Talk given by David Mason at Alumni Hall, Victoria College, University of Toronto, 30 November 1999,
under the auspices of the Toronto Centre for the Book and the Friends of Victoria University Library.
Published in Toronto at Coach House Press in an edition of 300 copies in 2000. Now out of print.

When Professor Millgate invited me to speak to you today, I asked him what he would like me to talk about. Anything you want, he replied. Now I'm sure what he meant was anything I wanted to talk about relating to books, but since he didn't actually say that I spent some time considering the freedom of talking about anything I wanted to. Perhaps I'll tell them about the house and the renovations, and my operation, and then my retirement portfolio. Finally, I decided that it was only fair that my anecdotes should at least have something to do with books; which still allows me to tell you about my operation.
A couple of years ago I got a blocked tear duct. Now that may not sound very serious but what it meant was that I could only cry out of one eye - an intolerable situation for a bookseller, as it left me at an enormous disadvantage with my colleagues. To correct that problem, they drill a hole from the corner of your eye into your nose, so it was to be an overnight stay in the hospital, with full anesthetic. So I packed my toothbrush and eight books. As readers, you will understand why. Since I couldn't know what my mood might be when I woke up, I thought it best to have a book for whatever state of mind I might be in.
I woke up, one eye patched and with my brain throbbing in a manner I hadn't experienced since I gave up the booze years ago. I wasn't sure I could read, and in fact I couldn't. Luckily I was rescued after about 10 minutes on the same page by my lady's entrance. She called me a fool, took the book away, and I then slept 14 hours, packed up my books, and went home, once again able to cry properly like the other booksellers. So that's the operation. I will spare you the rest. The house because I don't own a house, and the retirement portfolio because all that's in it is books and booksellers generally don't retire anyway.
I had a lot of ideas when I started planning this talk. I thought I might tell you about the death of all the new bookstores (the independents) killed by the Chapters / Indigo conspiracy. Then, I could go on to tell you about the eventual and inevitable death of the perpetrators of the conspiracy: Chapters and Indigo themselves. Or about the disappearance of antiquarian bookstores in most of the world's major cities, including Toronto, also going on right now, although for different reasons.
The underlying theme of this talk is that most bookstores as we know them, new and antiquarian, are largely finished. I don't have time to give you my arguments for this case, you will have to take my word for it, but it leads me to conclude that, as someone whose whole career has been in an area which will soon disappear, I should use occasions such as this to place on the record what it was like in the old days. That the old days I refer to are right now, is irrelevant; in ten years this will seem like a hundred years ago.
So what I am going to tell you are some anecdotes about : scouting - the term booksellers use to denote their principal activity (selling books, you might be thinking, ought to be the principal activity of a bookseller, but you would be wrong -buying books is far more important). As an unknown colleague once said: "any fool can sell a book - it takes a pro to buy one."
But first let me explain my title. There is a certain bookseller, who shall remain nameless, whom I consider the best bookseller of my generation. I have spent 20 years having fights with him, because he is rude, arrogant, and so opinionated that anyone who has the temerity to disagree with him is likely to be subjected to a blistering put-down. To make matters worse, he is frequently right. Not only will his personality overwhelm you, but so will his arguments.
One problem with such people is that their strong personalities attract disciples, and the problem with disciples, as evidenced by just about all religions and political movements, is that they tend to interpret the master's words through the filter of their own often deficient reasoning abilities, thereby distorting everything. So some of my colleague's disciples have caused much more trouble than he has, and, in my opinion, many of the ludicrous excesses of today's Modern First Edition Market are directly traceable to misinterpretations by his disciples of ideas which in themselves were initially sound.
For many years his arrogance frustrated me, for one wants to admire someone who does what one does, and does it so much better than anyone else. This man makes it difficult. His favourite axiom, which he has been trumpeting far and wide for many years, is this: "the function of the bookseller," he pontificates, "is to serve the customer." I took this to mean that all a bookseller's skill and cunning should be at the disposal of anyone who has the means to buy books, but I didn't care for that idea.
I wrestled with this notion for some time and conjured up numerous unpleasant consequences of such a view before I realized where his error lay. (Yes, I am also arrogant and opinionated; it seems to go with the territory). But, after all, the book is at the core of all this, and surely our loyalty should lie with it, not with the customer. So I came up with my own philosophic axiom: the true function of the bookseller is to serve the book; hence the title for this talk.
My function, as I see it, is to rescue from the dump, from basements, from the hodge-podge and jumbles of sales and even from bookshops, those books which, without my skills and knowledge, might disappear. I am on the front lines, out there just ahead of the garbage men, on my quest to rescue the artifacts of the past from the depredations of the present, so that the scholars of the future will have the resources with which to scholar along. In the trade we call it scouting, and it is the most exciting part of bookselling. It is our skill and knowledge backed by the willingness to put our own money on the line. For although the books at a church sale or flea market can be cheap, scouting also includes the stores of other booksellers, where a mistake or misjudgment can be expensive.
