Bibliophagist

What, we ask with a suitably stem-winding rhetorical flourish, is perhaps the lengthiest thread to run its crooked course through the rich tapestry that is our Grand Republic? One would do worse than to claim for this place in the national character the twinned pursuits of the production of ardent spirits (and kindred fermented beverages) and the consumption of same.

I am in mind of such spirits even at this early hour because I had been following with a certain professional interest yesterday the fate of a copy of Samuel M’Harry’s The Practical Distiller (Harrisburgh, Penna., 1809) at Pacific Book Auction Galleries (the acution house known to some in the trade as P-BAG, a perhaps affectionate echo of another San Francisco institution that itself boasts a certain association with pursuits Gambrinian, the Washbag). This copy of The Practical Distiller, cellophane tape repairs and all, was knocked down for $4600 — a practical measure of its scarcity in the trade and one which left my hopeful absentee bid panting in a ditch as the price raced ever upward, bearing its banner with strange device.

Much has been written about the use of distillation and fermentation as a means of preserving food on the frontier, viz. the itinerant Swedenborgian nurseryman John Chapman who sold his wares in order that the pioneers of the Old Northwest would have the means to produce hard cider. The farmers of Western Pennsylvania, of course, had also long converted their excess grain into more portable spirituous form — their unhappiness with the taxes upon such production leading to the first test of the strong federal government in the new republic.

Of course, the desire to bring beverages other than branch water to the frontier did not always meet with unalloyed success, as those involved in the Tombigbee Association would find. This project began with a Congressional land grant in 1817 and aimed to settle Bonapartist exiles in Alabama to produce wine and olive oil, though as as Thomas Pinney notes in his History of Wine in America: From the Beginnings to Prohibition (Berkeley, 1989),

the whole thing was grandiose, impetuous, and vague–grandiose because it was seriously maintained that the French would supply the nation’s wants in wine; impetuous because the would-be planters began settling even before they knew where they were to settle, with disastrous consequences, as will be seen; vague because no one knew anything about the actual work proposed or had any notion of ways and means. The idea that the veterans of the greatest army ever known, men who had been officers at Marengo, Austerlitz, Moscow, and Waterloo, would turn quietly to the American wilderness to cultivate the vine and the olive, emblems of peace, has a kind of Chateaubriandesque poetry about it, but little to recommend it to practice.

After these ersatz Cincinnatuses settled the village of Demopolis, they were forced to move over a land dispute and settle the town Aigleville. The French succumbed to fevers and the European vines succumbed to the Alabama weather; within ten years the project had washed up and any remaining settlers had turned to cotton.

M’Harry is admirably grounded in local conditions for his recipes, though, noting the suitability of corn, turnips and pumpkins in the distillation process. He includes some recipes for wine as well, though for much of the early history of America the common man would in general eschew the fruit of the vine for his more homely spirits. Indeed, Peter Buell Porter, the Secretary of War for John Quincy Adams, argued in 1829 in a letter to namby-pamby critics in the House of Representatives that, in effect, an army marches [or perhaps staggers along] on its ration of liquor:

The practice of indulging in the use of spirituous liquors is so general in this country, that there is not, it is believed, one man in four, among the laboring classes, who does not drink, daily, more than one gill; and it is from these classes that our Army is recruited. To subject, therefore, persons of such habits, at once, to a total deprivation of a beverage, to the free use of which they have long been habituated, would not only impair their health, but induce them to resort to means for gratifying their propensity which a moderate indulgence of it by the Government might prevent.

Such benevolent paternalism seems perhaps out of keeping with our image of the frontier as a place of rugged individualism, but I am here to provide the raw material of history and not to judge it.

I don’t usually follow the market in contemporary children’s books (and its sundry related material) with anything that might be construed by the unwary observer as attention, but the news at last reached me today (via Daddy Types) that an original Ludwig Bemelmans illustration from Madeline was sold at Sotheby’s in March for $126,000 (that’s with buyer’s premium; est. $10,000-$15,000).

I remember once hearing a bookseller say that the only books worth stocking were those that could be immediately recalled by anybody you stopped in the street. I have not hewn to that dictum–my pocketbook does not run that deep–but this is a pretty good example of what happens when sentimental familiarity and disposable income intersect. Perhaps one might claim that the butched-up version of this phenomenon is the price brought by Winston Churchill material.

Anyway, the hammer price for the Bemelmans piece doesn’t seem like a huge surprise given the current market for high-spots–an original 1926 illustration by Ernest Shepard of Christopher Robin from Winnie-the-Pooh brought $120,000 at Christie’s New York in April, 2005. (Another drawing at the same sale from The House at Pooh Corner brought a paltry $32,000.) The market for Beatrix Potter seems a trifle less bullish (in one recent instance, in the summer of 2001, an original drawing of Peter Rabbit and his family she executed in 1927 in ink and watercolors knocked down for £ 18,000 at Sotheby’s), while Maurice Sendak seems to dash off latter-day Wild Things with relative abandon; they bring about $4,000 at auction. (Given recent trends in naming kids one wonders what a drawing of Max might bring on the block?)

There is some consolation for those of us who missed the sale or who can’t otherwise afford original artwork from Madeline–we may still sign up to receive from her a personalized birthday card.

The Wall Street Journal has run a “gee-whiz” article about an upcoming sale at Sotheby’s in conjunction with the June book fairs in London. The collection being auctioned off has been built around a catalogue of high spots, Connolly’s The Modern Movement, and the material is certainly of the sort that fetches high prices (and the attention of financial newspapers).

