Macaluso. I remember exhibiting across the aisle from him at a bookfair in Cambridge Mass. in the late 1970s. He looks the same now as he did then. I’m the one who’s gotten older.

By 9:00 the next morning I was loading my wares into the cavernous Baltimore Convention Center for the zillionth annual Baltimore Antique (and book) Show.I’ve got my issues with this show's promoters, the Palm Beach Show Group. Their one size fits all approach is a bad fit for book dealers (can’t speak for the antique people) and their over the top self promotion is silly, as well as being full of baloney. (Here’s a shot looking up my aisle at 3:30 Saturday afternoon, after two days of their annoying emails boasting big crowds and record sales – looks like a freakin’ bowling alley to me!)

But I have to admit, watching them pull together a giant show like this (550 antique dealers, 70 book dealers) is awe inspiring.
There are tens of thousands of details – from flowers to food to walls for booths that must turn into high end storefronts, to moving objects weighing hundreds or even thousands of pounds,
to accommodating every dealer complaint about lighting or placement, and accomplishing it all at top speed with absolute safety and complete security. Pretty amazing.Even moreso when it was revealed to us Thursday morning that the ceiling above the middle portion of the Book Fair area was prone to leak badly during heavy rains (apparently the Convention Center Management had failed to previously notify the Palm Beach Show people about this unfortunate situation), and, what with Irene bearing down, we were likely to see some heavy rain.

They let the booksellers vote whether to stay or move, and the booksellers voted to move.

So, beginning at eight o’clock that night, after the show shut down, the dozens of dealers in the middle of the show area packed their stands up, moved them to safety, and reassembled the booths in new locations.

It was a backbreaking, miserable job at the end of a long day. But here’s the kicker.

Most of the dealers who were not affected by the move stayed around anyway to assist their less fortunate colleagues. Sure, there were a few “me first” dealers who disappeared, but almost everyone remained on the floor and helped pack, schlep, unpack and set up the booths of the thirty-two dealers who were in harm’s way. No fighting, no biting, not even any whining. By the end of that evening, the hall was cleaned out, and the food court was moved in.

Just when I get cynical and grouchy about my brethren, just when I think I’ll snap if I hear another jackass bookseller braying about some great thing he bought, something like this happens and I realize, yet again, what a fundamentally decent bunch of people booksellers are, and how fortunate I am to have had my life’s lot cast among them. Wonderful stuff!

And once again, the Palm Beach people came through with flying colors, offering whatever assistance they could, whenever they could.

Wish I could say the same about the rest of the show, but the hurricane reports scared the customers away, and packing out was a nightmare for almost everyone. Little had changed from last year's fiasco, and several dealers were stuck there for three or four hours.

Sadly, Palm Beach just doesn’t “get” the difference between book dealers in 10x10 booths and antique dealers in spaces the size of my living room.

One size does not fit all.

Going, Going, Gone!

2011-08-21T13:34:00.000-07:00

Front elevation of the future. (See below.)

In 1993, after seventeen years in the used book business, I finally saw the light. Retail bookselling was not for me.

I closed the shop in downtown Gloucester, my fifth location since 1976, sold all my non-maritime, non-rare stock, and headed home. As chance would have it there was a shack on a 10,000 sq. foot lot across the street from my house that wasn’t being used by anyone.

I tracked the owner down and discovered that she was just about to have a baby, and needed money. It didn’t take long to arrive a mutually agreeable purchase price.

The place was a wreck, but we went to it with a will and soon had a sweet little warehouse in which to store our maritime books and documents.

These were the early days of the internet, before the dreaded “race to the bottom” that has all but destroyed the value of used books. For a few years we made damned good money buying all sorts of books and throwing them on Interloc, then on ABE. Soon the warehouse was filled with used books and orders were rolling in every day.

Joe and Amanda were over there working five days a week handling that end of the business. I stayed in my office at home, concentrating on growing my rare book specialty, working on my website, figuring out how to put catalogs together, and establishing relationships with librarians and collectors. Then I saw another light.

My two workers were sitting in the warehouse, up to their ears in used books, five days a week. I might as well open the doors to the public and see if I could make a little extra cash.

That was how shop number six came to be, right across the street from my house.

And for a number of years it worked very well. We kept banging out Internet sales, but now, from May to October, tourists would come in, tell us what a charming place we had, and ask to use the bathroom. Once in a while they’d even buy a book.

Sadly, as more people got into Internet sales the competition sharpened and prices began their inevitable decline. A book I might have sold for $25 in 1993 began showing up on Internet databases for $20, $15, $5… The party was over.

Meanwhile my wife Anne Marie and her buddy Cynthia, both talented artists, were toying with the idea of opening an art gallery on the main street of our little village. The light went on yet again.

“Don’t bother renting a gallery space,” I told them. “We’ll convert the old book building into a gallery with a book store attached.

The rent will be free. All you have to do is man the store on the days Joe can’t be there.”

So, once again, I sold all my books except for the rare maritime tomes that had become my stock in trade. This time I put the proceeds into spiffing up the building and grounds, and in the end the place looked pretty classy, track lighting and all.

Anne Marie and Cynthia started curating art shows.

And for every new show we’d have a big opening, which was really just a party for our friends and customers. We weren’t making a lot of money in the gallery business. But boy, were we having fun!

All this time, I’m happy to say, the rare book business was growing. Our website was drawing a steady response, and our catalogs regularly sold 50%-60%, which is considered a pretty good percentage.

Then, in February 2010, just after we returned from the Los Angeles Book Fair, a neighbor’s tree blew down on our little gallery,

destroying its structural integrity. The building was condemned.

Over the next year and a half this neighbor revealed himself to be a world class jerk. He somehow managed to forget that it was HIS tree that had ruined us, and steadfastly opposed every rebuilding plan we put forth, threatening legal action at every turn. We had all our permits and permissions from the various regulatory boards and commissions, and the jerk surely would have lost his lawsuits, but the process might easily have dragged on for five years and cost tens of thousands of dollars. So we kept trying to compromise with the guy. True to his jerky nature, every time we offered something, he’d want a little more. What he really wanted, it turned out, was to buy the property. No way that was going to happen.

Meanwhile the gallery was out of business, all our used books were in storage pods, and Joe had moved his office into my house, forcing me and the rare book end of the business upstairs into an unused bedroom. We were able to carry on, but it was very difficult. Nothing was where it used to be. Books kept getting lost. Our jury rigged computer network kept crashing. Fortunately, our insurance company came through just like the ads on TV. They worked with us to recover the value of the building, the ruined stock and the upfront costs of relocation. But after they signed off we were faced with a constant stream of unforeseen disasters and expenses just to try to maintain business as usual. I reckon our neighbor and his tree cost us about $50,000 in lost business and extra work over the course of that next year.

Finally, we came up with a compromise that even HE could not refuse, and we started in on our new gallery building.

Which gets me to the point of this essay.

After a year and a half, Anne Marie and I were itching to begin our building project.

Imagine our surprise, then, when the crusher took the first bite out of our dear old building,

and it suddenly felt like the machine was taking a bite out of us. We hadn’t tracked it, hadn’t given it a thought. But it turned out that both of us were incredibly attached to the physicality of that place – all the work we’d put into, all that had gone on inside it. It was the container of two decades of memories, and when that machine smashed it, we yelped.

But we’re over it now…

Ecology 101

2011-08-14T14:29:00.000-07:00

No bookfairs to scout or participate in this weekend. Maritime List #204 is in the can and ready to go on line. (It’ll be on the tenpound website Monday – a collection of reference books about Melville and Moby Dick).

Maritime List #205 has been written and sits on the shelf awaiting photographs, and I’ve even got our poor old gallery building across the street cleaned out and ready for demolition next week.

The storage containers are filled to bursting.

A perfect opportunity, this Sunday afternoon, to indulge in a little wool gathering.

Specifically, I’ve been thinking a lot recently about IOBA – the Independent Online Booksellers Association. I joined this group a few months ago, and was quickly drafted to head up their Membership Committee. I was happy to take the job because I thought it would give me a broader look at the contours of the book trade.

And indeed it has.

Lurking on the IOBA listserv got me hooked also on the Bibliophile Group listerv, a private subscription discussion list ($30 annual membership fee). Both these venues have provided a wonderful opportunity to learn about aspects of the online culture to which I never would have been exposed.

I had no idea, for example, how pervasive the phenomenon of “phantom listers” had become. These are guys who use specialized software to scan titles and prices of books offered for sale by legitimate booksellers. The phantom lister will copy the description but raise the price and wait for an unwary customer. When they get a purchase order (This doesn’t happen often, obviously. But phantom listers can offer hundreds of thousands of titles since they don’t actually own or have to handle any of the books they list.) the phantom buys the book from the original lister and has the lister drop ship the book to the customer. Aside from obvious problems with delivery, shipping, and price-gouging, phantom listers are parasites. They undermine the fiscal health of the entire trade. The open discussion and education provided by venues like the IOBA or bibliophile chat lines is the best way to combat them.

Then, there’s this email, typical of an entire genre of such discussions on IOBA and Biblio:

“Although the most recent version of Ubuntu will be somewhat demanding (but will run on anything that can handle Windows 7 and on most computers that can run XP or Vista) there are other versions that will require fewer resources, like Lubuntu, or be more familiar to Windows users, like LinuxMint… It’s also very easy to keep a version of Windows and install Linux side-by-side, booting up to whichever version is needed for a particular task. Linux can see and use data files on a Windows partition, although Linux partitions seem to be invisible to Windows… I’ve had Windows and Ubuntu dual-booting for over a year now, but since I found that I could convert my very old Pegasus email files to a different format that Claws-email-for-Linux can read I find that I rarely boot up Windows.”

Say what?

I have no idea whether this fellow makes $1500 a year selling used books, or $150,000, but I’m fairly certain that Lubuntu and LinuxMint are not in my computing future. However, it’s nice to know that such a high level of technological sophistication is available to me. Next time I’m contemplating the purchase of some new and inscrutable gadget or piece of software, I’ll feel comfortable asking this gang for their recommendations.

Sure, there are a lot of $15 books being offered, and heated debates about mailing bags and postal insurance – the kinds of newbie concerns I had myself 35 years ago, and have been listening to ad infinitum ever since.

But that’s OK, because, along with this chatter, I’m hearing about various ways these newbies have discovered to help their bricks and mortar operations survive. I’m learning how people scout booksales with hand scanners and price comparison software. I’m learning about constantly evolving Internet marketplaces like Amazon and the increasingly sophisticated sales tools and fulfillment options they offer.

True, not much of this pertains directly to my rather specialized business, but IOBA and Biblio have provided a window into what scholar, poet and historian Michael Suarez refers to as the ecology of the book trade. Dealers, collectors and librarians, from the biggest mega-institutions to the smallest hole-in-the-wall operations, each have distinct roles. It’s a system in which each part relies on the others. “The ecosystems of book history.”

That’s what IOBA has to offer an old-timer like me – a splendid view, and access to a broad international range of dealers, business models and viewpoints. I’m happy to report that more and more veteran dealers, members of organizations like ABAA or ILAB, are joining IOBA’s ranks, and I suspect that they’re enjoying the same benefits.

More importantly IOBA serves as an educational resource for newer dealers. In my brief tenure on the Membership Committee, the majority of applicants have been people at the beginnings of their bookselling careers. IOBA provides one-on-one mentoring if required, and a wealth of other educational resources. Through its code of ethics, IOBA also presents guidelines and standards for the “right” way to do business.

In a lecture a few years ago Bill Reese lamented the demise of bricks and mortar shops - not for nostalgic reasons, but because these were the places where new dealers learned their trade. “Despite a fancy education,” he said, “I learned most of what I know in used book stores, and I’m sorry to see them go.”

In this new world IOBA can serve that educational function. They’re helping us keep our “ecosystem” robust and healthy, and they deserve our support.

Next week: Report on Papermania and the incredible stuff I bought there. Also - the hazards of counting chickens.

A Contrarian Speaks His Mind

2011-08-08T08:13:00.001-07:00

Something about a thawed-out skating rink that makes a book dealer’s heart skip a beat.

The moldy walls, the gloomy vault of the ceiling, the scarred, unforgiving concrete floor… And the lights! Those Am-I-Going-Blind/I-Am-Going-Blind war surplus mercury-xenon floods… That’s how we know we’re home! Like bats in our cave. (Mental flash here of a flock of dealers hanging upside down from the rafters, waiting for dusk, reminding me that soon (August 20th) we’ll be at Hartford’s Summer Papermania, in the mother of all concrete and neon hellholes, the Hartford Civic Center, now known creepily as the “XL Center.”) But I’m getting ahead of myself.

It just goes to show what a hardy lot booksellers are. This year’s Vermont Antiquarian Book Fair, despite the fact that it was held in a skating rink, was smoothly managed by promoter Garry Austin. The aisles were wide, the dealers attentive, and the stock attractive and well displayed – ranging from the minimalist presentation of Matthew Raptis’ eponymous Raptis Rare Books to the more traditional cornucopic display curated by old pal Eugene Povirk of Southpaw Books.