Furthermore, scouting also provides the meat of much boasting amongst booksellers. And other things too. Like revenge. What better way to extract vengeance for some wrong done to you by another bookseller than to be able to say to a group of colleagues over drinks: "I bought such-and-such from so-and-so, paid him $20, and sold it the next day for $750. He didn't even know what he had, that fool." Now, admittedly, this is posturing, which we should have outgrown by age eight, but I can tell you - silly as it is - it's very tasty. And it can be done, and does get done, to even the loftiest dealers in the world, which is even more satisfying.
Now I must emphasize here that I do not refer to dealings with the public. When a bookseller enters a private home to offer on a library, he has a moral obligation to treat the owner fairly. The dealer who does not do this is a crook, and he must, if he practices such frauds on people, admit to himself that he is a crook. And with crookedness, like pregnancy, there are no half measures possible. For there is no point in being just a little bit crooked or occasionally crooked. It's all or nothing.
But in another bookstore, with priced books, it is The Game. It becomes a matter of your skills and knowledge versus your colleague's, and the prize is the legendary "missing book," the sleeper which booksellers know is waiting in every store for those with the trained eyes to find it. I personally hate house calls; they are anxiety-laden for me because, living in a society where people are afraid to call a plumber or take their car in for repairs, one starts out knowing that people fear and distrust us. There is a tendency in those circumstances to react by paying too much, and I have noted through the years that all the booksellers I most admire talk about house calls in a tone that indicates that they too do the same.
But the excitement of scouting another bookstore, especially one that you've never been in before, provides a thrill which never dissipates. The excitement of the hunt, the thrill of gambling, and the potentially unlimited rewards possible, are fuelled by all the great stories of the triumphs of others, recounted dramatically over late night drinks, as the lore of the trade is exchanged. It also furnishes us - and in this sense all of us, booksellers, collectors, or scholars - that single most satisfying event in the entire equation: the purchase of the book.
Some booksellers neither enjoy this nor do it much. They seldom buy from other booksellers, preferring to buy cheap from the public and sell dear, but they miss the point, I think. This kind of dealer loves to see someone like me enter their store. They seem to think dealers like me are fools to put the^ book before the buck. They like to sell at a good profit and they hold in contempt the fool who pays retail because he wants to own the book. But I think they are the real fools; because I get all those wonderful books, and all they get is money.
For I have owned books which only a rich man could contemplate owning, and if it is true that I can't own them forever, or at least not all of them, I have the privilege of owning them for a while. And that teaches an even more important lesson. We are never really owners of these books; we are merely the custodians of these artifacts of civilization, we can only love the book, respect it and care for it, until it is passed along to future generations.
Earlier this year I read a study on collecting written by a psychoanalyst. It was an attempt to explore the psychological basis of collecting, and a fascinating book it was, even though it demonstrated that I, and almost all of my clients, are even more weird than I thought. Book collectors, of course, are aware that their families and friends neither understand nor sympathize, and in one way or another they find ways to cope with being thought of as demented fools. Most of the ones I know simply accept that fact; so for them, those poor, misunderstood martyrs, I offer a quote from A. N. L. Munby, the great librarian and bibliophile, who said, "To be thought a lunatic by one's fellow men, however, is a small price to pay for a lifetime of the enjoyment of books." What a splendid way to put it!
Returning to our psychiatrist, he states, "the basis of collecting is the human ability to animatize objects like the amulets and fetishes of preliterate man or the holy relics of the religionist." And he goes on to say: "there is reason to believe that the true source of the habit [i.e., collecting] is the emotional state leading to a more or less perpetual attempt to surround oneself with magically potent objects."
Now the doctor is referring to collecting in general, but for a book collector, what a stunning and felicitous description of the objects of his passion. For what could be more descriptive of a book in its very essence than "a magically potent object?" A book is indeed a magical object. For me the most magical of objects; and I sometimes recall the five- or six-year-old I once was, clutching my older sister's hand each Saturday as she escorted me the two miles to the district library to return ten books and borrow ten more. And I wonder if those wonderful nameless lady librarians who guided my early reading, every Saturday, could even begin to imagine that they were engaging me with something which would become the centre of my life, my passion, and my vocation; the only thing which has remained constant and inflexible in a chaotic life.
I have to interject here an anecdote related to me a few days ago by a friend. James Houston, the arctic writer and pioneer Inuit-art historian, recently gave a talk to the friends of the Osborne Collection at the Toronto Public Library. He recounted how, as a child he walked regularly to precisely the same children's library that I frequented, although a generation before me. Houston recalled that when he was nine years old, he had asked one of the librarians to marry him, something that I deeply regret not having done myself. According to my source, the librarian replied, "Wouldn't it be better if we waited awhile?" Houston apparently hoped that by the time he was eleven it might be possible. I think that anyone with the wisdom to give a reply like that ought to have been running the country, not a children's library, and I have already convinced myself that she must have been the same librarian that I was in love with fifteen years later.
