Bibliophagist

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.

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.

Or for those who insist on larding their posts with filmic allusion, “My God, it’s full of morocco!” My eye was caught by item 86, Albert Cohn’s own set of The Comic Almanack (1835-1853), here priced $9,500. 379 sets, from Addison (& Steele) to Zola.

heritagebookshop.com

So I noticed that a little something signed by A. Lincoln made some big money last year. The 13th Amendment is all very well and good, though not necessarily the kind of material one is apt to find on the shelves of this bookselling concern. Indeed, given my advocacy of “low-spot” collecting, one might have a hard time locating in my office something from a political figure remotely electable, let alone someone who managed to pull off something on the scale of, you know, freeing the slaves.

Which is not to say that historical value is entirely lacking in the detritus of the obscurely Quixotic (or at least the semi-addled) and their attempts to gain political traction. Sorting through a shelf full of uncatalogued controversial or political literature makes history seem less an inevitable expression of the dialectic and more like some kind of rococo funhouse.

I just finished cataloguing an example of one of these guys a few days ago — a nice handbill from what appears to be the 1960 presidential campaign of Homer A. Tomlinson. Tomlinson, head of the Church of God (World Headquarters) thrice ran (unsuccessfully) for the White House on the Theocratic Party ticket (see Melton’s Encyclopedia of American Religions); as I note elsewhere,

Among the bishop’s proposals were tithes to replace taxes, the King James Bible to replace current civil laws and a promise to “Follow New Revelations in Government and Peace”–this last plank perhaps the most problematic, as a later revelation would lead to Tomlinson (inevitably referred to in contemporary accounts as both “genial” and “eccentric”) crowning himself king of the world.

General J. W. Phelps (1813-1885) might well have appreciated Tomlinson, since compared to the bishop Phelps comes off as an altogether more moderate voice. The general embodied a late efflorescence of national anti-Masonic sentiment (the Anti-Masonic crew having perhaps reached their zenith with William Wirt in 1832), though in at least one instance he makes some telling points about the nature of power and political corruption. Whatever resentment Phelps might have tapped into during his run for the presidency in 1880 was rather overshadowed by the fracas between Garfield and Hancock; Phelps managed to secure only 1,045 votes nationally.

One candidate in the next election who did considerably better than Phelps was Belva Ann Lockwood, the woman who ran on the Equal Rights ticket. Lockwood failed to secure the support of Susan B. Anthony or Elizabeth Cady Stanton (who decided to back back the better horse and throw their weight behind Blaine) but still managed to pull down 4,149 votes. And though Lockwood may not have gotten the nod from leading feminist political figures of her day, she did manage to get a published endorsement from the Saratoga “Professor” (the honorific appears self-granted) J. W. Shiveley.

Shiveley had a certain amount of political experience (having earlier been arrested in Washington D.C., where he had come in his role as a self-declared incarnation of the messiah to cast the devil out of presidential assassin Charles Guiteau); he also had a zeal for reform. I have a broadside of his which seems to argue (however obscurely) for civil service reform, financial transparency and a vigorous press; he also presses the case of “darling sweet Belva Ann Lockwood, for President of these United States.” As with his earlier efforts with Guiteau, this endorsement appears to have had only marginal success.

This brief essay had begun in my head as a comment on Seattle bookseller Michael Lieberman’s observation on the disappearing “middle class” of books, with perhaps a supporting digression on the future of the trade as laid out by the proprietor of the Brick Row Book Shop in San Francisco. Perhaps I will get to those thoughts later. In the meantime, I will recommend you secure a copy of ‘If Elected . . .’: Unsuccessful Candidates for the Presidency 1796-1968 (Washington: National Portrait Gallery, 1972); also, I throw out the observation that the items described above suggest that while history may be written by the winners the losers certainly leave ample traces.