Matthew, I’m told, hosted a wonderful gathering for exhibitors the night before the fair. Mr. Povirk, on the other hand, may not be left-handed. (I’m calling for an ethics committee investigation.)

Still, the sad truth is that with only thirty-nine dealers, this show is on the verge of losing its critical mass. Furthermore, it was a hot and humid day. Attendees seemed rather bedraggled, and Peter Stern likened the experience to "doing a fair inside a toaster oven.” I doubt any of those brave thirty-nine dealers made a killing at the fair. Professional scouts like Bill Hutchison probably made a day’s pay (somehow he ((almost)) always does), but I wonder how many of the other thirty-eight booksellers turned a profit?

I was just shopping, not exhibiting, so I was free to flee. But before I left, I sat down with long-time colleague Steve Finer for some traditional and comforting whining about the death of book fairs, how difficult the book trade is, and how close we are to extinction.

But Finer, always the contrarian (in his blurb on ABE he describes himself as a “retro business: most of the stock in inventory sells either through periodic hard copy, subject-oriented catalogues, distributed first through snail mails, to be later uploaded to www.ABEBooks.com..”) had something surprising to say to me.

He told me he was amazed and thankful that promoter Garry Austin kept promoting these shows, even when they didn’t make sense financially. He talked about how organized Garry was, how attentive to detail and solicitous of dealer needs. He reminded me of all the money Garry spent on advertising and amenities, and wondered how he made any profit at all. In Finer’s estimation Garry’s efforts were more ideologically motivated than business oriented, and rather than complaining about the demise of book fairs, we should be thankful that there are people like Garry who keep them alive.

Talk about uplifting! And from a grizzled old pro like Steve Finer, none the less…

On the drive home, still glowing from his oration, I realized Finer’s sentiments would apply equally to the stubborn, sturdy lot of book dealers who keep doing these shows, to the dealers who faithfully shop them, and to those few book-mad souls who still get a treasure hunt buzz from walking the aisles and nosing through our wares. Here’s to us all!

And to skating rinks where they don’t play hockey in the summer!

And to this wonderful trunk I picked up at the fair. It measures 20 x 10 ½ inches, made of pine with a rounded top, once covered in wallpaper, and still lined with this lovely broadside taken after a lithograph, circa 1850, by James Baillie.

I priced it at $750, but if I never sell it that’s OK. It’ll be a perfect container in which to display my ephemera at all those book fairs Garry keeps promoting.

Digital media for analog tasks

2011-07-31T10:57:00.000-07:00

No, it’s not the New York Public Library.

It’s Searles Castle, situated amidst the beautiful rolling hills of Great Barrington Mass,

setting of the 18th annual Book Fair at Searles Castle, promoted by Bernice Bornstein of Bornstein Shows. It’s Friday afternoon, setup time for the forty or so dealers who are exhibiting here. As usual, Bernice has overbooked the show by two or three slots.

She’s running around in a panic while the rest of us load in, trying to stay out of the way of the two or three very pissed off dealers who have arrived to find that their booths have been moved to a basement hallway.

And, as usual, stalwarts Gary and Hutch – dealers Garry Austin and Bill Hutchison - take over for frazzled Bernice and figure out a win-win solution for the challenging Rubik Cube bookfair floor layout problem. Bernice is lucky to have them as a resource at her shows. Garry is a veteran promoter and Hutch is one of those guys who does the NY Times crossword puzzle in pen in 10 minutes. By the end of the day everyone’s happy.

Everyone, that is, except me. After five hours of scouting the floor, I’ve found exactly two things to buy, and they were items that had been offered to me two weeks before, which I was unable to pick up because of my shoulder surgery.

This reminds me once again what an important factor luck is in our business. You can be prepared, diligent and hard working, but without a bit of luck, all the diligence in the world won’t help.

In general, the material on offer at this show seems high quality and well chosen. Dealers who do this show – set at the highpoint of Berkshire/Tanglewood vacation season - know they are dealing with a sophisticated crowd with disposable income, and they try to bring their most attractive offerings. It just so happened, this year, that none of these offerings pertained to maritime history. There was nothing to do but take my lumps and hope for better luck next week, scouting the Vermont Antiquarian Book Fair up in Brattleborough.

While I was moping around the floor trying not to be too surly to my colleagues, I remembered that I had purchased a wonderful piece of folk art here last year. And this recollection inspired a rather surprising realization.

I’d done a blog entry about that piece of folk art last year on August 4th. (HAND PAINTED POLITICAL CARTOON CONDEMNING JAMES MADISON AND HIS TAX POLICY DURING THE WAR OF 1812.)

That meant I’d been doing this blog for more than a year – fifty three posts, to be exact - which meant my blog was starting to get traction as a historical record of the antiquarian book trade.

Now I’m reporting on events that I covered a year ago and, along with noting the particulars of each year’s events, I can compare all sorts of factors that might affect our trade. The digital blogging format is so clean, so simple to use and access – much easier, actually, than pencil and paper. Unless the Internet blows up, the information in my blog will be more efficiently preserved and more universally accessible than any hard copy journal (with pictures pasted in?) that I might otherwise have used to keep a record of my adventures in the trade.

In effect, I’m using a digital medium (my web based blog) for an analog task (keeping a bookselling journal.) There’s a certain postmodern irony to this that tickles me.

Anyway, for the record, the crowd (left to right - Peter Stern, Natalie Bauman, and Bernice)

was well heeled, in a buying mood, and steady all day. Also, for the record, here’s what I bought.

(Print) US SLOOP OF WAR JAMESTOWN. CAPTAIN R.B. FORBES (with) AN INTERESTING MEMOIR OF THE JAMESTOWN VOYAGE TO IRELAND OF THE LATE R.B. FORBES. (Bos.) 1890. 15 pp. b/w frontis. Robert Bennett Forbes is one of the great characters in American maritime history. He made his first trip to China at age 13; at 20 he received command of his own ship for a 3 year voyage around the world; by age 30 he had made a fortune; by age 34 lost nearly all of it, and then by age 36 regained it. In later years he became a ship owner and builder and was responsible for improvements in lifesaving devices and ships’ rigs. He also wrote his autobiography, which is a rich source of information on the China Trade, and a terrific read. In 1847, on the heels of the Irish famine, Congress authorized two warships, the Jamestown and the Macedonian, to carry supplies to Ireland to help relieve the distress of the Irish people. Forbes volunteered to captain the Jamestown. This lot consists of a rare colored lithograph by Atkinson and Scruggs dated 1847 of the Jamestown arriving at the port of Cobh in Ireland. Image size is 20 x 16 inches. Matted and framed, under glass. The pamphlet is also scarce. It was published by, James B. Cullen as the first in a series of pamphlets devoted to historical oddities, and in honor of Forbes who had died in 1889. It is bound in half morocco over marbled boards, with wraps bound in. $1250

and…

(Print) THE GROSVENOR, EAST INDIAMAN. This print commemorates a famous shipwreck which took place off the African coast in 1782. 132 passengers made it ashore, but only 18 survived starvation, thirst, exposure and harassment by natives. This 1784 aquatint by Pollard and Wilson measures approximately 21 x 17 inches. It is in brilliant condition. Matted and framed, under glass. $750

Next week… The Vermont Antiquarian Book Fair or, What Am I Doing Here?

Never Too Late

2011-07-24T11:52:00.000-07:00

Burgues, "Installation des Vaisseaux". (1798) More info below

Closing in on the final stages of getting ready to pull the permits and secure the variances that will allow us to prepare to start building our new gallery and shop. Sounds torturous doesn’t it? Because we’re building a commercial structure there have been many, many unexpected regulatory hoops to jump through, involving plumbing, access, structural engineering, fire safety, and drainage. Seems like every agency in the city needs to issue us a permit of some kind or other, and those things ain’t cheap, folks!

We’ve also been soliciting bids from the different contractors who will be involved in the project – landscapers, demolition people, excavators, concrete guys, carpenters, plumbers, electricians, and HVAC specialists. The process has been enlightening.

Every contractor wants to get the job, of course, and each of them has his own way of playing the game. Some just bang the estimate out by the square foot, producing a low number that will inevitably rise; some drive you nuts by seeking to micro-manage every detail, resulting in a mostly incomprehensible list of specifications that make it impossible to compare their bid with anyone else’s; some game the process by saying, “tell me the lowest bid and I’ll beat it;” some throw their hands up and try to convince you that the best deal would be for you to hire them by the hour, on a cost plus basis. A few - a very few - look you in the eye, explain what they can and cannot do, give you some idea of what you’re paying for labor, and break down expected material costs and overruns.

On the whole it’s been an interesting study in human psychology. But because of the feeling of being continually gamed, it’s not one I’d care to repeat.

My experience with the building trade has gotten me thinking about my own trade. I’ve been struck by the way this slightly uncomfortable process resembles the ordeal the novice endures when selling a library or buying an expensive book or manuscript.

Suppose you’re charged with acquiring a rare book as a retirement gift for the head of your department at work. Or suppose your aunt dies, leaving you with the task of selling her lifetime collection of Victorian children’s books. You fire up the computer, get on the phone, and suddenly you’re surrounded by any number of dealers, each of whom is trying to gain the advantage. You, meanwhile, know nothing about whatever it is you’re trying to buy or sell, and feel overwhelmed by a dizzying array of numbers, terms and possibilities. You move quickly from overwhelmed to slightly suspicious to slightly more annoyed to wishing you could just get the damned business done.

As the years go by we tend to take the details of our trade for granted. But to someone who is not familiar with our world the book business is a swamp of esoteric terminology, arcane bits of knowledge and bizarre financial contortions. Despite energetic PR campaigns by auction houses and the fondest hopes of the database jockeys over at Americana Exchange, the market is anything but transparent.

Over the course of my career I’ve been involved, as a dealer, in hundreds of transactions with inexperienced civilians. Now that I know how it feels to be on the other side, I’m going to put a little more work into emulating that “look you in the eye” contractor. It’s never too late for good karma.

Meanwhile, in the hard-knock life of the antiquarian book world… My arm is still in a sling, so I can’t drive. But I found a perfect excuse to pass another week without having to endure the drudgery of trying to learn to buy books on the Internet.

On Thursday and Friday, July 21st and 22nd, Eldred’s Auctions held a huge two day auction of marine and export art, books, manuscripts, and antiques.

Accordingly, I devoted Monday and Tuesday to studying the catalog – hard copy, of course - all marked up with my scribbled comments and coded price estimates. Then on Wednesday I got my dear long-suffering wife to drive me out to East Dennis on Cape Cod to preview the goods.

I loathe auctions, especially these summertime sales that are as much social affairs as business deals. White pants and straw hats. So I left my bids, sixteen of them. Then after an excellent lunch with fellow maritime book dealer Dick Hawkins at Columbia Trading Company, schlepped back home with Anne Marie.

I must say, I was a little glum on the ride to Gloucester. After the exhilarating experience of handling those lovely books and manuscripts it was a downer to realize I probably wouldn’t be able to buy much of what I wanted. Bob Eldred has been running these summer maritime auctions since the 1960s, and by now has accumulated a world class clientele. I knew there’d be a lot of money bidding against me. Prices would be at retail and above. I didn’t stand much of a chance.

But something funny happened. As expected the art and antiques went for top dollar. But nobody seemed particularly interested in the books. I won eleven of my sixteen left bids, almost all of them going for less than my limit.

I’ve been saying for years that people are losing interest in books (in favor of visual items such as maps and broadsides). But it’s a little frightening to see my dire prediction played out in the marketplace.

Maybe I should’ve gotten into the construction business.

Here's one of the nicest books I bought at Eldred's:

Burgues de Missiessy. INSTALLATION DES VAISSEUX. Paris An VI (1798). 4to, xii, 403, (1) pp. Design and construction of a 74 gun frigate, showing full hull construction, bow and stern views, deck arrangement and interiors. A scarce book. Polak 1322. Scott 456. Light water stain on lower edges of pages, but still a very nice copy, with eight folding engraved plates. Bound in original full calf with gilt spine decorations. $2750

Next week… How to continue avoiding learning to buy books on the Internet. And our special feature – Things you are surprised to learn you cannot do with only one hand.

Something to Feel Good About

2011-07-17T08:57:00.001-07:00

“Journal of a Whale Voyage to the Pacific Ocean on Board the Ship Samuel Wright, John Pitman Master. Kept by Wm. E. Percival Second. June 14, 1833 – Sept. 8, 1837.” (more below)

Shoulder surgery July 8, to be followed by a month in a sling. No driving, hence no book scouting. The plan was to spend this interval learning how to scout books on the Internet, and to report on my progress in this blog each week.

What was I thinking?

My first five minutes on eBay were excruciatingly boring. Then over to Americana Exchange, which I’d vowed to master. Three minutes was about all I could take. I’ll just have to face the fact that it really IS hard to teach an old dog new tricks.