We have all heard that new age maxim: you are what you eat. Well, why wouldn't this also be true: you are what you do, you are what you venerate. Perhaps I am merely acknowledging that long line of Presbyterians I descend from, but it seems reasonable to assume that what you do will affect your character, even if no-one ever mentions it. We have entire industries devoted to health and well-being, both physical and mental, and many people get rich instructing us on how to get rich by any means possible. But what do we hear about improving our characters? You never hear anyone say I'm going to the library to exercise my character. I remember reading an observation of Gore Vidal's somewhere in response to hearing of someone who committed a particularly despicable act: "That's not very good for your character", he observed with his trademark irony. Indeed! Well, books are good for your character.
One day, surrounded by my books, I hit on a novel idea. I decided that simply being surrounded by books was good for us; that civility and wisdom came to us by osmosis, so to speak, just through associating with them. Some time later I tentatively mentioned this to a client, in a sort of joking manner (so he could see that I didn't really believe such nonsense). To my surprise he was neither amused nor skeptical. "Oh", he said, "I've always been sure that's true, I just never told anyone because I didn't want them to think I was some kind of idiot. What a pleasure to have someone agree." So I tried it on a few others and was astounded to find that many of my customers - in fact a majority - held that view, albeit secretly.
Another near-universal attitude I've encountered among booklovers is that their books comfort them - there's no other word for it. Their books lend them a feeling of security that one would expect to be more appropriate for someone contemplating their vast properties, or a huge group of their offspring, or perhaps their bank balance. But books? What does all this signify? I don't know. I just accept it. With enduring gratitude.
I have been a bookseller now for 33 years - one third of a century - or more important here, a generation. A generation is a relatively long time for anything; in the book world it means I have seen a fair number of people come and go. Booksellers, collectors and librarians have retired or died and new ones have appeared. Some collectors who started around the time that I did are still collecting, and their collections, from the proverbial humble beginnings, have grown in size and to levels of significance unimaginable all those years ago.
When I started selling books, I assumed - reasonably it seemed - that hard work and time would slowly but surely elevate me into the middle class. But after several years, when I had worked my way up to being only $40,000 in debt, I saw that that wasn't going to happen. The reason, I finally decided, was because the number of serious regular book buyers was too small. After years of observation I concluded that serious book buying had so deteriorated that we were left with a pool of potential customers somewhere in the range of 3-5% of the population. A depressing conclusion but one that the subsequent years have confirmed.
But, one of the advantages booksellers have over normal people is that, learning early-on that they are unlikely to get rich, they are free to focus on what other rewards might be afforded to them in their chosen vocation. With financial anxiety removed from the equation, the pleasures to be derived from everyday events were much more obvious, and the pleasures themselves greatly magnified. There's a moral there. I hope you have noticed.
It seems to me that every aspect of the booktrade that I ponder lately seems to be in a state of great flux, a situation not particularly pleasing to me, for like many other booksellers, my views of the trade, based as they are on a strong sense of tradition and continuity, are essentially conservative. Therefore, like most conservatives I believe that any change in the established way of conducting our trade, however slight, may lead to the complete destruction of everything I hold dear. And now, I find myself confronting changes of great magnitude, changes not seen in the booktrade since the advent of the industrial revolution; because we are in the midst of another revolution, the electronic revolution.
During the last ten years good bookstores of every sort have started to disappear. This current trend started years ago when antiquarian bookstores closed or moved to the country and many dealers became specialized and began dealing from offices or their homes. Thus the famous Fourth Avenue in New York and Charing Cross Road in London - and Queen Street right here in Toronto - lost their stores because there was no longer cheap space downtown, and used bookstores need a lot of space, and they need it cheap.
Many good books still have to wait somewhere for the person who needs them to appear, and I have books on my shelves which have been there for 10 or 15 years. And I mean good books, not junk. What am I to do with them but wait, if my social function is to preserve these books for posterity? I can't dump them like so much unsaleable junk. I once read a piece on business which stated that as a rule the average small retail stock should change entirely [meaning sold or dumped] three times a year. With used books it would be closer to three times a century.
Which perhaps explains why my father the banker got to the point where he refused to discuss my business with me.
These two trends - large used stocks transferred to the country, and dealers whose speciality-range narrows to the point where they merely require a space to accommodate their equally specialized clients (with the implication that they don't want to see anyone but these clients) - both these trends have been accelerated by the advent of the Internet. The Internet is changing the entire world as drastically as did the industrial revolution and the booktrade also is affected.
The major change is that we are now selling daily and all over the world those books I referred to earlier, those good books which previously needed 10-15 years for the right customer to come along. Naturally this has resulted in a huge surge of sales, so unexpected that many booksellers have become almost ecstatic in their optimism. All the trade gossip now seems to focus on the wonders of selling books in Singapore, Tokyo and Australia etc, and many booksellers have started to think that they may even get rich.
Those of us who are natural pessimists or prone to philosophic meandering remain skeptical especially as some of the negative implications become manifest. This is a can of worms which only time will unravel, but right now the Internet is like the wild west; there are virtually no regulations, so I urge you to use great caution if you venture onto it. So, with no stores, what?
