Bibliophagist

Friend and colleague Lorne Bair has just published an essay on becoming and on being an antiquarian bookseller, with some apt bourbon-fueled ruminations on why we enter the trade:

In the end, everyone I know who does this job well does it because they would be less happy doing anything else. . . . Perhaps not coincidentally, most of the booksellers I know share a somewhat melancholic disposition, so that the notion of a ‘less happy’ bookseller is a melancholy notion indeed, and it might perhaps be fair to say that the trade is the only thing keeping some folks from suicide. You may not take comfort in such a notion, but I do: I like booksellers, almost all of them, and anything that keeps them around awhile seems good to me.

At a dinner during the recent Boston Book Fair, I sat across from a board-certified genius who posed Lorne’s very question to the booksellers at our end of the table–Why are we antiquarian booksellers?

Never averse after a cocktail to enlighten a genius on a thing or two, I advanced my pet theory that failed poets (and perhaps the occasional successful one) fall naturally into the book trade.  Another poet seated across the table from me gave his qualified agreement. Arthur Freeman (a legendary bookseller and himself no mean poet) has elsewhere remarked that the qualities of writing verse and its need for semi-intuitive jumps and analogies suit a bookseller’s task well; indeed,  like a poet, the bookseller must with grace make preposterous claims upon the critical heart of a customer. (Also, as with many who incline toward the muse, we often lack the focus to become academics, the grim resolve to become Titans of Industry, and the ability to take orders that augurs success in large companies or military organizations.)

When I started in the trade in 1991 as a young idiot working for John Crichton at the Brick Row Book Shop in San Francisco, I had not yet failed at poetry or at bookselling or at much else of note. (I am now wistful for the simpler and perhaps solipsistic worries of twenty-two before my heart took hostages of wife and child and my failures at 3:00 AM seem on occasion legion.)

But how much has the book trade changed since I first came stumbling through Crichton’s door? On my first day on the job John had me looking up titles in the National Union Catalog; the particularly hot-shot booksellers of Manhattan and Los Angeles insisted on conducting business through the lightning expediency of fax machine; we had one high-powered customer who might on occasion phone us from the car. (And a $75 book might still fetch $75, rather than the Internet-deflated price of $5-$10.)

(As a brief aside, I will note that some mechanics will never change: once I answered the phone at the Brick Row and The Customer was calling on one of those new-fangled car phones from a freeway somewhere in Los Angeles and I told The Customer that the boss was on another line and asked politely if The Customer might call back later; I was later gently reminded by the boss that The Customer’s business essentially paid the rent on my room in a shared flat in San Francisco and that perhaps I should patch the customer through to John the next time we got a call, my native strains of egalitarianism be damned. I soon learned that a bookseller’s ability to discriminate significance and importance should not extend solely to his stock.)

The mechanical changes in the trade and the woes of finding the right way forward in this era of instantly-available texts and books have been argued over at length in the places where booksellers gather to sup or to click at their keyboard in a lonely room and if I had a facile answer to the challenges facing the trade I would be an entirely different bookseller indeed; but behind all this confusion, the basic model of the trade remains, even if we are forced to find novel means to make it so; or as Lorne has it in his Molly Bloom conclusion to his meditation,

I can only imagine one way forward: more books. And then, more books after that and, for dessert, more books. More books. More books. More books.

From an article entitled “Defining Americana” by the late Thomas R. Adams of the John Carter Brown Library in The Book Collector (Winter 2008), page 562, comes this classic illustration of how bibliophily does not always lend itself to neat academic categories:

My father [Randolph G. Adams] introduced me to the ambiguities of the term Americana when I was quite young. Soon after he went to the William L. Clements Library in 1923, Junius Beal, a Regent of the University of Michigan, member of the Committee of Management and a close personal friend of Clements, wanted to give the library a 1480 edition of Cicero’s Tusculanae Disputationes. My father demurred, saying it really wasn’t Americana. Beal replied, ‘Young man, make it Americana. That is what you are paid for.’ A passage on Atlantis solved the problem.

Conversely, Junius Beal may very well have missed his calling as an antiquarian bookseller.

The New York Times’ Education Life had an article on using rare books to teach undergraduates. The article hints at the those perennially paired  educational components of rare material — the first being of course the allure of the gee whiz (or what the more academically inclined might term a spark to the sympathetic imagination), the second being the amount of cultural information packed into the physical instantiation of the particular book. Both these strands obviously have relevance to the vendor of rare books, and of course the earlier we get ourselves lodged into the hearts and minds of undergradutates (where by “ourselves” I mean the sundry representatives of the rare book industrial complex), the better.

It is perhaps instructive to relate here that despite my checkered academic record I did manage to produce for my 18th century English literature survey class one creditable paper, a paper in which I explored the nature and rhetorical strategies of satire by comparing Swift’s send-up of astrology in the Bickerstaff papers with the texts and physical properties of contemporary London almanacs. In enthusiastic support of my task (undergraduates being relatively uncommon in the Rare Book Room) the folks in special collections helped me photocopy at least one Partridge almanac for the cause. (I cannot be more exact, as my memory of the particulars at this late date is suffused with something of a nostalgic haze — though I should note that when I say “helped me photocopy,” I was in fact employed by the Rare Book department as a student employee and that my highly-trained photocopy forays were duly accounted for in all appropriate departmental paperwork.)

In any event, with the kind assistance rendered by both the special collections staff and the hapless Mr. Partridge, the paper managed to capitalize on my pernicious habit of pursuing reading material peripheral to any given course in which I was enrolled, capitalize on it to the extent that this became one of the rare examples of a paper completed in the space of time allotted by the professor.  And it is of course worth noting that once I had limped to the end of my undergraduate career that I did not go on to pursue graduate studies in 18th century English literature but rather took the more academically slipshod route of buying and selling these basic ingredients to research.