But there was enough going on in the analog world to make me forget the Internet for a while.

Seems an anonymous donor had given a whaling log to the Friends of the Library Sale in Newtown, CT. John Renjilian of Pages of Yesteryear (he volunteers at the sale) sent me an email about the log. He told me the book was priced at $3500 and would be put out Saturday morning along with the rest of the book sale merchandise. First come, first served. If I wanted to be sure to get it, I’d better show up early. He then politely refused my bribe offer,

Of course I was going to be in the hospital getting my new shoulder. So I called my pal Orv Haberman of Connecticut River Books and he kindly offered to get in line at the sale and try to snag the log. A little later I had a similar conversation with Brian Bilby of Appledore Books who graciously offered to be Orv’s backup.

Long story short, as they say, my cellphone went off at 9 AM last Saturday morning as I lay in my hospital bed picking away post-op cobwebs. Orv had gotten the whaling log.

When he delivered the book a few days ago he told me about the library sale. What an eye opener!

The Friends of the C.H. Booth Library sale was established 36 years ago. After a year or two they realized they’d better start getting serious if they wanted to make any money for the library. Now they have more than 30 volunteers including a publicist. Over 100 people help out on the day of the sale. They work all year gathering books and generating publicity, and they take almost everything they are offered, often driving considerable distances to make pickups. None of the books are creamed off before the sale (hence the rejection of my $1000 bribe), and none of the volunteers, not even Renjilian, are allowed to take books before the sale opens. They’re very strict about this, and over the years the sale has gotten the reputation of being one of the few in which the stock is fresh and unpicked.

This year, according to John, there were about 140,000 books on offer. More than 1200 people paid the first day $5 admission. All the books were priced and the price decreased each day until the fifth day when the remaining books were offered for free. Incredibly, almost every one of those 140,000 volumes found a home. At the end of the five days, a mere 14 tables of merchandise remained.

My whaling log, I learned, was essentially a publicity hook. Articles about it appeared in local papers, the Newtown Bee, and even Americana Exchange. Indeed, it seemed as if everyone in the western world had heard about the whaling log on sale at the Newtown Library book sale. Renjilian said it was the best advertising the sale could have gotten.

It’s nice to know that smart, dedicated and energetic volunteers can raise enough money to keep a library afloat. It’s even more gratifying to know that there were buyers for all those books.

Sure, many of the customers were collectors or casual readers, but by John Renjilian’s estimate, about 60% of the attendees were dealers. A few of them, he said, were people we’d know from the trade. But the majority were from a new generation of dealers. Not younger necessarily, but newer to the business. Take a look at the Member Directory for a group like IOBA (Independent Online Booksellers Association). Suddenly it seems there are an awful lot of people out there making livings, or even parts of livings, at this difficult job.

I’ve been whining for years about the demise of the trade. Examples like the Newtown sale suggest that the book business may be healthier than I’d imagined – not dying at all, but morphing into new forms, finding new venues, developing new customers.

Just think about it – 100,000 volumes, give or take, absorbed by dealers and retail customers at one sale over a single long weekend. Sounds pretty healthy to me.

Or maybe it’s just the percocets kicking in.

"The Samuel Wright was a 372 ton ship from Salem, Mass. She fished a little over three years in the Pacific and returned 2000 bbl. sperm oil. Following her departure June 14, she made the Azores July, and killed her first whale July 20. She rounded the Horn at the end of September and spent her entire cruise on the line and the coast of Peru. Saturday, October 5, 1833 “at 7 AM lost overboard James B Drew brought the ship to the wind and lowered a boat but could not save him he was a very interesting youth aged about 14.” The log skips Apr. 1834 – May 1835, and resumes west of the Galapagos with 1300 sperm. On October 15, 1835, Percival records, “28 months out 1650 barrels.” December 23, 1835, “30 months out and only 1,800 barrels of oil, well never mind shall get more in someday.” They wintered each season at Tumbes. “Sunday, Dec 20, 1835. shall probably get in tomorrow and then what; why all hands will go ashore and have a high time and when they get through with it they will feel worse than before well never mind we shall get home in the course of 12 months.” And so they did, heading home at the end of July, “squall on one side and cook playing the fiddle on other.” Pages at the end include an interesting recipe for the 'Cure of Cancer.' $6000"

Bone on Bone

2011-07-03T11:22:00.000-07:00

Fate has pitched me a curveball, folks.

For years I’ve had a bad right shoulder, probably the result of a mis-spent youth painting houses instead of studying library science or apprenticing with A.S.W. Rosenbach. Suddenly it got really bad – pain and no range of motion - and I went to see the doc. “Bone on bone arthritis,” he told me, “With bone spurs, arthritic damage and deposits, and a frayed rotator cuff. We’d better get you a new one.”

So in I go, this Friday, for a new shoulder. They tell me I’ll be laid up for 4 to 6 weeks. No driving. So how am I going to conduct my business, buy and sell my books, make my living? Feed my family?

Easy! I’m going to contact all my Internet-savvy friends and find out how they buy books online. ABE, eBay, Craig’s list, iGavel, and every grungy bookseller listserv, auction and marketplace known to man. I’m going to wheedle advice from my more knowledgeable compatriots, and try everything they tell me.

Each week, as part of this blog, I’ll tell you what I’ve learned, if I was able to apply it, and how well it worked. Typing with one hand, I should be plenty busy during my recovery, though the blog might be a little short on pictures.

So if you’ve got any tips for navigating Americana Exchange, searching eBay, or, gaming ABE, take pity on a poor wounded vet and send me your secret tips for Turning Spare Time Into Intenet Gold.

Meanwhile, back in the cynical, hardnosed world of rare maritime books and manuscripts, here’s a wonderful manuscript item that just came in. It was scouted up by a colleague who saw a small ad for an auction in a good neighborhood, got in his car at 4 AM and drove hard, arriving just as the auction began. His gamble was rewarded with:Manuscript. PRIZE BOOK FOR THE PRIVATEER AMERICA ON HER THIRD CRUISE, JANUARY 17 - MARCH 12, 1814. WITH SUMMARIES OF HER FIRST TWO CRUISES. 12mo. 11 pages manuscript entries. The ship America, owned by the Crowninshield family of Salem, was one of the most successful and famous privateers in the War of 1812. A merchantman built in 1804, she was razeed and reinforced at the outbreak of hostilities, raising her tonnage from 473 to nearly 600 tons. She carried twenty guns and 150 men. Her first cruise, a successful one, began on September 7, 1812. The second cruise, March 29, 1813, was also successful, but shortened by lack of supplies. The third cruise, whose results are detailed in this book, began December 3, 1813, under Captain James Cheever, Jr. After two near mishaps - pouncing on strangers who turned out to be British warships - Cheever and the America lucked into a convoy of 140 sail and fed like a hungry wolf. This was followed by good hunting in February and March, before the America returned to Salem on April 8, 1815. Over her three cruises she landed twenty-five prizes returning $1,100,000 to her shareholders. Ten of them are recorded here, in considerable detail. The author of this book records type of vessel, master, cargo, location of capture and the names of the prize crew put on the captured vessel. The final three pages of the book summarize the results of the first and second cruise. The only similar documents I’ve seen are folio ledger sheets tallying prizes. This is a more immediate kind of record, probably made at the end of the final cruise. Pages clean and legible. In beautiful condition, absolutely contemporary, on paper watermarked 1808. $3000

Next week: Things you can do with one hand.

Footloose Whalemen and Other Matters

2011-06-27T06:45:00.000-07:00

Whaling Journal Kept by George Smith, 1847-1851. Details below.

In case I didn’t explain myself sufficiently in my prior entry, I spent last week not on a restaurant tour, but at a conference of Rare Book and Manuscript Librarians in Baton Rouge, LA. For the past few years the conference (held in a different city each year) has included a day-long meet and greet event called the Dealer’s Showcase, in which ABAA booksellers get to hang out with the nation’s most active institutional librarians. And that’s what I did last Tuesday from 9:30 AM to 7:30 PM, having left Gloucester Friday, scouting, driving and eating my way south, until Monday.

Colleagues Adam Davis and Kate Schaefer of Division Leap Books meditate on the mysteries of the proto-punk narrative, while Cynthia Gibson (a spiritual relation only) and Rob Rulon-Miller, representing Rulon-Miller books, study hard to make themselves better booksellers and more caring human beings.

This year’s event was certainly worth the investment of driving time, road dollars and mental energy. I met some new librarians, had a few excellent conversations with librarians and booksellers, and even sold a couple of items. The river was lovely, the companionship wonderful, and the food superb.

Here, Heidi Congalton of Between the Covers and Kevin Johnson of Royal books are having a little chat. The librarians only came in numbers toward the end of the day, so we booksellers spent a lot of time having little chats. The big windows in the back ran all across the room, giving us a wonderful view of the Mississippi. Great storm about 3 PM!

All in all the event was a success. Only one troubling thought followed me on the long drive home.

The day after the Dealer’s Showcase, on Wednesday morning, I gave a talk to about 200 librarians. My topic was “Archives in the 21st Century: One Dealer’s Perspective” and the talk consisted of stories about various archives I’ve had experience with. My idea was to demonstrate anecdotally the many new pressures on archival material in the 21st century market. My major conclusions were that the Internet now draws more material out of hiding than ever before – including by theft – and that auction houses, whose rise strangely mirrors the decline of “bricks and mortar” book shops, tend to disintegrate rather than aggregate archives. The punch line was, “My friends, I’m here to tell you that auction houses are not our friends.” This was all well received.

Then followed a Q&A session. At one point someone asked me about pricing procedures involved in offering archives to institutions. I gave my answer, then turned to my co-speaker, Lee Hampton, of the Amistad Research Center at Tulane, and asked him what the procedure was like on his end, at Tulane. He brought the house down by replying, “We never buy anything. We rely on donations.”

He then launched into an interesting discourse on the methods he employed to sway potential donors. Surveying the room as he spoke, I got the sense that a significant minority of the audience – perhaps 20% - agreed with his “donations only” stance. This, of course, implies that booksellers are essentially parasites who have inserted themselves into the donor/recipient relationship.

Mr. Hampton’s statement bemused me because I’m pretty certain it’s untrue. Amistad buys things from book dealers. Beyond that rather quirky wrinkle, its implications are troubling.

Does the Amistad Research Center have its holdings insured? If so, how could the insurance appraiser ascertain fair market value if he was forced to work in a world where nothing ever got sold, if everything was donated, if there were no “comps”- records of prior sales of similar items? If a donor needs a tax writeoff, how could he evaluate his donation except in comparison with sales of similar material?

Certainly, donations are important to any institution. I understand and respect that. But by theoretically excising the book trade from his sources of supply Mr. Hampton does serious damage to what Michael Suarez refers to as the “ecology of the book trade” – a broad concept that includes institutions and collectors as well as dealers. As we all know by now, to eliminate any bit of an integral ecology – even “parasitical” book dealers – only damages the whole.

Mind you, the vast majority of those librarians in attendance “get it” about the book trade. They see our place in the greater scheme of things.

Colleague Ian Kahn of Lux Mentis Books attended the conference and, though he didn’t participate in the Dealer’s Showcase, paid to distribute his advertising material to the attending librarians. Part of what Lux Mentis had on offer was “Collection Development.” On its face, this seemed like a reach to me. I mean, the guy has been in business for about a quarter of the time I have been, and I still don’t offer “Collection Development.” What does he know?

But as I considered the matter on the ride home (long, yes) I realized such services can be a genuine “value added” part of an institution’s relationship with a dealer. Very few of us have enough knowledge to sit on high and dictate which books an institution or collector should acquire. But most of us in the ABAA have the skills to work with an institution in order to bring a broader perspective to collection development. This is what Ian offers. And it’s an important aspect of what book dealers can bring to the table.

Mr. Hampton is very good at what he does, but he’s cutting himself short by cutting us out.

OK, off my hobby horse and onto the whale.