I'm going to relate a couple of anecdotes which I hope will illustrate my thesis that not just book collectors but scholarship will suffer dramatically by the absence of good used and rare bookshops.
One day, scouting a colleague's store, a book caught my eye. It was a 19th-century book, rebound with a vellum spine and quite attractive. I pulled it out with curiosity but nothing more, because the '2' on the spine had already told me it was an odd volume and therefore virtually worthless. It turned out to be Volume 2 of the Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (published in New York, in 1852). Margaret Fuller - later Marchessa Ossoli - was a friend of Emerson, and one of the earliest American feminists. Her major work, Women in the Nineteenth Century, stressed that men have deliberately kept women in a subordinate position and that women must help themselves towards independence. She was the editor, with Emerson, of the Transcendentalist journal, The Dial, and is considered, along with Poe, the first of America's major critics. If she is not quite so famous as Poe, perhaps this can be taken as confirmation of her theory of the subjection of women.
I found, as I flashed the pages, that it was interleaved with a considerable number of blank leaves. Now, except for 16th- to 18th-century schoolbooks which sometimes are found that way, experience has taught me that such books are bound like this by interested parties - often, in fact, the author - to facilitate revisions and expansion for a later edition. This book indeed bore notes on a lot of the blank pages in a very small, neat hand, a good sign that the notes might be scholarly and relevant. A quick perusal of a couple of them, confirmed by careful reading later, made it apparent that the author of the notes knew of some of the events in the book - the parts pertaining to the Italian fight for liberty -and he actually turned out to be an Italian named Torlonia who was indeed immersed in these events.
I bought it, thereby breaking one of the cardinal rules of bookselling and book collecting: for buying a broken set or a defective book is considered stupid and pointless, in fact throwing away money. But it was only $10 less discount, and I justified my purchase by saying to myself: it's pretty; if it turns out to be nothing, I can sell it as a binding.
Incidentally, a good bookseller does this sort of thing often. Instinct counts for a lot, and I often buy books, sometimes expensive ones, on hunches. In fact, a bookseller learns to go with such hunches, for every dealer has stories about books they almost didn't buy, or worse, the ones they didn't buy which another more astute dealer or collector retired on. In book-scouting, as in life, my experience has been that it is my sins of omission I have regretted far more than my sins of commission.
So, that's part one of the story. I bought it, it was interesting, and the notes were important, although still anonymous. And it was still worthless. I put it on a shelf in my office with a lot of similar books: the shelf of orphans and misfits that all dealers have and which they will usually end up having until they die, at which time more sensible people will pitch them in the garbage.
Now part two: My colleague Robert Wright - one of my alumni and therefore privileged to enter my office - came in one day to do some research. After a bit, his eye caught the vellum spine on the shelf.
"Where did you get that?" he exclaimed. "/ have the other volume!" Now, Charlie Everitt in Adventures of a Treasure Hunter, (to my mind the best introduction to bookselling) says: "A good dealer ought to be able to sit in a colleague's office gossiping and still know what each book on the shelves twenty feet away is, even though he can't read the title." So I guess I had trained Robert properly.
"You have the other volume?" I asked. We were both stunned. The fanciful bookseller's dream had occurred, and neither of us could quite believe it. It had never happened before and neither of us could comprehend that it might be happening now. And the incredible coincidence, that the dealer who had the other volume just happened to be one of the privileged few allowed in my private room, made the coincidence even more profound.
"Where did you get it?" I asked incredulously.
"At the Sally Ann", came the reply. "I only bought it because it was pretty, and I figured I could sell it as a binding if it came to that," he said defensively. I think by then we had both confronted an unpleasant truth. Our shock at actually blending two odd volumes into a full book was so profound that I, for one, realized that all the booksellers who had shelves of unmatched books, or books lacking plates or maps etc, were kidding themselves. We all knew in our heart of hearts that we would never match them; it was simply that we were constitutionally incapable of throwing any book in the garbage. All our lofty ideals were just a cover-up to avoid admitting that we were going to die with piles of junk cluttering everything up.
Robert and I made a deal. We would be partners on the book, and I would undertake the research and assume the responsibility of selling it. The first volume, Robert's, contained penciled notes in another hand identifying a dozen or so of the characters mentioned anonymously in the text. The hand was that of Sarah Clarke, another of the Transcendentalists, a painter and a close friend of Fuller's, and the sister of the Unitarian minister James Freeman Clarke, (who, incidentally, was one of the editors along with Emerson of these Memoirs). Her name on the endpaper of both volumes indicates it was her copy. So, now we had a complete book and probably a valuable one.
Now, one of my more effective methods of research is to ask people who know more about the subject than I do, thereby stealing their knowledge. Therefore, on his next visit, I : showed it to Professor Joel Myerson, the bibliographer of both Emerson and Margaret Fuller, and obviously, extremely knowledgeable about the entire Transcendentalist movement. I don't remember his conclusions, but a week later I had a call from Madeleine Stern, part of the formidable team of Rostenberg & Stern, Booksellers, so I knew he had informed her of what I had.
