Bibliophagist

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!”

Rostenberg and Stern — the musical!

I decided to make this story a musical because I’ve known Madeleine and Leona for well over 20 years and I’ve always felt that their story was a story for our time.

(Here’s more of what the playwright has to say about it.)

Bookseller Ken Sanders has been a long-time scourge of the biblioklept and bunco steerer, and he will be honored as such at the upcoming Gold Rush Book Fair.

(Note that “Sanders” is the preferred spelling of his surname; the misspelling of Saunders, as in the article linked to here, might put one in the mind of Winnie the Pooh’s domestic arrangements, a moderately incongruous juxtaposition for those with any passing acquaintance with Mr. Sanders.)

Back in my day as a book shop clerk in San Francisco, I was once allowed the pleasure of confronting a dapper book thief who had been illegally peddling our wares around the rare book shops of the city. He had been collared with one of our books in another shop and when I confronted him in the company of a San Francisco police detective — I believe that when faced with the thief I employed a rhetorical flourish along the lines of “So we meet again!” — he produced a Panamanian passport and claimed diplomatic immunity. (This was the merest pretence and subsequently proven to be hogwash.) I mounted his mugshot on my desk the way a big game hunter might hang the taxedermied head of an ibex in his den.

Booksellers as a group (he says, gesturing expansively) exhibit a strange combination of hail-fellow, well-met collegiality and knives-drawn competitiveness. I blush to admit that as a bookseller I can appreciate the impulse to hoard information (the identity of a particularly live customer, the sources of inventory, the bids I’ve left for an auction, etc.). In general, asymmetric information has been the bookseller’s friend.

Back in my youth, when I was but a callow clerk for an antiquarian bookselling concern on the West Coast and the telephone was the preferred medium for the dissemination of information, I was on the phone attempting on behalf of my employer to inveigle a colleague out of a selection of what we were pleased to call “Jackson material” for a remunerative institutional customer.

The colleague posed an innocuous question about the scope of our customer’s collection; I was momentarily puzzled, so I moved the telephone receiver about three inches from my mouth and called back to my boss’s desk, “Hey, do you think [Name of the Institution] would go for thus-and-such?”

“Did you just say [Name of the Institution]?” my boss answered.

“[Common gutter expletive],” I answered. I put the phone back up to my ear. The colleague was laughing.

“I promise not to use this information against you,” the colleague said, collegially.

The model of one-to-one information sharing seems as quaint as my past reliance on the Ameche. Today of course I would have typed the customer’s name into my blog in a moment of idle distraction and seen the balance sheet laid waste by the persistence of the Google cache.