Manuscript WHALING JOURNAL KEPT BY GEORGE SMITH, ABOARD SEVERAL WHALESHIPS, PACIFIC OCEAN, 1847-1851. Folio. Unpaginated (About 220 pages of manuscript entries). What makes this journal unusual is that, over a period of four years, Smith jumped from ship to ship while remaining in the Pacific ocean - most of the time “on the line” and west coast of South America - and recorded each of his whaling experiences in the journal. There does not appear to be a connection between any of the ships (they were all whalers), as they were not owned by the same people, nor were they from the same ports. The journal starts aboard the ship China off Paita in August 1847. Smith changes ships in August 1848 when he transfers to the Nantucket. “Wedns. the 2... Changed staichons with Timothy H. Fisher on Board the Nantucket of Nantucket Cap Gardner...” He stays aboard the Nantucket for one year then transfers to the ship Lafayette. In July 1850 he transfers to the ship Callao were he stays until April 1851, then finishes with a brief but superbly illustrated turn aboard the Superior. (He signed on for a $34 cash advance - almost certainly as a mate.) This journal contains some excellent descriptive passages, dozens of whale stamps, a very unusual stamp of a full-rigged ship, and manuscript illustrations including recognition views and a sketch of a stove boat. It begins with a list of more than fifty vessels spoken up to 1848. Smith also kept track of his expenses, and of oil stowed aboard the Superior. He evidently swallowed the anchor and went to work ashore as a teamster or laborer. Twenty pages at the back of the book document his jobs and pay in 1853 and 1854. We know that whalemen frequently jumped ship for other vessels. However, continuous accounts such as this one are rare. $10,000

Red Stick and Big Easy

2011-06-20T20:34:00.001-07:00

Off at 5 AM, bound for the Rare Book & Manuscript Librarian’s Conference in Baton Rouge, LA. No traffic at that hour.
“Cheap” gas in NJ.
Lunch at Cranberry Bookworm, one of the last open shops on this ancient trading route. Barely made my lunch money. The route is possibly too ancient.
Then down to Bartleby’s Books in Georgetown, DC, the best general used and rare book store in the east, bar none. Their landlord refused to renew their lease (the jerk is putting in a restaurant at 3x the rent) and proprietors John Thomson and Karen Griffin will be closing their doors at the end of this month.It’s the end of an era, and a great loss to the immediate geographical community, as well as the community of book lovers at large. The last thing G’town needs is another yuppie restaurant. But so it will be.

Down the beautiful highway toward Baton Rouge, the Red Stick. Anybody know how it got that name? First stop in Knoxville, Central Street Books, formerly known as the Book Eddy, now relocated in the bar at which Cormac McCarthy used to drink – the bar still in place in the store, and very nicely designed in terms of ergonomics, I must say. Though there was nothing to do while slouching there but read a book. Owners John and Molly tell me Japanese literary tourists make pilgrimages to the place.

Next day a stop for lunch in Tuscaloosa at Dreamland,fifty years in business serving some of the best ribs I’ve ever et. But good food is not what saved it during the recent spate of killer tornadoes that tore through this area. The restaurant building happens to be snuggled up against a Baptist church, with three others nearby, and it is a well known fact that God loves ribs. He even took one of Adam’s.
Surprisingly pleasant rib-fueled drive from Tuscaloosa to Baton Rouge, a place I’d never visited before. The city proper turned out to be not much of a city - more a riverine industrial area, with six blocks of hotels and restaurants in the middle surrounded by a sprawl in which white people drive SUVs to malls. All backed up, of course, by the mighty Mississippi.

Took a jog this morning at 7:30. Temperature was 85 and climbing.

By noon it was 95, and fellow book dealers John Thomson, Lin Respess, Garrett Scott, and I repaired to the Big Easy for lunch. Which took place at a terrific place called Cochon, which my betters told me was French for pig, which we all ate like… The jackrabbit livers with pepper jelly were to die for, as was the melon soup, followed closely by the ‘gator. If I don’t sell a book this trip, or meet a new librarian, the journey will still have been worth it for that lunch. Cochon.

A quick stop at Joe Phillips’ Crescent City Books, then back to Baton Rouge to set up our stands for tomorrow’s ten hour long meet-and greet with the 250 librarians attending the conference. The alleged purpose behind all this eating.

I’ll be headed home after that, so I’m posting this abbreviated blog entry now, in order to not get too far off schedule.

Sorry I don’t have any product to shill. I’ll try to make up for it in next week’s entry, which will also contain some SURPRISING NEWS, and a proposal for a potentially entertaining run of future entries.

Till then, let the good times roll!

The Real Pirates of the Caribbean

2011-06-13T15:00:00.001-07:00

Spent a wonderful week up in my artist buddy’s studio in Cape Breton working on a book proposal.
Each day, after I’d written and read as much as I could, I’d take a walkabout, and do a little work in my field. But a bad shoulder and lousy weather kept chainsaw fun to a minimum.

When I bought the land from my buddy six years ago it had gone wild and was full of twenty-five year old spruce trees. Every summer I cut, cleared, and burned – probably toasted $10,000 worth of Xmas trees - and now I have a beautiful field to enjoy, and a place for a getaway shack of my own. If my kids want to build it for me!
Down at the bottom of the field runs Middle River, a sweet, clear Canadian stream, home of trout and spawning salmon. It was one of the features I liked best about the land, but lately it’s been on a rampage.
Over the last five years it’s eaten up about fifty feet of beach, and now is chawing into the hillside, causing massive mudslides and collapses. It’s already obliterated the bottom of the path that used to lead down to it, leaving instead a ten foot cliff.
The Effects of Global Warming? I dunno. But if this keeps up. I won’t have to worry about clearing any more trees out of my field. The river will do it for me.

Saturday I drove down to Halifax to scout books and try to pay for my trip. It was a lovely warm day, and the streets were full of basking students. Stopped to see my friends at Schooner Books, on the far end of town, then down to John Duoll on Barrington St. John is a madman. He can’t stop buying books. Found a couple of interesting things there, then hit the road, drove as far as I could, and got up the next morning and kept driving. There was one other place I wanted to hit on my way home. I was pretty tired Sunday afternoon, and couldn’t decide whether to keep driving or not. Almost on a whim, I stopped. And boy, am I glad I did!

Waiting for me there was the first manuscript account I’d ever seen of an American ship being captured by pirates. Really cool!
Manuscript LOG OF THE SHIP HANTONIA, ICHABOD ROLLINS, MASTER. SEPTEMBER 20, 1805 - APRIL 14, 1806. PORTSMOUTH, NH - KINGSTON, JAMAICA. Tall folio, 12 x 19 1/2 inches. Unpaginated (approx. 47 pages manuscript entries.) Because of its excellent level of detail, clear writing, and impressive physical appearnace, this would be a valuable and interesting log in and of itself. However, something happened on this voyage that makes it most ususual. In September 1805 the Hantonia departed Portsmouth, NH with a full cargo of lumber and fish. They made Port Royal by the end of October and spent three weeks repairing their ship and discharging their salt fish and staves, boards, and planks. Then they “got under way and proceed’d to the Balafin ground... Employ’d one black man on board to work” taking on ballst. Apparently the work was hard. Two days later they employed “two more Negroes to work.” The day after that three men, named in the log, refused their duty. Finally, by the end of November, they’d gotten themselves repaired, ballasted and watered, and got underway. A week later, on December 6, 1805, they were captured by pirates, who locked the crew up, ransacked their ship, stole everything they could pry loose, ate and drank freely from the ship’s stores, and then took what was left of those along for good measure. The pirates stayed aboard through the night, “behaving in a shocking manner breaking & tearing & taking every thing they could lay their hands on” before sailing off. The pirate captain “said his vessel was call’d the Queen of Spain he had Spanish coulours sett but they were all french men on board of her.” The Hantonia then limped into port in Cuba, got repaired, and took on a cargo of sugar for New York. They departed January 15 and, after a rough winter trip, Made Sandy Hook light a little more than a month later. This is a remarkable log. The pirate account is about 500 words long, and all the entries are intelligently written and full of information about shipboard conditions. This is the first manuscript account I’ve ever handled of a capture of an American vessel by pirates. These were the real Pirates of the Caribbean! $5500

Next week, a little late, will be a report on the Rare Book & Manuscript Librarians conference in Baton Rouge. I’ve got to give a talk on archives there, but I promise I won’t make you listen to it.

Muscle Memory

2011-06-06T08:03:00.000-07:00

Ooops! First weekend in June. Load the car, head for Concord, New Hampshire. Stop for mugup

and what will prove to be one of the more significant purchases of the trip.

Arrive at the Everett Arena and hang out with my colleagues

until the doors open on the 574th annual New Hampshire Antiquarian Bookfair,

ably organized by Laura Parr (née Barr, née Parr).

And watch as the crowd of visitors beats the doors down in their eagerness for books.

Try to stay awake until 4PM Sunday at which time I pack up and head for home, stopping only to have a martini and order takeout from Golden Dragon, as I have done on this weekend every year since Hector was a pup. Coulda done it in my sleep. I think a few of my colleagues did. I was tired, the crowd was tired, the stock seemed tired too.

The best thing I bought wasn’t even bought at the fair. It was delivered from Allentown, having been scouted up a few weeks ago by King of the Road, Bill Hutchison. Five albumen photos of the 1901 America’s Cup trials taken by Brooklyn photographer Frederick A. Walter, with his blindstamp in the lower corner of each photo. The heats featured Constitution, Independence, and ultimate victor, Columbia. One of these images has turned up on the internet, but most seem to be unknown. Prints measure 7 ½ x 9 inches and are in very good condition. They’ll make some collector happy. The lot $1250

So, the show was a snooze.
Laura Parr (maiden name Parr, married a guy named Barr, then took her maiden name back) said she thinks that show has enough gittyup to last for another three or four years, then, who knows? Perhaps, some June in 2015, a bunch of us will find ourselves in the parking lot of the Everett Arena shooting the breeze and waiting for the doors to open, even though no show has been scheduled for that year.

But now for the exciting news.

Today was the last day our control-freak neighbor could legally challenge our plans for the new structure at 77 Langsford St. He has not done so, which means we can go ahead and demolish the old structure, then build our beautiful new gallery and shop. The ground floor will house Flatrocks Gallery, but now the new space will also be the home of my daughter’s florist business, Celia’s Flower Studio

Art and flowers! We think it’s going to be a hit. The books and maps about local history will be discreetly placed around the gallery, with overflow stock in our clean, dry basement. Meanwhile, on the second floor there will be three studio spaces available for rent at reasonable rates to local artists.

The guy who lives behind us has held this project up for 16 months with threats of legal action. In his need to micro-manage our project he’s managed to forget that it was his tree that destroyed our building. But finally we’ve come up with a compromise solution that even he can find no objection to, and so we move forward at last. We’re excited about the whole project – about Anne Marie and pal Cynthia starting the gallery up again, about our daughter Celia working with us, about our son Brooks building the structure, and about once again having a gathering place for our artists and friends in the village of Lanesville and all of Gloucester and Cape Ann. But mostly I’m excited about moving out of the kids’ old bedroom where I’ve been stuck since February 2010, when our neighbor’s tree destroyed my workplace.

This coming week I’m up in Cape Breton trying to put the finishing touches on the proposal for my book about John Ledyard. I’ll have a full report next week, and probably some visually interesting tweets and Facebook entries along the way. So, if you haven’t already, “like” and “follow” Ten Pound Island.

A Cruise with the Carters

2011-05-30T08:06:00.001-07:00

Here’s a lovely thing that just came in.

YACHTING JOURNALS OF THE WILLIAM CARTER FAMILY, ALLSTON, MASS - MONHEGAN ISLAND AND MAINE COAST, 1914 - 1915.

William and Isabelle Carter and their daughter Jamie lived in a comfortable but not over-the-top Victorian house in Allston, Mass.
They owned a comfortable but not over-the-top yacht (it looks to be about a 35 foot motor cruiser). In those days the Charles River was still open to traffic down as far as Allston, and they tied their boat Isabelle up at “Carter’s Landing” along the Charles in that city. In the summers of 1914, 1915, and possibly other years, the three of them made family trips in the Isabelle down east to Maine. If the Carters had been upper class people, these cruises would have involved yacht clubs, yachting costumes, and lots of socializing and drinking. But they were not. Their adventures centered on the natural beauty of places along the way, on humorous adventures and mishaps - they were avowed amateurs - and a few visits with friends. All this is recorded in five hand made journals measuring about 6 1/2 x 7 inches and bound in limp leather. The pages are good heavy watercolor paper, watermarked 1914. One of the voyages is recorded in mock epic style, two in rhyming couplets, one in straight narrative, one in blank verse. All have captions, sometimes humorous, to photos and drawings. Some of the drawings are elaborate double page spreads. Isabelle Carter was probably the artist responsible for these journals, though her husband may have contributed a narrative. Four of the journals are 64-76 pages in length. The fifth is 35 pages long. In total they contain 177 snapshot photographs of coastal scenes - from the lock in the Charles to Monhegan Island, passengers and the Isabelle, and 70 colored drawings (ink and watercolor) of descriptive, decorative and humorous subjects. An intimate and charming look at recreational yachting in the early 20th century $4500

As I read through the journal and enjoyed the adventures of this lively family, I marveled that these books, in their limp suede covers, had survived in such good condition for nearly a century… then I began to wonder if there had originally been more. This series obviously documents the end of an era for them – the last journal is titled “Last Voyage” – and undoubtedly the pressures of the Great War constrained their carefree days on the Isabelle. But until I, or you, do more research on William Carter and the motor yacht Isabelle, we won’t know how many years she was afloat, how many years Carter owned her, or how many other volumes there might have been in this series.