Leona Rostenberg & Madeleine Stern, who are highly respected in the trade as scholar booksellers (which is to say real booksellers), have been around a long time, and besides having, I assume, as much fun as the rest of us, have contributed no small amount to the scholarship relating to early books and bookselling. They have published, jointly, several highly respected books on these subjects. Madelaine Stern also wrote on a variety of 19th-century American subjects, including the very important book Imprints on History -which dealt with the impact of publishers on the expansion of the American frontier - and another fascinating book that I ; have used a lot for my own research, Heads and Headlines, a history of phrenology and the famous Fowlers. In short, they are the sort of booksellers who allow the rest of us to feel, by association, almost respectable.
Another of Stern's interests is Louisa May Alcott, whose biography she wrote, and you may have seen some of the books of Louisa May Alcott's "lost" mysteries which Stern rediscovered and edited. Her partner Leona Rostenberg is justly famous as an expert in Mediaeval and Renaissance books. I once had a long conversation with Rostenberg and can assure you she is not to be tampered with in spite of appearing to be about 4' 10" high and weighing in at maybe 75 pounds. Formidable is the term which comes to mind. Stern, I had only met once, briefly, but, as I found out, so was she.
"I hear you have Fuller's memoirs annotated by someone", she started out, not wasting any time on the amenities. "I need it! I'm working on her." I didn't stand a chance. Without going into all the sordid details of how she beat me into submission, within a few minutes I had agreed to send her the book on approval for $600 - less than half of what I had tentatively decided it might be worth. And she did it with great civility, even charm, as she explained that the writer of the notes couldn't be that important - after all she had never heard of him - and anyway, who else would I ever sell it to; and of course my price was ludicrous - surely I wasn't serious.
Anyway, I succumbed as gracefully as I could because I had known from the start that she deserved to get it, and Robert forgave me, and anyway, our combined outlay of, I guess $8.50 - $8 for me and 50 cents for Robert - meant that our profit, although disappointing, was adequate (especially for people who are always saying they don't care about money.)
Robert and I were delighted. Both of us had committed the same stupidity, on instinct, yet we had been vindicated by events, and a book of great scholarly value had gone to precisely the right person. For if the truth be known, most booksellers are closet romantics. I could tell many stories about cases where booksellers have relinquished profits, sometimes considerable ones, in order to make some grand gesture. Most booksellers love books in a romantic manner, and really do have strong feelings about who deserves to own them, and will sometimes sacrifice, profits or advantages to have the pleasure of seeing them go where they should.
This, of course, is another fine example of my central thesis: the book is the important thing, and I remain its servant. My primary duty is to recover it from the scrap heap, but no less important is to help find its proper home.
But that's not the end. About three weeks later, I received a packet from Madeleine Stern. It was a 16-page scholarly essay she had written about our book, having deciphered the extremely important annotations of the Italian Torlonia which he had made on the inserted leaves. His responses to Fuller's comments on Mazzini and the Italian revolution, the comments of one steeped in the culture and politics of the era, were invaluable and will no doubt find their way into the historical record. With their kind permission, I would like to quote from the end of Stern's essay:
"One of the most extraordinary things attending this set is that, although Sarah Clarke herself spent her later years in Georgia, the two volumes somehow - perhaps in the library of other Clarke relatives who penciled in their ownerships - found their way to Canada. Moreover, it appears that at one time in Canada the two volumes were separated, the volume containing Sarah Clarke's penciling appearing in one locality, the volume containing Torlonia's vituperations in another. Finally, and most remarkably, the two volumes, purchased separately, were brought together. Like Margaret Fuller, whom they memorialize, they had wandered worlds away from their beginnings, and like Margaret Fuller they had been enriched by their wanderings."

It is hard to imagine a better resolution of commerce and scholarship, with all those disparate elements coming together in such a serendipitous fashion. An important book rendered worthless by the separation of its parts, and, therefore, probably doomed to destruction; and two different dealers, both smart enough to break the rules independently, thereby rescuing the volumes. Then the fortuitous match; then showing it to precisely the scholar who knew the really pertinent scholar. And the fact that after reading her essay I realized that the book was worth not hundreds but thousands bothered me not one bit. In fact I took, and still take, a certain pleasure in having been sweet-talked into parting with a book worth a lot of money, for so little. And if you understand that you are a little closer to understanding what makes a bookseller tick. To paraphrase the old saying, we wouldn't want the truth to interfere with a good story, I would say: "we wouldn't want money to ruin a perfect ending."