And thus shines the beam of a little early exposure to rare books in a naughty world!

Bookseller as melancholy hero, via recent correspondence with Dr. B.

Tomorrow I will once again be staffing a table on the sunny side of the sixth annual Kerrytown Book Fest here in Ann Arbor. The book fest combines book arts, author panels, and vendors of antiquarian, collectible and various books. It will also once again offer a complimentary low-rent version of the Antiques Road Show at the free book appraisal table. The appraisal table will be staffed by Jay Platt of the West Side Book Shop and yours truly.

While I enjoy the opportunity to chat with local book lovers and to peddle some of my wares, I have a complicated emotional relationship (at best) with the appraisal table, one aspect of this complication being my tendency toward a narrow focus of interest; this, allied with a reticence in matters of delivering bad news, makes me perhaps a less-than ideal public face for the antiquarian book trade. In sum, your family Bible is unlikely to be worth much, and I am unlikely to want to tell you of this fact or to pursue the question at length. Happily, Jay Platt combines years of experience with a street-level bookseller’s jaded eye. Thus, our rough division of labor has traditionally split along logical lines:

I handle the 19th century Ohio Valley religious controversies, Jay handles everything else.

But even if you don’t have a copy of Alexander Hall’s Universalism Against Itself (St. Clairsville, O., 1846) that you’ve been dying to find out more about, please feel free to stop by booth 43 tomorrow at the Farmer’s Market in Ann Arbor. Gleefully shout the magic word (”Bibliophagist!”) and while supplies last you will get a promotional decal suitable for your laptop computer or whatever means of transportation you choose to festoon.

Somewhat souped-up print on demand has come to the University of Michigan library system. This has of course been in the works for a while, and I am not remotely qualified for (nor inclined toward) prognostication, so I will withhold predictions on the death of the book. Though it would be cool to hear from scholars who can provide me with instances where the original book or pamphlet is clearly preferable to the digital version.

(Of course, once Google offers an on-line/on-demand virtual Hinman collator I will begin to throw up my hands in dismay for real.)

Otherwise, we here at bibliophagist industries have marked the return of another school year with the publication of our twentieth catalogue, catchily entitled “Catalogue 20: American Pamphlets.” 372 items in wrappers, ranging across our usual array of hobby-horses. If you are not on the mailing list and would like one of the remaining copies, feel free to drop me a line. Supplies are limited — act now!

In response to a moderate groundswell of demand, I have mounted several photographic views of the [relatively] new book shop space. It is perhaps worth noting that within a week or two of the visit from the bookseller who remarked, “You don’t have very many books here,” I received a visit from a bookseller specializing in 19th century pamphlet material. He took a look around and said (predictably), “You’ve got a lot of stuff here!”

One way in which the dissemination of information freely on the Internet may in fact translate into sales of books rather than their obsolescence: the collection of Sarah Wyman Whitman binding designs at the Boston Public Library as seen on flickr. The arrangement of the photos does not necessarily lend itself to ready bibliographic reference and I don’t think the library makes any claims to completeness, but I am certainly off to start pulling material off the shelves of my shop to flag them as Whitman designs.

Just a heads up that I will have a couple of tables at the Ann Arbor Antiquarian Book Fair on May 18. The book fair has been timed to coincide with the Ann Arbor Book Festival. All of which should be good clean fun. I will not be offering bookstore passport stamps, alas, but anyone who manages to track me to my lair here at the shop or to my booth at the book fair — and who mentions the magic word “bibliophagist” — will receive a complimentary Lyman E. Stowe bumper sticker (while supplies last!).

Louis Sullivan,
Mending fences where relevant,
While asking around for extreme unction,
Said “Forget I said ‘Form follows function.’”

I’m fairly certain somebody once noted that a clerihew is the last refuge of a scoundrel, but this is a clerihew parable.

I’ve had a few instances in the past month or two where somebody walked into the new warehouse space and said, “You sure don’t have many books.” (Or words to that effect.) This is somewhat true — since I’ve quadrupled the space in which I keep my stock, the once-crowded confines of my home shop have given way to this relatively expansive box of a warehouse space, and the epmphasis I’ve placed over the past six or seven years on pamphlets and ephemera has been brought into sharp relief. So far it seems to do me little good to explain that I’ve got tons (or pounds at least) of interesting material in pamphlet boxes, since this notional customer cannot be brought to look at anything that’s not a book.

I realize that one might put a gentle word into this bookseller’s ear that customer demand should drive the market, and that if the customer comes into a book shop looking for books, it might be in the bookseller’s best interests to provide him or her with same. There is a certain seductive logic to this argument!

But I shall not be swayed. Despite the wide-open expanses of grease-stained poured concrete floor here in the shop, I have continued to stock my shop with pamphlets and ephemera; I have noticed an infusion of some codices over in the Food and Drink section and the Federal Writers’ Project shelves, but otherwise I have maintained my faith in the redemptive power of Jacksonian-era controversial pamphlets. (The mere title of 1828’s Remarks on the Letter from a Clergyman in Boston to a Unitarian Clergyman of that City, and the Reply, and Review of Same, with its vertiable three-fold nested parentheses of controversy, will still make me open my checkbook with a willing sigh.)

We shall see if the books begin to fill the space provided for them (PV=nRBooks) and if the space begins to overrule my perverse desire to make customers buy the material they didn’t know they wanted.

Of course, the idea of a business model in which I maintain a loving yet fundamentally adversarial footing with my customers perhaps will have to await a further meditation.