My thoughts run in this vein because I’m an aggressive, acquisitive book dealer, but also because I’m in the process of writing a talk that I am scheduled to give at the 2011 RBMS (Rare Book & Manuscript Librarians) pre-conference in Baton Rouge this June 22. The theme is “In the Hurricane’s Eye: Challenges of Collecting in the Twenty-first Century” and you can guess what the dominant topics will be. Where does paper fit in an increasingly digital world? Will there even be a significant role for collectors and purveyors of antiquarian paper?

You may have heard the news last month that British poet Wendy Cope (successor to Ted Hughes as Poet Laureate) just sold her archive to the British Library for thirty-two thousand pounds sterling. Only mild surprise there. The kicker was that the “archive” consisted of fifteen boxes of stuff and 40,000 emails. And you can bet it was the emails the British Library was after. Even as we digitize the world, we’re consuming (destroying or institutionalizing) most of its analog paper artifacts.

I’ve been buying and selling whaling logs for thirty-five years. These days, every time I find another one, I fear it will be my last. That’s the weather in the “Hurricane’s Eye” at RBMS.

For me, part of the answer to this challenging problem has to do with expanding the envelope. Are the Carter family’s journals whaling logs? No, but they do just as good as job at describing what life – and the world – were like for the Carters as some first mate’s log did at describing the Pacific in 1843.

Now let your belt out another notch.

One of my favorite art exhibits is the reconstruction of the London studio of the great twentieth century painter Francis Bacon. After Bacon died a team of archaeologists moved in to his place in London and spent two years compiling a 7000 item database that recorded and photographically documented every scrap of material in the studio, as well as its exact location. The studio was then removed from its original site at Reece Mews in South Kensington and put back together, full scale, in Dublin’s Hugh Lane Museum. (Bacon was Dublin born.) Looking down into that gorgeous mess of a room provides a kind of insight into the work of Francis Bacon that no book or monograph could ever deliver.

The point here is that as time goes on and archives of necessity become more diverse, it will take more of a trained eye, a certain connoisseurship, and definitely more imagination to find virtue in what seems to be junk.

As far as I’m concerned, this is the “future” for archives – at least from the supply side. What kinds of assemblages - what sorts of material - are at the farthest limits of my imagination? How can I unlock the virtue in an attic full of trash? What new ways can I find to sift a narrative from chaos, history from stuff?

The Rapture

2011-05-22T14:12:00.001-07:00

J.P. Jones Plugs Lt. Grubb. (Details below.)

What a difference a year makes! This Saturday morning, as I pulled up at the Greater Philadelphia Expo Center to shop the second annual Philadelphia Book and Paper Expo,the parking lot was full. And so was the hall.Oh, wait a minute. That was the Eastern Pennsylvania Conference of the United Methodist Church (“Making Disciples of Jesus Christ for the Transformation of the World.”) being held in the space adjacent to the book fair. The fair looked more like this.In short, the usual lackluster event, populated by the usual dealers, attended by the usual suspects, competently organized, as usual, by Flamingo Eventz, but just about flatlined as far as energy, imagination, or creativity were concerned. Super Scout Bill Hutchison put it best:“The Rapture came early. This is hell.”

I stole the line to use as a tweet. (Yeah, it’s true. “Follow” me, will you? For that matter, “like” Ten Pound Island on Facebook. I got kids to feed.) But then I got to thinking what a perfectly Twilight Zone-ish kind of hell the Philly book fair could be – the last place you’d expect to spend your life in eternal damnation, but hellish for exactly that reason. In such a hell, as Hutch put it, “The books would keep getting worse.”

So how come the Methodists got such a big crowd? They’re only selling one book.

Ah, well. I got more than one book, but jest barely. Here’s the math of it.

I was on the road for four days, a little over 1000 miles. At an average cost of about $1 per mile on such trips, and figuring to double on anything I bought, I’d have to spend $1000 just to break even on expenses, and cover my cost of goods. Cash flow is the name of the game, friends. My total purchases came to $1220.

I guess I could have stayed home. But then I would have missed my first two days in various Vermont locations including the Rauner Library at Dartmouth, researching John Ledyard’s famous canoe trip, which I hope will be the core of my next book.

After I finished my research I hit the book trail in semi-earnest, stopping at a couple of places in New York, including Fred Rosselot’s house.Fred is a lovely guy, one of the true characters in the business, who’s made a long and successful career out of lumping antiques, house cleanouts, and dumpster diving.Then down to see Bob Langmuir, subject of my book, Hubert’s Freaks. Turned out Bob had sold the Arbus archive, and is now living the life of a country squire in Chadd’s Ford, PA. So happy endings are possible, I guess.

The funnest thing I bought in Philly was a collection of 32 nineteenth century lithos and engravings collected by someone interested in old printing. (Kindly scouted up for me by Dan Gaetta of John Bale Book Co.) This group contained a wonderful image of John Paul Jones shooting Lt. Grubb - a famous episode about which I blogged a few months ago (It has been the subject of many images, but it never actually happened.) - and an even more famous event, the yacht America’s victory in the first America’s Cup race, with a contemporary colored image and an article from Hunt’s Yachting Magazine, 1861. As well as 30 other engravings of George III, John Calhoun, Benedict Arnold, the Constitution defeating the Guerriere, etc., etc… $200 for the lot.

Well, it's been rapturous visiting with you. Next week a piece on archives, then a report on the venerable New Hampshire Book Fair.

Ferdinandea

2011-05-15T13:29:00.000-07:00

Along with pirate treasure, white whales, female marines and flying Dutchmen, one of the most interesting byways of maritime lore has to do with disappearing islands.

Atlantis comes first to mind - home of our greatest lost civilization and enough crackpot theories to populate several islands. Then probably Avalon, where King Arthur went for R&R after his dustup with Mordred, and Lyonesse, where Tristan lived before he met Iseult and got into opera.

In times modern enough to attract the interest of geographers, there’s Drake’s Elizabeth Island, discovered by him in 1578 off the coast of Tierra del Fuego, and missing ever since. Also Isle Phelypeaux and Isle Ponchartrain first mapped in Lake Superior in the 17th century, and disappeared soon thereafter. Dozens of islands, and even continents, made their appearances on early maps, only to be effaced in subsequent editions.

Even more recently, there’s Ferdinandea, a little bump coughed up by a volcano off the coast of Sicily in 1831. A passing Spanish merchant ship may have discovered it initially. The French called it Julia and sent a geologist and an artist to document it. Ferdinand, the King of the Two Sicilies, thought it was his and named it after himself. The British, who were convinced they owned everything, named it Graham’s Island, after a Grand Poobah in the Admiralty.

The island rose to about 200 feet above sea level. It was ideally situated to be of strategic importance to the countries that claimed it. It even had two small lakes and a beach, which made it the hottest tourist attraction in the area. Everything seemed lined up for a nasty four-way international property dispute when, in 1832, Ferdinandea sank back below the sea, leaving nothing but a gaggle of frustrated diplomats.

Oh, and a few printed and manuscript accounts of its existence.

Last fall I purchased a journal kept by a man named Henry Dean, who was on the navy ship that took American Ambassador John Randolph to his post in Russia. Just for some context, here’s how historian Henry Adams describes Randolph’s posting. “In September, 1829, he [Randolph] was offered and accepted a special mission to Russia; he sailed in June, 1830; remained ten days at his post; then passed near a year in England; and, returning home in October, 1831, drew $21,407 from the government, with which he paid off his old British debt. This act of Roman virtue, worthy of the satire of Juvenal, still stands as the most flagrant bit of diplomatic jobbery in the annals of the United States government.”

After delivering Randolph Dean’s ship joined several others from the Atlantic Squadron, and cruised the Mediterranean. So, what I had was a interesting account of a US naval ship hauling a scoundrel around.

I put it on the shelf and forgot about it until a few months ago, when a colleague sold me a drawing and description of the eruption and formation of Ferdinandea. The event rang a bell with me, and after a few weeks of scrabbling around I came upon Dean’s journal, toward the end of which I found his entry describing the strange little island. Furthermore – I had not noticed these in my initial perusal of the manuscript – Dean copied several pages describing the formation of the island, transcribed from contemporary printed reports. The wording of one of these accounts was almost an exact match for wording on the drawing. Suddenly, much to my delight, I was the owner of a previously unknown chart and drawing of the formation of Ferdinandea, along with a lengthy manuscript account of the event. (You can be, too. For only $3500. I’ll pay the shipping.)

In my case, this concurrence was just dumb luck. But it put me in mind of some of the great finds of recent years, and of the great book scouts who made them. In almost every case these exciting discoveries involved the discoverer making a hitherto unknown connection, of seeing something in a way others did not see it.

About thirty years ago legendary book scout Scott Nason found a first edition Tamerlane in a box of seed catalogs – a happy launch for what has been an exemplary career. Since then I’ve talked to half a dozen scouts and dealers who told me they’d been to the shop where Scott had made his find, and probably had looked through that same box of catalogs, without seeing what Scott saw.

Then there was the rumor last year that a well attended book fair yielded an early copy of the Articles of Confederation. According to the story, the piece had been sitting on a dealer’s table, priced at a few hundred dollars. The dealer had no idea what it was, nor did the dozens of people who picked it up and put it down that morning – until at last someone with the eyes to see it examined it closely.

You probably know someone who seems to have that gift – a preternatural ability to pull the right book off the shelf, even when none of the spine titles are legible. It’s an ability akin to second sight.

On the other hand, as my pal John Thomson points out, it may simply be the result of experience. Perhaps the dealer who found that copy of the Articles of Confederation had seen, or even sold a copy before.

This is the reason Thomson rarely passes up an opportunity to look at a library, even if he knows he doesn’t stand a chance of buying the books. At home his kitchen table is piled high with other dealers’ catalogs. His bookcases groan with reference books. At the end of a long bookfair setup, when the rest of us head for the bar, he’s likely to still be on the bookfair floor, squinting at title pages spread out in dusty glass cases. “You have to know the material,” he says. “You have to educate yourself.”

Having a book scout’s second sight, ala Nason or Matty Needle is all well and good. A little luck, as in my dance with Ferdinandea, doesn’t hurt either. But to really make a go at this trade, to keep turning up the goods day in and day out, Thomson’s right.

You have to educate yourself.

Tune in next week for a review of the Philadelphia Book & Ephemera Fair as well as other hijinx yet to be discovered.

Hold the Onions

2011-05-08T09:13:00.000-07:00

One day in the late 1970s I was in Ernie Starr’s shop in Boston talking books with Ernie’s son Norm when a squatty little wise guy broke into our conversation and told me I should think about joining a new association of booksellers called MARIAB – Massachusetts and Rhode Island Antiquarian Booksellers. I made some smart reply about not being a joiner and the little guy just shook his head. “You don’t get it.”

The little guy’s name was Peter Stern and, over the years, he became a good friend and trusted colleague. Over that same period MARIAB (which Stern and Starr were instrumental in founding) morphed into one of the largest and strongest regional trade organizations in the country for old and used book sellers. What I “didn’t get” was that MARIAB was not a fraternal organization. Along with promoting member firms their major function is sponsoring book fairs. And they’ve been doing that with considerable success for 35 years.

For a while, back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the venue for the spring MARIAB show was the Shriner’s Auditorium in Wilmington, Mass.The show was a real gas. The Shriners, in their fezzes and fancy jackets, worked as our porters and security staff. To help raise money to support their worthy Hospitals for Children program they sold big bags of fresh vidalia onions, imported direct from Vidalia, Georgia. What could be better than spring weather, guys in fezzes, old books, and vidalia onions?

This year the MARIAB bookfair and the Shriner’s Auditorium were reunited. The fair was run by promoter Marvin Getman, of New England Antique Shows and, I must say, this was a brilliant choice by the MARIAB book fair committee. Getman, who comes with years of experience and networking in the antique world, is far and away the most imaginative, organized, and energetic book fair promoter in the northeast. His production at the Shriner’s Auditorium this year did not disappoint.

The guys with fezzes were there, just as in days of old.So was the famous Shriners camel.
More importantly Getman had coaxed more than 90 dealers out of hiding and created a vibrant mix of book, photo, and ephemera dealers. It was the biggest, strongest, and liveliest non-ABAA bookfair these parts have seen in years. Getman’s five-figure advertising campaign drew a crowd that was so eager they had to be restrained by crime scene tape.(This photo was taken an hour before opening. I’m told some of the customers had camped there all night).

Best of all, the material on offer seemed fresh, interesting and, in general, reasonably priced. It was almost like bookfairs in the old days - lots of exhibitors, good books, healthy crowds. There was only one problem. This year, for whatever reason, there were no vidalia onions.

As an addendum to this rave review, I should report that boothmate John Waite and I were standing in our booth talking to Marvin Getman about promoting shows, and the wisdom of a big, easy to reach, relatively inexpensive venue like the Shriner’s, versus a classier downtown Boston location. A lady who was shopping in our booth overheard us and told us that she was there because she’d learned about the fair from one of Marvin’s ads. She and her husband lived in Needham, she said, but he would not drive into Boston. The clincher for them was that parking at the Shriner’s Auditorium was plentiful and free. Ain’t gonna get that in Big City, no way.