I must add here a detail which I find amusing and which graphically portrays why I had to have the eye operation. When Madeleine Stern gave me permission to quote their piece, she mentioned that it had been published by her and Rostenberg in Connecting: Our Selves - Our Books; Modoc Press, Santa Monica, 1994. Naturally, I ordered a copy, which arrived after I had written the above. A delightful book it is; a series of essays on their life amongst books. Prefacing their account of the Fuller book they have appended a lengthy intro mentioning their purchase of it from a Canadian dealer, with a description rather at odds with the account I have just given you. I quote: "although we were somewhat shaken by the price the Canadian dealer was asking.. .we finally agreed." So now you have two different versions of the same transaction; one dealer says $600 should have been $6,000 and he was pummeled into submission, the other dealers, who paid the $600 were "shaken" by the price. I'll leave it to you to decide which version to accept, but at least you will see what I meant about my eye operation being essential.
Now my second example. I don't know what you might know about how dealers prepare their catalogues but my guess would be not much. A dealer uses certain tricks from time to time in his attempts to sell his wares. These range from exaggeration and slippery evasion, in the description of books, to the outright lies or appalling ignorance demonstrated by some dealers, who are often blissfully unaware of their shortcomings.
There is a long and honourable tradition at work here; it's called capitalism. An old cataloguing rule, learned during my apprenticeship, is to make the cover attractive, then make the first page as compelling as possible.
The man who trained me would sometimes go out and buy a choice item with hardly any margin for profit, just to make page one appealing. "You have to make them get their pencil out", he used to say, which meant that an irresistible treasure, which must be ordered, often triggers the impulse to order other less desirable items. Having decided "to go to the trouble of ordering one book, we decide that we might as well order some of the other ones which we don't really need. I think the psychology is sound, because it works on me too. The only problem being that too often the choice item is sold before you call, and you end up with only the secondary material which you didn't really need or want. Another of the endless reasons booksellers die broke.
Anyway, I was preparing catalogue NO. 2, and scouting other bookshops for likely fillers. If you have acquired only one book by a particular author, the chances of it selling are less than if you have half a dozen or ten of that author's books. I usually either withdraw a single title for a future list, or fill out that author's entry by purchases; which was what I was doing that day.
One of the authors on page 1 in the catalogue I was working on, was Michael Arlen, a near-forgotten minor writer of the twenties, who had been immensely popular in his day. He was clever (all too often a synonym for superficial) and had caught-on, became fashionable, then famous and rich. Well, I had a couple of Arlen's novels which had come in as part of a lot; so he was one of the authors I was intent on either expanding or removing. Really another exercise in futility, since I had never met anyone anyway who might remotely want to buy one of his books. Yet another reason booksellers die broke: they seem to have a propensity for buying books based on logic which might be impeccable from their point of view, but less compelling to their customers.
I was in a shop with several Arlens on the shelf, so I was examining the prospects. After contemplating the third title, I realized what a waste of time it was even considering such a pointless exercise, so I jammed it back. But the sixth sense was working, and my mind registered something that the eye had caught in passing which caused me to take it off the shelf again: a penciled notation on the endpaper: "D. H. L, Paris, 1926". The second time there was no missing it; it hit me with that unmistakable electric jolt which the treasure hunter knows so well, that enduring moment punctuated by a shock which seems to suspend time. Fishermen feel it when they get a hit on their line or poker players, when a lifting of the hole cards reveals a pair of aces to go with the one on board. It is , this jolt which prompts dealers to term browsing, scouting; we are hunters after prey and the prey is the "missing book."
I knew at once that I had found the "missing book". My own personal collecting interest then was D.H.Lawrence, and I was amassing as my means permitted a small collection of his first editions. (That's NO. 18 in the list of why bookdealers , die broke: collecting what better belongs in stock.) Now I had a book from Lawrence's library. Trying to hide my elation, I secreted my treasure in a pile of other books (after all, it was priced at $2.50 and I didn't want to alert my colleague and perhaps cause an embarrassing incident). I paid, and fled.
When the initial elation passed, it was time to begin research. The first reference book I looked at set me back. Lawrence was pretty ill in 1926, living in the Villa Miranda in Florence, and there was no mention of Paris. But in another . book it was related that he did make a brief trip home (in fact his last) to the English midlands. But it mentioned no sojourn in Paris. Still, I knew it was Lawrence's signature, so I did not fear the disillusionment that sometimes follows such a discovery. For all too often the discovery proves bogus. It proves to be wishful thinking on the part of our optimistic book dealer, and the facts, unpleasant and final, convert his dream into fantasy, and his book-find reverts to a worthless trifle. How often a young dealer searches endlessly through reference sources to discover that Elmer Lincoln, whose name is written in the book he has bought, was not Abraham Lincoln's son, nor in fact any relation to Abe, not even a third cousin twice removed. But dreams are what make the world go round and we persist in the search for the Missing Book, the Holy Grail of bookselling.
However, back to Lawrence. Not only was I certain that it was Lawrence's signature, but I quickly solved a parallel but important problem: how to explain how this occurred; a book from Lawrence's library turning up in a bookshop in Toronto, Canada, forty years after his death; how could that happen? Well, I knew.