Collections built around an established framework of high-spots (Printing and the Mind of Man, The Zamorano 80, etc.) don’t hold many surprises — the items already hold a cultural cachet and one isn’t going to find many sleepers. The inelasticity in the demand for a particular title will still be driven by this moderately complicated stew of rarity and prestige, so it’s not like you’re going to be surprised when a “Yellow Bird” (”the rara avis” of the Zamorano 80) pulls $60,000-$75,000 at an auction. The price in itself perhaps subsumes the rarity and becomes a big part of the gee-whiz factor in the item. And you get articles like the one in the Wall Street Journal.

For those of us in the book market who are under-capitalized and even at some weird ranting level fundamentally uneasy with the very concept of high spots, I’m forced to operate under the assumption that we need to exploit other factors besides (obviously) the price itself and (maybe less obviously) cultural importance. At its worst, this becomes a perverse exercise in re-contextualizing an item to plug it into a possible customer’s interests. I might for instance play up the fact that an author was a woman or a Free Mason or perhaps even of unsound mind, and thus

what one might call the bookselling frame of mind is largely inimical to judicious scholarly statements about individual titles. To be successful a bookseller must unfit himself permanently for much of the rest of life. A bookseller, if he is truly to be a seller, must be able to detect in every volume its saleable ‘angle’ (Ian Jackson, The Key to Serendipity vol. 2, Berkeley 2000, page 28).

Thus in the poetical works of a 19th century working man does the optimistic bookseller attempt to discern the lineaments of incipient class struggle! (Gee whiz!) I take comfort that my job is not necessarily to make the fine academic distinctions about the item but rather to hang enough context onto a title that somebody willing to amass a sufficient quantity of kindred material might be able to move beyond the initial gee-whiz factors to find the common (more serious?) social threads that run through a collection.

My apologies for fumbling around with this topic. I find in the end that a bookseller tends to price an item on a host of decisions based on experience and metacognitive exercises such as these blog entries leave me feeling as though I have less of an understanding of what I’ve been doing on a daily bases for the past nine years than I had when I started.

Much has been written about the demise of the Gotham Book Mart, nearly all of it lamenting the end of an institution. Having never been a wise enough man to have fished there, I have not felt much of a pang at its passing. Certainly the nominal auction to dispose of its assets was an anti-climax (perhaps by design), leading one to speculate on who is going to get the fun of lotting up the various consignments that will no doubt come out of the landlord’s sudden entry into the bookselling business. Perhaps they can get around the hassle and cost of storage by simply swapping the $400K worth of inventory for a small batch of Steinbeck papers.

(Whoops! In the paragraph above, I meant to type “cold-hearted landlord,” despite the obvious redundancies of such a phrase when speaking of those involved in big-city commercial real estate.)

Much of the coverage of the dissolution of GBM may be found at the Fine Books Blog, which includes a capsule summary of the various on-line lamentations and rending of garments. Much has been made of the fact that the grand old cultural loci (redolent with tradition, etc.), along with their humbler second-hand book shop brethren, are fast dying off and leaving the culture without any place to nurture the next generation of print culture and charming eccentricity.

Are second-hand book shops failing at a greater rate today than they have over the past century? Does the demise of the brick and mortar shop correlate to some decline in our culture? The idea of a book shop as a cultural hub seems to have a peculiar fascination, though my (admittedly uninformed) impression is that it has been a relatively recent cultural phenomenon (bracketed by London’s 18th century coffee shops or maybe the early 19th century American bookseller-stationer-general store of the Ohio valley on one end and our contemporary weird, wired social networks on the other). Certainly the seeming ubiquity of information and low cost of entry for on-line selling has lowered barriers to entering the trade, at least in its (perhaps vitiated) on-line form. But finding the resources to tie up in an inventory and affording the space in which to keep it seem to remain limiting factors in the success of a bookselling business.

My apologies for the open-ended nature of this entry — certainly the questions above aren’t meant to be rhetorical. Framing the questions in terms of the effects on sustainable local economies (measurable or no) gives me pause. Happily, we can all take philosophical comfort in the fact that the paths of entrepreneurship lead but to the grave.

So there may be a problem with “wide-spread” shill bidding on eBay. The problem may need the ministrations of academic research to correct. Or reports of the problem may be seriously overblown.

In any case, those participating in auctions (whether as bidders or as consignors or as auctioneers) tend to seek — as do most folks engaged in competitive endeavors — an advantage. The advantage may be relatively benign, viz., booksellers in any given auction room tend to line the back wall. Or the competitive advantage may on occasion involve some degree of perfidy (viz. the practice of employing shills).

I have just a couple of quick thoughts off the top of my head on this, in part because the Bibliophagist does not endorse unethical or illegal behavior in the machinations of the book trade and yet realizes that such behavior is inevitable. (Though you can take reasonable steps to mitigate such problems.) But any discussion of this sort also begs the question as to what, exactly, is the right price for a book.

Broadly speaking, the one who is buying a book wants to pay nearly nothing; the one who is selling the book wants to realize what he or she will characterize as a “fair price” for the item. Without wishing to be impious (or to suggest which role the bookseller might play), certain aspects of the trade at times begin resemble Genesis 32:24.

In any event, for a fairly concise look at the general evolution of the book auction, see Nicolas Barker’s 1995 essay for ABPC; for a scholarly study of the workings of the early 20th century auction ring, track down a copy of Arthur Freeman and Janet Ing Freeman’s Anatomy of an Auction (which appears to have gone out of print). And for one alternative model of pricing, see the proposal for the “drunkard’s auction” at Notional Slurry.