My prize catch is pictured above. It is the work of a whaleman named John Williams. In June 1846, cruising the line off the Galapagos Islands, Williams found himself with some time on his hands. He got hold of Taber’s New Bedford and Fairhaven Signal Book, probably not hard to find aboard a whaleship, and copied its contents into a small (4 x 6 inch) blank book in ink and watercolor. Not satisfied with that accomplishment, he then copied flags of maritime nations (source unknown, but probably also from a book, with some creative additions by Williams).

The result, though it may not add anything to our knowledge of flags, is a stunning little piece of folk art, done aboard a whaleship. One hundred five pages of color illustrations, with captions. $2500

The Donohue Effect

2011-04-09T14:54:00.000-07:00

I heart New York.
When I first got in the book business “the City,” as we called it, (could there be another city?) was still a mecca of book stores – little holes in the wall all over town out of which great things came. There was a lady named Gertrude down in the Village (could there be another village?) who knew all the intellectuals and got their books and papers when they died. Or maybe she just went through their trash.

I started doing the New York Book Fair in the late 1980s. It was held in the Park Avenue Armory, as it is now, but back then it had more of a neighborhood flavor. The roof leaked and there were still $25 books on exhibit. I know, because I brought them. Hundreds of them. Sold a lot, too.

I stayed with this fair through thick and thin – race riots, union troubles, a misbegotten move to the Americana Hotel, then back to the Armory under the management of Sandy Smith. And that – no matter what you might think of Sandy – was when the fair blossomed into the world class event it is now. The New York International Antiquarian Book Fair is where the books are, folks. The very best of them.
This year I landed in the City early Thursday morning, and used my extensive knowledge of the place to secure a very reasonable hotel on the West Side.
Scouted shops all day and made enough to pay my hotel bill, then went up to Donohue’s, an old fashioned bar and chop house on Lexington Ave. for my ritual pre-fair drink.

Made it to the Armory just as the doors were opening.
These Thursday evening “Previews” used to be moribund affairs. In the panic following 9/11 New York’s armories came to be seen as something other than venues for track meets and flower shows. Stricter rules for using these buildings were put in place. Armory events now had to be held in coordination with, or under the sponsorship of, a bona fide charity.

So, in order to keep his book fair going, promoter Sandy Smith wangled a couple of prestigious libraries into participating in special “Preview Nights,” with ticket proceeds being donated to the sponsoring library. The Swells on each library’s list were invited to walk the floor, drink champagne, eat strawberries, and marvel at the bibliographic baubles on display. The public was allowed in only grudgingly and tickets were very expensive. As a result people stayed away in droves and we dealers sat fuming all night, feeling like zoo animals, while gaggles of socialites who couldn’t have cared less strolled the aisles, chatting one another up.

Somehow Sandy got that changed this year. Ticket prices dropped to $50 and, from the opening bell on Thursday evening, there were real live book buyers prowling the floor.
On the other hand there was a good deal of grumbling that Sandy had scrimped on advertising for the Preview and had definitely gone on the cheap with the hors d’oeuvres… celery and carrots with no dip! He also failed to provide complimentary tickets to the dealers. So anyone wanting to invite a favorite customer had to fork over fifty clams, a significant portion of which, I’m told, went right into Sandy’s pocket.

Still, he gets the people out. The cream of the trade and the big buyers. I talked with two dozen colleagues Thursday and Friday. Comments ran from “pretty good” through “great” and, if no one was having their best fair, no one was having their worst. Pre-fair sales among dealers (a significant percentage of income for many of us) was also good but not great. The Baumans, Bill Reese and Jeff Marks did their parts. The smaller dealers did not seem to be buying as aggressively. So what’s new? The market is increasingly stronger for big books, as little books (and booksellers) struggle to hold their own.

For me, however, the true indicator of the fiscal health of the trade was at Donohue’s.
I’ve been drinking (and eating lunch and dinner) there for two decades, and Jerry the bartender, and Maureen the owner, feel more like colleagues than barkeeps. In the old days the place used to be packed with book dealers – before, during and after fair hours. Since 2008 the place had been relatively empty, inhabited only by my buddies and me, and a few locals. But this year Donohue’s was mobbed as in days of old. It was like the swallows coming back to Capistrano. A good sign for the industry.

Then, Friday night, there was the so-called “Shadow Show.”
This is a smaller and less expensive New York event held on the same weekend as the big New York fair, and intended to provide an inexpensive alternative. It’s been through many venues and managers. For the past few years the valiant Flamingoz of Flamingo Eventz have been giving it a go. Unfortunately scheduling conflicts meant that it opened this year during the hours that the big fair was still running (it has traditionally opened in the morning before the uptown fair began) and the result was a thinner than usual crowd on Friday evening.

I hope more dealers came down from the big show during the rest of the weekend, because there were a few unhappy campers on the floor when I left the place Friday night.

I got out of town Saturday morning.

As was the case at the San Francisco book fair, it was nice but strange attending as a customer rather than an exhibitor. In New York this weekend the buying was tough. I spent about $6000 at the big and little shows. If I sell what I bought I’ll pay my expenses and my time, and not much more. I’ll be back exhibiting next year. I need to be where the books are, I guess.

But not right now. I’m off for Ireland until the middle of May, to write books rather than buy them (I tell people I’m making the used books of the future) so you’re on your own until then.

Sláinte!

What’s he DOING in There?

2011-04-05T08:07:00.000-07:00

Starbuck's History of the American Whale Fishery

Last week’s blog entry was devoted to the subject of whaling logs, and it felt so good not to be writing about the relentless demise of the antiquarian book trade (see "Amazon/ABE acquires ZVAB" if you want more of that sort of thing), that I thought I’d spend another week on whaling logs and the process of reading, understanding, and selling them.

Over the past thirty-five years I’ve peddled used and rare books and manuscripts at a number of venues - the five different shops I’ve owned since 1976;
at book fairs; through catalogs; via telephone, fax and, more recently, email and the worldwide web.

The setting may change - from the stone age barter transaction at a typical book store, in which a customer thrusts a book in your face and asks how much you’d really sell it for, or tries to wangle a steep discount by paying in cash – to the modern iteration of that transaction, in which the customer tries to wangle a discount electronically, sometimes by offering PayPal dollars. But the heart of the deal is eternally the same. A customer wants something you’re offering, and hopes to get it on the most favorable terms possible, whether he’s talking wampum, clams, US dollars or digital funny money.

It sounds straightforward, but books are not widgets. Good booksellers don’t simply throw books before a hungry public like farmers feeding hogs. To succeed at our trade, to grow our businesses, to make our livings in this difficult line of work, we have to know our wares, and we have to be able to succinctly and clearly let the customer know what’s important to know about them.

Every time we catalog a book or manuscript we are creating a vital link between that text and its end user. Primarily, we are describing it as a physical object, so that others will have a clear idea of what it is. But such a description is also an opportunity to locate a book in the context of its time – to explain why it is, how it came to be, what it has to tell us, and why it is important. This is true whether the process occurs in a catalog, or whether it is delivered orally across a desk in a bookstore or a showcase at a book fair.

I’ve seen many catalogs of books, described to a T, bulging with bibliographical references, and completely devoid of any narrative content – as if the cataloger were confident that the books were good enough to sell themselves. Well, here’s a news flash. Books do not sell themselves. Booksellers sell them.

That’s what I’ve been doing since 1976.

Naturally, as in any other line of work, booksellers have tools. Along with magnifying glass and whiskey bottle, the most important of these tools are reference books. Each reference book has its place and particular purpose in the process of learning about a book or manuscript. (For the moment I’m ignoring the computer, which obviously has a huge but not all-important role as a reference tool.)

Let’s take the case of last week’s whaling log, documenting the five-year Pacific voyage of the Triton, which I listed in Maritime List 200 (sorry, it’s been sold).

I first went to Judith Lund’s Whaling Masters and Whaling Voyages Sailing from American Ports. This is a compilation of whaling records assembled by the tireless Judy Lund and published by Ten Pound Island in cooperation with the New Bedford Whaling Museum, and it’s quite handy because it allows me to look up any voyage by ship or master. One bit of information was sufficient to get me started.
Using that information, I turned to Starbuck’s History of the American Whale Fishery which is pictured at the top of this page. It’s a more detailed but cumbersome compilation of data about whale ships. From it I learned That the Triton was a 300 ton bark owned by the Howlands, that Roland Packard was her master, and that she fished in the Pacific Ocean from October 10, 1860 to April 23, 1865. Starbuck used to be a rare book. When I first started it was worth $600 or $700 dollars – big money back then! After the copyright expired it was reprinted several times. Now the original edition is a tough sell. (This is the story of reference books in general. My reference library used to be worth a lot of money. Now there would be few customers for any of the books it contains because everything has been reprinted or is on line. Good thing I don’t want/need to sell it.)

To get a better sense of this particular log book, I then went to Sherman’s Whaling Logbooks & Journalswhich lists all such manuscripts held in institutional libraries as of the early 1980s. From this I gleaned the valuable information that there was only one other journal of this voyage in captivity, and that it was only a partial account. Good news for me!

There are literally dozens of other references I might turn to for specifics about whaling history and technology. In my opinion, Clifford Ashley’s Yankee Whaler is still the best of them all.
Once I got the Triton and her 1860 voyage “surrounded” intellectually, I began to read the actual log. I spoke about this process in last week’s entry and won’t go into it here except to add that there’s one other reference book I depend on heavily at this stage – a good old fashioned atlas, with a view of the globe that lets me plot a whale ship’s course, day by day.
As for pricing the Triton log, I had two essential kinds of information. First and most importantly, I knew what I paid for it. Second, after thirty-five years of compiling sales records, I had a pretty good idea what similar items sold for in the past and what they are selling for now.

A straightforward calculation ensued, which promptly got demolished by a freight train of emotional, aesthetic and financial considerations. (This is where the whiskey bottle figures in.) When things calmed down a price emerged, like you-know-who rising from the sea.
There’s a time-honored and respectable school of thought that holds the “what I paid for it” part irrelevant. I disagree – especially in today’s economy. But that’s the subject of another blog entry.

And speaking of other blog entries, next week will be a report on the 51st New York International Antiquarian Book Fair. Stay tuned...

Quite a Life

2011-03-28T10:30:00.000-07:00

Whaling Log of the Bark Triton (see below)

Lucked into a pod, a shoal, a school (all designations for groups of whales), of whaling logs last week, and because I’ve been completely engrossed in reading them since then, I find that I’ve got nothing to blog about today. Except whaling logs.

Whaling logs comprise a fascinating sub-genre in the world of antiquarian paper, manuscripts, advertising, documents and ephemera that I’ve been writing about for the past few months. But they come with a glamour rarely equaled by other kinds of historical documents.

It is important to understand that whaling was an international industry. All of civilization needed light and, in the days before petroleum, whale oil and spermaceti candles produced the brightest, cleanest illuminating flame. All of whaling’s romantic elements - bold harpooners and raging whales - occur frequently and truly in its history, but in capital terms this history is essentially one of the growth of an American industry.

In mythic terms, whalemen were our first heroes in the conquest of western vastness. Before the Great Plains, there was the boundless Pacific. There were exotic islands and strange savage races. American hunter-heroes pitting themselves against the largest animals on earth. No harpoon guns or factory ships. These were the days of hand-thrown iron; of Nantucket sleigh rides; of the lance; of greasy luck. It is no accident that Moby Dick is our great American novel. Before there were astronauts and cowboys to inspire them, young men dreamed of going to sea.It is striking is how young they actually were. Although the captain and his first two mates might be marginally old enough for their positions of responsibility, most of the rest of the crew were mere schoolboys by today’s standards. New England mothers sent their sons to kill whales in the Pacific Ocean at an age when modern parents would think twice about letting them have the car for a weekend. Younger bodies were more resilient to the rigors of shipboard life, and young sailors tended to have less at stake on shore – though it is true that many seamen had families. In the culture of Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard, boys were raised with the expectation that they would become seamen.Industrial history, maritime material culture, personal adventure and the dimension of myth are all represented in whaling logs, and there is another characteristic that is uniquely theirs.

As any deep water sailor knows oceans have a quality of endlessness, of immensity, for which there is no exact equivalent ashore. Imagine being in a sail-powered vessel - designed for capacity and stability rather than speed – traversing that immensity. Could there be a better recipe for boredom? For grinding, relentless tedium? Not infrequently, men went mad, plunged from yard-arms. More frequently they exploded, lashed out, were confined in irons until starvation calmed them down.Intersperse those hours, days, and weeks of monotony with instants of mortal danger, delivered by whale or storm or shipboard hazard, and you have the rhythm of a whaling voyage, the form of a whaling log.

One final element – some of these young men were gifted craftsmen and artists. Boring months at sea produced scrimshaw now esteemed by collectors around the world, and whaling logs themselves have become objects of folk art.This is the world I’ve inhabited for the past five days and, though I am not necessarily a better man for it, I’ve got a head full of terrific stories.