Some time previously the Fisher Library had been the recipients of an incredible cache of literary material from the estate of Douglas Duncan, yet another of those extraordinary Canadians most Canadians have never heard about. Among his many other activities, such as bookbinding and art patronage, Duncan was a book collector. And included in his bequest to the University was one of the three extant manuscript versions of Women in Love, and some first editions of Lawrence. I knew what must have happened.
The Arlen book had been part of this collection and had been overlooked by the University and sold along with other ordinary books to the bookseller, who had also missed it. So I had my provenance - indisputable, it seemed to me. In fact, it has been suggested to me that technically this book is really owned by the Fisher Library, and if I was at all sporting or even decent, I would return it to its rightful owner. A suggestion, that naturally, I have had no difficulty ignoring.
Finally, sure enough, a book detailing D. H. L.'s travel itinerary mentioned a two- or three-day stop in Paris on the trip to England in October of 1926, and further corroboration was found in references in the collected letters. The next step was to try and tie it in with what I already knew about Arlen.
I knew, for instance, that the character named Michaelis in Lady Chatterley's Lover was based on Michael Arlen, and I vaguely remembered that the portrait had been rather unflattering. So I went back to Lady C., although first I did what one always does with a book owned by a famous person: I went through it page by page, hoping to find annotations and comments, the more scurrilous the better. But, alas -nothing. A disappointment, since any and every word, even an exclamation mark, can be translated into hard cash if one has learned the proper formula.
One evening, idly pondering my mystery, I read part of the book. It was in fact a collection of short stories, and as I read the first story my excitement became electric. For this story was about a clever young man of the lower classes who meets and has a love affair with a Duchess. It was clever, but not deep - not really funny enough to be in the same class as Waugh's descriptions of the same types at the same time (but then, neither is anything else, is it?). But, everything fell into place and "The Theory" was born.
For the other thing I had discovered when I was trying to place D. H. L. in Paris in October was that at that time, gestating in his creative core, was his next novel. When he returned to Florence, after England, he began at once the first draft of that novel - which two years later was published as Lady Chatterley's Lover, the story of an affair between a man of the lower class and a woman of the ruling class. I had it! What a revelation!
What I had was no less than the genesis of Lawrence's most famous and controversial novel. Surely it happened like this: Lawrence and Frieda are in a bookshop in Paris en route to England, and he sees Arlen's latest book. He has heard all the talk of this acclaimed young man, and he decides to check him out. He reads the sentimental, superficial story of the Duchess, and goes into one of his typical Lawrentian rages, fulminating: "What drivel, when will people learn that sex is holy? This little hack is doing dirt on life. I'll show them, I'll take the same theme but I'll show it as it really is; that sex is holy and its power can eradicate all artificial barriers." And so we got Lady C. Does that seem too fanciful? Not to me.
D. H. L. returned to Italy on October 4th, so he must have bought this book on his way back through Paris - and he started Lady C. probably on the 22nd, (in spite of telling his sister-in-law on the 18th that he felt he would "never write another novel"). The introduction to the definitive edition of Lady C. states: "but the journey to England and his boyhood haunts, as well as the vigour of the autumn harvest, roused him and stirred his creative flow". I don't think so. I think Michael Arlen initiated the creative flow.
Curiously, Arlen did not appear in the book until Lawrence wrote the third version, after his two encounters with Arlen in Florence, in late November of 1927. Now the introduction of the character Michaelis /Arlen is intended to portray a false start for Connie Chatterley, Michaelis being the first possible solution to her dilemma after her father encourages her in the euphemistic way of the time, to "meet people". Now surely this is D. H. L.'s private joke. For if I am right, and the seed was Arlen's shallow story, what better irony, given that the idea came from that story, that he use the author himself to further his point. Even if none would know but himself. There is more, of course, worthy of a scholarly paper and no doubt we will get such papers now that my earth-shattering revelations have been made public...
I must say, I like this scholarly stuff. This could go on and on - I could get a book out of it perhaps, and crash the world of scholarly jousting. Except that the academic world is too dangerous, from what I've seen. It's safer down on Queen St among the junkies, and squeegee kids and street people, from my observations of the academic world.
From a bookseller's perspective, an inescapable irony of this history of Lady C., is that poor Lawrence, starving and dying, got almost nothing for the book, despite selling it himself through Orioli in Florence, while the last fine copy in dust wrapper I saw offered on the market was priced more than $10,000.
One day a while back I was at an antique mall which I sometimes frequent, looking in a case full of junky books when a name on a book's spine caught my attention. "Mellors", read the author's name. Mellors, I thought, that's a name one doesn't see, why is it ringing a bell? Of course, Mellors - Mellors, the gamekeeper in Lady Chatterly and then I looked at the book's title In and About Nottingham-shire. I bought the book.
Here is another seed, this is how it starts. A book on Nottinghamshire, D. H. L.'s home area, by someone called Mellors, and from outward appearances, from the right period. Could this be the source of Lawrence's name for his hero? Later, researching it, I discovered it was indeed Lawrence's habit to use real places, usually disguised, in several of his books, and, indeed, he used family names from his area as well. There were in fact Chatterleys in that area and I suspect, given the subsequent furor over Lady C., that they wouldn't have -been too happy with Lawrence's expropriation of their name.
