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!”

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.