Just for something to chew on, here’s the pick of the litter, a classic whaling log that combines all the elements mentioned above. It will be featured in our next catalog, Maritime List 200.

WHALING LOG OF THE BARK TRITON, NEW BEDFORD, 1860 - 1865. ROLAND PACKARD, MASTER. Approximately 300 pages manuscript entries. The Triton was a 300 ton bark owned by the Howlands of New Bedford. According to Starbuck her five years at sea -- October 10, 1860 - April 23, 1865 -- resulted in only 257 barrels of sperm oil, a long and difficult voyage for such a meager haul.

A month after their departure a crewmember named James McCan either fell overboard or committed suicide. His body was never found. They had, not surprisingly, bad weather rounding Cape Horn, and it wasn’t until the following June, well into the Pacific, that they took their first whales. They continued “cruising the line” – working the equator hunting for whales - all that summer, and put into the Marquesas at the end of August for provisions. Predictably, several crewmen deserted there.

By December they were off New Zealand, where they cruised without success all winter. Back in equatorial waters, they took two whales in the summer of 1862, then returned to the Marquesas where they encountered a “French steam gunboat.”

The summer of 1863 found them cruising the line again. On July 27th, following his aborted suicide attempt, “John Brown armed himself with a knife & marling Spike he wounded two of the crew and then jumped overboard and was not seen again.”
So it went, with whales coming slowly if at all. Trouble with the crew and a near mutiny in Hobart Town that winter, no whales all summer, and in August a gam in the Feejees with the Bark Plover of New Bedford, which promptly wrecked on a reef, busying the Triton with rescue and salvage operations. More whales, finally, in the fall of 1864, and home the following spring.

Tipped onto the front of this log is a newspaper article about the sinking of the Triton off Hershel Island in 1894. According to the article she had been built in 1818, and refitted in 1857 - quite a life!

Where Paper is King

2011-03-22T04:24:00.001-07:00

Whaling Log of the Moctezuma, New Bedford. 1844-1846 (see below)

About ten years ago a couple of enterprising promoters organized an antiquarian book fair at the Civic Center in Greenwich Connecticut. It sounded ideal – right off I-95, a short walk from the commuter rail station, and smack in the midst of a posh demographic. It was a setup to die for.

And die is what we did. Residents of Greenwich and Darien, it turned out, do not read books. Or if they do read books, they don’t read our books. Maybe they only read books inherited from great-grandfathers who went to Yale, sat on boards of railroad companies, and owned entire Midwestern counties. Or maybe they only read stock reports and prices on labels of expensive gewgaws. The Greenwich Antiquarian Book Fair was a flop.

Not so the Ephemera Show that is held every year at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Old Greenwich, CT. This event, just a part of the big annual conference of the Ephemera Society of America, is one of more than a dozen ephemera-related lectures and presentations that take place in the hotel over the weekend, and that attract hundreds of ephemera collectors from all over the United States. So we have a built in crowd of eager and knowledgeable collectors – potential customers all.

That said (ever notice how often “that said” is said these days?), dealers at this event must occasionally endure windy lectures on the fine points of ephemeral obscurities, while “real” customers stand waiting patiently for assistance. But the pleasure of meeting someone who’s really interested in the material you’ve got, knows more about it than you do, and makes a purchase while he or she educates you – well, that’s what we live for. And it happens enough at this show to keep many of us coming back every year. (Although, like every other book or paper show, the Greenwich Ephemera show has seen dealer participation decline over the years.)
I guess I’ve explained before in this blog that I participate in these shows primarily to buy material from my colleagues. Book and paper shows are one of the major sources of the goods that I sell in my catalogs to collectors, dealers and institutions. Essentially I’m just a middleman, and this is an accepted part of the food chain in our trade. Often dealer sales make up the bulk of an exhibitor’s business. Two or three dealers may purchase thousands of dollars worth of stock from a fellow dealer in the hours before a show opens. After opening, retail sales may total no more than a few hundred dollars. Dealers like Natalie Bauman or Heritage before her probably kept half the trade alive.

That said (there I go again!) It struck me at this particular event how different buying ephemera is from buying books. No Natalie here!

Books sit in orderly rows, often arranged by subject or author, on tidy shelves. Paper comes in piles, or endless boxes of hanging files, or vast walls of intimidating loose leaf binders to be pawed through. You need different eyes to scout a paper show, because you’re scanning much more material than at a book show, on the lookout for a graphic detail, or a name/place/date that identifies a piece of paper as potentially interesting. When you spy a possibility you give it the eyeball and try to understand, in an instant, what it is and why it might be important to you and your customers. Then you move on, repeating the operation hundreds or thousands of times. At book shows you get tired from walking. At paper shows the brain gives way first, then the eyes, then the feet.

Here are a couple of examples of the sort of thing you might find. The first one is a patent application for a “submarine boat” (only the top bit of the document is shown here) that was to be used in salvage operations. Like the later bathyscaphe, it would use water to regulate its buoyancy and, like diving suits even then being developed, workers used flexible watertight arms to work outside the craft. Behind its time! $150

In the other piece, a ten page Senate Document, a fellow named Sutter complains that his land was swarmed over and essentially taken from him by a bunch of fellows in 1849 and 1850 – wonder what that was all about? Anyway, he’s asking Congress to make him whole again. $125

And of course the fascinating whaling log pictured above, which was easier to spot. It documents the first half of the voyage of the New Bedford Whaleship Moctezuma, features some interesting whale drawings, and an eyewitness account of one of the first battles of the so-called Flagstaff War in New Zealand. “At this instant the English are marching to battle up the Kidahedea (Kororareka – a seaport in the Bay of Islands where the ship was anchored) river 500 English to 2500 Mowreys the newzelanders fight bravely they muscle up to the mizels (muzzles) of the guns and defeated and killed 300 English in about 30 minutes.” $5500

I didn't hear any major complaints this weekend, but I did have three conversations with dealers about downsizing, shedding stock, getting "lean and mean." Maybe we'll talk about that next week, if no better topic presents itself between now and then.

2011-03-14T14:35:00.000-07:00

The Naval Chronicle, complete in 40 volumes. An immaculate set. More information at the end of the bloviation.

So there I was, sitting at the Washington Antiquarian Book Fair trying to stay awake long enough to collate my splendid set of The Naval Chronicle, when a woman named Karin Bergasel came up and introduced herself. She’d been a student at the Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar the year before I’d taught there. In fact, she said, she’d written an article about it for an Internet bookseller’s newsletter called Bookthink.

We got to talking and I learned that she was a bookseller too, having been forced to figure out how to make a living when a tragedy thrust her into the role of breadwinner for her family. Bookselling is not the trade I’d take up if I were forced to make a living, so I was impressed to learn that she was actually making a go of it.

Her path was a little different, though. In fact her whole world was different than mine.

She is strictly an Internet bookseller. Sells all her books on Amazon. Doesn’t have a store or an office. Doesn’t do shows. Doesn’t even have many books at home, because she uses Amazon’s fulfillment service, FBA, at about the same cost Advanced Book Exchange (another big online book database) charges me to sell books that I have to store on my own dime.

Karin is also the head of IOBA, the Independent Online Booksellers Association. This is an association whose mission is to educate booksellers about the ethics and standards of the trade, and to provide bibliographic information, networking, and a sales venue for Internet booksellers. You join IOBA and you get the benefit of their mentoring and other resources. In return, you agree to abide by their Code of Ethics which presents a succinct summary of how honest booksellers should ply their trade.

Karin told me that Ken Karmiole had told her to look me up and educate me about IOBA. Karmiole is the dean of our trade, and a very successful bookseller. It seemed surprising at first that this purveyor of six-figure tomes should have an interest in an organization whose members sell used text books and other volumes in the two and three figure price range. But then the light went on.

My wise old friend Karmiole didn’t get where he is by taking the short view. He grasped immediately that IOBA and ancillary resources like Bookthink are training grounds for booksellers of the future. In the old days, book stores performed that function. Now that the influence of book stores is diminishing, we need IOBA more than ever. The more educated booksellers become, the better they’ll be at representing their product and their trade. The better they and their products look, the more their customers – the end buyers of the product – will trust them. The more trust there is, the more comfortable they'll be transacting business over the Internet.

This is vitally important for all of us, at the high end or the low end. Every time I hear someone ask if I provide a “Certificate of Authenticity,” or balk at proving credit card info, I cringe. There’s another potential customer some bookseller has failed to educate. To be able to provide this education, the bookseller must be educated as well.

Touching on this point Karin later wrote in an email to me, “Our mission is to ensure that the traditions and standards of the trade are maintained in the virtual world of today’s online booksellers. Joining IOBA is often a first step for dealers who are working up to ABAA, and so we especially like to have established ABAA members, like you, join us... I'm also of course writing to say that I hope you will look into joining IOBA, the Independent Online Booksellers Association.”

Think I’ll do that right now. If IOBA is good enough for Karmiole, it’s good enough for me.

While I’m signing up you can read about The Naval Chronicle.

THE NAVAL CHRONICLE, VOL I - VOL XL. Lon. 1799-1818. b/w engraved portraits, views, vignettes and maps, some folding. Various paginations, about 20,000 pp. in total. The Naval Chronicle is THE source for contemporary reports of the affairs of the Royal Navy during the period from the Napoleonic Wars to the War of 1812. It was published in London twice a year between 1799 and 1818. First-person accounts were contributed by officers as illustrious as Nelson, and biographies of fascinating characters like Cochrane were a staple. In addition the thousands of pages of this journal contain a wealth of historical nuggets and recondite facts. Typical issues featured lists of vessels captured and wrecked, promotions, accounts of battles, biographical sketches, articles on technological advances, and tidbits of naval gossip, as well as copper engraved portraits of officers, views of foreign ports, and charts of harbors and battles. It was a major source for Patrick O’Brian in writing his Aubrey-Maturin series. This is a complete set, handsomely and solidly bound in half mottled calf over marbled boards with gilt spine decoration and spine labels. Plates and maps in this set correspond to the lists of plates bound in each volume. Specifically, there are 416 copper engraved portraits and views, 88 maps and charts (eight folding), and over 60 wood engraved vignettes after drawings by artists such as Pocock. Plates and text are clean and fresh, Forty volumes, complete. $15000

Next week - A report from the Annual Ephemera Society show in Greenwich, CT - where paper is king!

After Amazon Has Eaten Everything Else

2011-03-08T14:16:00.000-08:00

I always think I'm looking for maritime books, but often I wind up with pieces of paper. Here's a particularly sweet one. I'll let you guess what I like about it while I flap on for another 500 words, then I'll let you in on the secret.

A colleague handed it to me at the Washington Antiquarian Book Fair, a venerable event smoothly run by seasoned volunteers. It was founded in 1975 as a fundraiser for the Concord Hill School, and thus is even older than the “Paleozoic Book Fair” of last week’s blog entry, the Greenwich Village Book Fair. Unlike the Greenwich Village event, however, the Washington Book Fair is held at a Holiday Inn rather than in the school itself. This makes the booth rents more expensive, but if you’re staying in the hotel the commute is a breeze.

Another difference is that the fair is held in Rosslyn, VA, right across the Key Bridge from Georgetown. There’s no way it could be considered a neighborhood event (as the Greenwich Village fair was) because Rosslyn isn’t a neighborhood, doesn’t have one, wouldn’t know one if it saw one.
But who cares? Washington customers will buy a book or two. Most people reported decent sales, expectations met if not exceeded.

However, there was a nagging sense of diminishing returns common to most provincial book fairs. Opening night attendance seemed particularly slack. The promoters said it was nearly the same as last year, but if so, that only means last year was off, too.
I’ve been listening for years now to these complaints – Attendance is diminishing and the average age of attendees is rising to AARP heights. There never seems to be enough advertising. Promoters aren’t reaching out to young people, schools and colleges. Internet shopping habits keep too many people at home – and I have to say they have a solid basis in fact.

Just as the old “bricks and mortar” book shop is slipping into obsolescence, the traditional book fair model seems to be headed that way too.

This is not to suggest that book shops or book fairs will soon become extinct. People will always be attracted to the physicality of the book. They may need to feel a book before purchasing it. Old book shops and antiquarian book fairs encourage this kind of transaction in a way the Internet cannot. There’s an ingrained need for shops and shows. We simply need to re-jigger the model.

For example, colleague Peter Stern has observed that we can no longer expect book fair promoters to be our publicists. Time, energy and money are in ever shorter supply, especially after book fair essentials like venue rental, furnishings and security have been taken care of. Furthermore, the multiplicity of media outlets has made it harder to get results from targeted low-budget advertising. In the old days all you had to do was run an ad in AB Magazine and the whole book world would know about your event. Not anymore.

So, says Stern, if promoters won’t or can’t advertise, we’ll have to do it ourselves.