Protagonists must have names and we have heard of many different explanations of where they originated. James Bond, derived from the standard book, Birds of Jamaica - which sat -on Ian Fleming's shelf as he worked on his new spy novel - is one example which comes to mind. It is not too fanciful to speculate that Lawrence knew this book about his home area, with its 1908 publication date contemporary to his time. Still it is of small significance whether I am right or wrong in this : case and I merely mention it to allow me to proceed to the two areas in which it does have significance.
The first is what I and many other dealers and collectors believe firmly: that there is a guiding force that leads to such discoveries. Now I would describe myself as a rational man (my lady and perhaps my lawyer wouldn't, but that is another talk entirely). But my explanation for this phenomenon -where things seem to happen in sequence, discoveries seem so logically fitting that coincidence can't be the explanation -is not, I think, merely superstitious. I think it is part of a psychological state which occurs in people who pursue any; activity with passion. The constant honing of scouting skills will instill unconscious abilities and eventually this bedrock of practical experience will result in what I choose to call an instinct. And when the instinct is working, incredible things can happen. I can remember days as a young scout when I would glimpse a patch of spine buried in a pile ten feet away and know, with absolute certainty, what book it was. And I would be right.
The second point to all this is that it is fun. Small discoveries of this sort, even where wrong or pointless, add excitement to the hunt. Whether in the end they mean anything seems irrelevant to me; it's like the clues in a mystery story: they can be useless, but the important thing is to see them. It means the instincts are working.
So what do we have now? We have a source, albeit speculative, for Lady Chatterley hitherto unknown to scholars and if my theory is correct this revelation gives great insight into Lawrence's state of mind in 1926. Did D. H. L.'s rage at Arlen's work - typifying, as it did, so many aspects of modern life that Lawrence despised - give him the necessary impetus to -' overcome his lassitude caused by the debilitating tuberculosis which killed him four years later? I choose to think so. And did the rage mean, that had he not read Arlen, he wouldn't have written Lady Chatterley? Perhaps. Although we do know that he would probably have written something else, maybe even something better because Lady Chatterley doesn't rank all that high with critics in the Lawrence canon.
But as the last novel of a writer whose essential message
was always conveyed via the novel, and further, as a novel
which Lawrence must have known would probably be his last
shot, its importance remains indisputable.
And so, I believe, does this little book of Arlen's. Because if I am right it is surely the spark which ignited the fire of Lawrence's last great creative burst.
In closing, I want to qualify somewhat the tone of what I have said, by adding a couple of points.
To have had the privilege of working for a generation with something, which I love deeply, brought a fulfillment that more than compensates for the lack of financial success, and I hope you realize that my jokes about the paltry economic rewards in my chosen trade are just that: jokes. I have never regretted a moment of it, for, as the man who trained me never tires of saying: "It's a wonderful way to make not much of a living." On the other hand, we might substitute another possible interpretation for my outlook based on what a psychiatrist once said to me: "I find that very interesting David," he said, pausing for effect, "a banker's son who says he doesn't care about money. Yes, very interesting," as we both roared with laughter.
The second point is more startling. A while ago I was leafing though some magazines which had come in, when I encountered the results of a survey done by a publishing group, on the book-buying habits of the American public. The figures given demonstrated clearly that approximately 3-4% of the public were serious enough readers to be regular book buyers, exactly the fraction that I had arrived at in my personal survey over 30 years. I was pleased of course about the corroboration of my insights, except for one somewhat disconcerting detail: the magazine with the survey in it was not current, it was considerably older - in fact, it was published in 1905. Which means that, before the telephone was universal, before we had radio, or the movies, or television, or the Internet, their survey projected exactly the same number of serious book people as my informal one had almost 100 years later.
After reading that I stopped talking about how people don't buy books anymore. Now I realize they never did. And it was from those figures that I concluded that the book will survive. For the point is that if there are no more regular buyers now, neither are there any less. And I now believe that the Chapters /Indigo conspiracy will not long endure after their decimation of the real new bookstores. They applied the McDonald's system to books, but they have made an erroneous assumption, by thinking that the basis of the McDonald's philosophy - that everyone must eat - can be successfully extrapolated to books, not realizing that only a mere 3% of the population are addicted to books. I know you didn't come here for financial advice, but I am going to give it to you anyway. Sell your Chapters /Indigo shares, and while you are at it sell your Amazon and E-Bay stock too.
As for me, I will continue to serve the book. For what other master could offer what books have given me; the only things in a now lengthy life which have never let me down. Books have given me my education, my work, my greatest pleasures, my hobby, and some of my dearest friends. I give fervent thanks that I am, and will always remain, one of the blessed 3%. And I hope you are too. And I join Thomas Carlyle in his pœan to books, my all time favourite book quote: "Praise be to Cadmus, the Phoenicians, or whoever it was who invented books."