How many of the exhibitors at this year’s Washington Antiquarian Book Fair made more than token efforts to get their customers to attend? Sure, many of us mailed or gave away palm cards touting the fair, but how many emailed our best customers with short, tailor made lists of books in their areas of interest? It’s easy enough to do with today’s computer databases, but I’d wager damned few of us went to the trouble to send a list, write a note, or drop a dime.

I can imagine future book fairs morphing into strange new entities. Maybe they’ll breed with Internet auctions and give birth to events at which books are priced by Bruce McKinney’s giant computers. Maybe they’ll become boutique specialty shows in ritzy hotel lobbies. Maybe they’ll develop into intense one-day extravaganzas linked with corporate sponsors or organizations like the Antiquarian Book Seminar or Rare book School. Whatever they are destined to become, we’d better start making changes soon. Because after Amazon has eaten everything else, I doubt they’ll have much interest in promoting antiquarian book fairs.

On a related note Dan Gregory has some very interesting things to say in a recent article about the contemporary bookseller’s relationship with the Internet. He sees companies like Google, Abe or Amazon as “controlling your profitability,” and speaks of his own struggle to increase sales through his company’s own website. He posits the idea that our websites are analogous to old fashioned book stores, and he points out that the Internet can be a useful tool for establishing a personal relationship with customers – much the same function as the book shop used to provide. However, he continues, most booksellers use their websites as no more than business cards.

It’s a fascinating article, and what made it even more interesting to me is that much of what he says about websites and the Internet can be applied to exhibitors at fairs like the recent Washington event. The book fair floor is our shop for the weekend, and we need take more responsibility for getting our customers through the doors and into our booths.

No one else is going to do it for us.

Now, about that piece of paper.

It's a good example of what is known as a "bill of lading." Ever since the days of sailing ships these documents were used to acknowledge the shipmaster's receipt of cargo. In this case William Bartlett, captain of the sloop Surprise in Boston Harbor acknowledges receipt of his cargo of molasses and promises to deliver it to William Lyles & Co. in Alexandria. It's dated June 12, 1787, and signed by Bartlett as his guarantee to Lyles & Co. Captain Bartlett would have filled out one of these forms for every consignment of cargo he carried on this voyage. As you can imagine, they are very common documents.

What makes this one rare is the engraving of the crossed flags in the upper left hand corner. If you look closely you'll see that the striped flag has 13 stars. In fact, it resembles - but not exactly - the Francis Hopkinson flag of 1777. This is the earliest representation I've ever seen on a piece of commercial paper of the 13 star American flag. Adding to the paper's allure, the flag on the left side has obviously been cleaned off by the engraver. Possibly, this is a re-use of an earlier British design, adapted by an American printer. It'll take more research to track the story down, but the job would be a lot of fun, leading as it does through the printing history of Revolutionary America. You can take it on for only $1250.

Paleozoic Book Fairs

2011-02-28T06:37:00.001-08:00

PS 3, Hudson Street, New York City

Since the decline of neighborhood used book shops, antiquarian book fairs have become a vital resource for book lovers who need more than Amazon can offer. Yes, the book is an outmoded analog information delivery system, but it also exists in the physical realm and hence is a potential Object of Desire. Book fairs are where collectors, curators, and librarians - who may need to heft, thumb, fan, browse, and even smell a book - get realtime facetime with the objects themselves (not to mention that odd subculture of pushers who purvey them).

There are two kinds of book fairs.

The first kind is run by promoters, sometimes at the behest of a local bookseller’s organization, but often simply as a profit making endeavor for the promoter. These kinds of fairs tend to come and go. Reasonably priced venues become unobtainable, exciting new locations turn out to be not so exciting after all, promoters burn out or go broke - or both.

The second kind of book fair is run by volunteers to raise money for a school or a church or some similar institution. These fairs generally have longer life spans because the venue and the labor are free and always available – supplied by the organization hosting the fair. They are usually well run because the collective wisdom of the volunteers is passed down from one generation to the next. They learn by trial and error what works and what does not, and after about twenty years, they have things down pat.

The Greenwich Village Book Fair, held (this year Feb. 25-27) at Public School 3 on Hudson Street in Manhattan’s West Village, is such a fair. It was started by parents as a fund raiser in the Paleozoic Era and, like the horseshoe crab, has survived very well ever since. I started exhibiting there some time in the 1980s. (It was at least long enough ago that two guys in leather wetsuits and studded dog collars making out on Christopher Street could get one’s attention.) I lucked into a good booth, right at the top of the stairs in the gymnasium, which I split with a woman named Iris who made marbled paper. She had the greenest eyes.(My old booth, now ably run by Penny Daly of WellRead Books)

My sons were little sprouts, junior high and grade school, and I have an image of them bravely huffing squeaky cartfuls of my $25 books up the steep wooden ramp from Grove Street. What they did the rest of the day is lost in the mists of time. I had an artist buddy who lived in an abandoned dentist’s office over in Jersey City. Friday and Saturday nights at the close of the fair I’d load the boys into the van and join the rush hour carnage at mouth of the Holland Tunnel to get to my buddy’s house. A reasonably cheap hotel might have cost $50-75 back then. Way too expensive. Sunday when the fair was over we’d deadhead it home.

Now the kids are grown up and my wife and I stay in nice hotels. I’m not exhibiting my books at the Greenwich Village Book Fair anymore, but when my schedule allows I still scout it, hoping to score an overlooked gem, and I continue to shop the book shops in Manhattan. For all our wailing and gnashing of teeth about bookstores closing, Manhattan teems with them, rents be damned. New ones seem to crop up like weeds pushing though parking lot asphalt, and the old ones – well a few survive. I can still find a book or two at the Strand and Jim Cummins almost always has something I’ve never seen before, and hence must buy.

The Greenwich Village Book Fair has changed very little over the years. Remember, the venue – PS 3 – is free. So all they need to do is keep the booth rents low enough to fill the space with dealers and their profit will be assured. The gate ($15 on opening night) is gravy. And the kids get new art supplies or lacrosse sticks for another year.

But even back in the Paleozoic Era, when I was proudly shelving my $25 tomes, the majority of books on display at Greenwich Village were only of average quality – good old fashioned Used Books. And so it is today, essentially a neighborhood book fair. That’s not to say you won’t find mindbogglingly high end treats at Lame Duck’s booth, or offbeat and affordable stuff at the booths of old hands like Will Monie or Dave Bergman (probably the last antiquarian book dealer on earth who does not list his books on the Internet, which only makes them seem more desirable). And if art, photography, and avant-garde lit are what you seek, PS 3 is the place for you. However, the antiquarian stock is pretty thin. Always has been, probably always will be.

So adjustments are made. Walking the floor at Greenwich Village I have eyes for the strange, the funky – the kind of thing that might have just come out of someone’s attic at a neighborhood book fair.

And this year I had a little luck, most notably this immaculate Victorian die cut of deep sea divers - $150

Or this illustrated article on whaling from an 1869 childrens magazine.$50

But mostly I just walked around and – like everyone else there – had a good time browsing through the wonderful assortment of used books on display. I even found one to take home and read.

Dealers I talked to reported sales a bit slow on Friday night, but up to expectations overall. This being the kind of book fair it is, a lot of business gets done on Sunday, when prices are slashed and boxes of good old used books lugged home, uptown or down, to be read and enjoyed as in days of old. If nothing else, the venerable Greenwich Village book fair provides this service to the book lovers of Manhattan.

Next week: A report on the Washington Antiquarian Book Fair.

And Now for Our Commercial Message

2011-02-21T05:42:00.000-08:00

Cook's Method Taken for Preserving the Health of the Crew of His Majesty's Ship the Resolution During her late Voyage round the World. (with) Extract of a letter from Captain Cook to Sir John Pringle (and) Of the Tides in the South Seas. Published in PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS, OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF LONDON. Vol LXVI. For the Year 1776. Small 4to., pp.402-406, and 447-447. See Beddie, Bibliography of Captain James Cook 1289. Bound in half calf over marbled boards with spine label. Fine condition. $3500

I dunno, maybe it’s Seasonal Affective Disorder.

As the lightless, sad world groaned and cracked its way through another bitterly cold afternoon, I found myself cast back to a warmer winter two decades ago, just about this time of year, when we launched the first Gulf War. That got me thinking about the Second Iraq War, then about the greedy nitwits who got us into it, then about George Bush, then, for obvious reasons, about chimps. That cheered me up.

I remembered my favorite among the recent Superbowl ads, the one in particular that made me laugh out loud.

I’m speaking, of course, of the Careerbuilder.com ad in which a guy pulls his car into a parking lot and is promptly victimized by an old clunker of a vehicle which, in its lame attempt to park, pins his driver’s side door shut. The driver and passengers of the clunker jump out. They’re chimps. In sport coats. Carrying briefcases. Then another clunker slams into the other side of the poor guy’s car, trapping him in his vehicle. Out jumps a chimp. In a sport coat. Carrying a briefcase.

I ask you, friends, is there anything funnier in an ad than chimps in sport coats carrying briefcases?

Is there any television commercial in America that would not be infinitely improved by substituting chimps for the humans in the ad? Think about Viagra with chimps. Those moronic beer and car ads. The freaky talking babies. Chimps! Make them all chimps! In sport coats. Carrying briefcases.

At the LA book fair a few years ago I overheard two assistants to big English dealers talking about one of their colleagues – Did he operate his own firm? No, “He’s just a counter monkey like us.” I liked that phrase, and now, thanks to Careerbuilder.com, I can imagine vastly improved ABAA book fairs, populated entirely by chimps. In sport coats. Carrying briefcases.

On a seemingly unrelated note, my multi-talented friend Anthony Weller has forwarded me a link about the demise of South Street Seaport.

We’ve known for years that it was in trouble. At first it became difficult to collect payments for meager purchases. Then their librarian was let go, then the library shut down entirely. Now the entire place may be on the block. Mystic Seaport is in tough financial straits as well. The Mariner’s Museum and the Peabody-Essex Museum have cut back severely on their acquisitions budgets. “American Neptune” has long since ceased publication, and “Sea History,” the journal of the National Maritime Historical Society, is on life support.

It’s part of a trend that I am at a loss to understand.

Decades ago, old ships and maritime history used to be cool. Remember the great Tall Ships parades of Operation Sail? Remember when our presidents were also yachtsmen? When celebrities like Walter Cronkite threw their weight behind organizations dedicated to the preservation of America’s maritime history? When Mystic Seaport used to be a money machine, with crowds overflowing giant parking lots all summer?

Those days are long gone. I’ve already talked (see the “Bookman’s Log” entry for July 23, 2010) about the decline of interest in lighthouses, and I could write a similar entries about the decline of popular interest in ocean liners, and in maritime history in general.

America’s attention has shifted from the past to the present. From the records and accomplishments of collective society to the endlessly fascinating minutia of the Self. From maritime history to Facebook reports – with photographs and videos – of this afternoon’s lunch.

Bad news for me as a maritime book dealer. Bad news too for the crumbling museums, and the lovingly restored ships and historical sites. Worse news, perhaps, for America as a whole. We’ll get sucked into our iPads and totally distracted by instanter miracles of social media. Our history will be forgotten. More greedy nitwits will fill the vacuum. Oh, we’ll long for chimps then!

And now for my commercial message. If you picture it being delivered by a chimp, it will be infinitely improved.

Back in the days those failing museums memorialize, sailors had different problems. Their teeth fell out. Wounds bled and bled. Limbs became painfully swollen. They had no energy, and yeah, they were depressed. Eventually they’d die. But the cause was scurvy, not Seasonal Affective Disorder, and it was a terrible affliction. In 1740, for example, on Ansons’s famous voyage, 1400 of his 1900 men died – most of them from scurvy.

In 1752 Sir John Pringle published Observations of Diseases in the Army which established him as the father of military medicine. Influenced by Pringle, James Lind sought to transfer this line of investigation to the Royal Navy. He published his famous Treatise on Scurvy in 1753, but it was ignored. Even he did not understand the true causes of the scurvy. Though he recognized the usefulness of citrus fruit in preventing and curing the disease, he thought it was caused by putrefaction of the body, which might be helped by acids. So citric acid was an accidental remedy, one of the many preventatives of putrefaction.

When Cook returned from his second voyage in July 1775, he had – astonishingly - not lost a single man to scurvy in the course of his four year sail. By this time Sir John Pringle had ascended to the presidency of the Royal Society. At Pringle’s request Cook sent several short essays to the Royal Society regarding that voyage.

Here, in a communication addressed to Pringle eight months after his return, Cook talks about the methods he used to prevent the dreaded disease. It is frustrating, poignant and fascinating to see him dancing around the answer that is so obvious to us now. He grasps that sauerkraut and lemon syrup (“rob”) are both effective, and that cleanliness is important, but he also endorses relatively ineffective methods, such as the use of sugar as an antiscorbutic.

Cook was elected to the Royal Society on March 7, 1776, the day this letter was read. Not until after 1800 was lemon juice issued as a matter of course in the Royal Navy.