Archives and the Digital Age - Part I

A few weeks ago, on June 6, I exhibited at a bookfair in Concord, New Hampshire. As opposed to the Philadelphia event that I talked about in my last entry, the New Hampshire fair has been running since Hector was a pup. Pretty much the same people attend it every year, and dealers from all over New England exhibit interesting materials that have accumulated during the long winter months.

And what did I buy at this bookfair? “Paper, not books!”

Here, for example, are a few images from a fascinating collection of one hundred photographs and negatives that I bought at Concord, relating to Arctic explorer Donald B. MacMillan, the schooner Bowdoin, and the Island of Monhegan.

MacMillan had a long career as a polar explorer. These photographs document several voyages to Monhegan Island, prior to departing on the Greenland Expedition of 1924, and the MacMillan-Byrd Greenland Expedition, 1925. The photographs include shots of the Bowdoin, her crew and visitors (including, I think, Miriam Look, who would become his wife a decade later), and several interesting shots of the village of Monhegan. I’ve priced it at $850.

The week after that, perhaps inspired by MacMillan, I headed north, to Halifax, Nova Scotia. But aside from an excellent lunch with John Townsend of Schooner Books, I came up nearly empty. (As I said last week, this business is a crapshoot.)

I know, antiquarian booksellers are supposed to sell old books, and in the last two entries all I’ve talked about are photographs and an antique print. Increasingly, over the years, I’ve been selling what we in the trade refer to as “paper” – old, letters, photos, documents, journals, account books, archives and the like.

The reasons for this are complex, and I’ll be writing more about them in future entries, but the simplest explanation is this: Because of the internet, books are now everywhere.

This may benefit used book buyers and sellers, but for people like me who sell rare books, the internet has degraded our status as purveyors of arcane and sought-after tomes. There is no more “secret” knowledge which in earlier days we booksellers painstakingly compiled, and by which we made our livings. These days anyone who can fire up a computer has instant access to knowledge we’ve spent our lives seeking out.

At the high end, those gorgeous multi-thousand dollar voyages and travels featured by Sothebys – Cook’s Voyages come to mind - might as well be widgets. Everybody knows what they are. The only story they have left to tell is how their selling prices track the market. Interesting enough, but for a small wily mammal running under the feet of dinosaurs, not a playable game.

A corollary to this is similarly depressing. In the old days if you wanted a copy of, say, Howard Chapelle’s “Search for Speed Under Sail,” you’d call me up or send me a postcard, and I’d find the book and sell it to you for $35. Because I specialize in this sort of book, I was the guy you went to. Today (I just checked) there are 252 copies of that title online, at prices starting as low as $6. You don’t need a specialist bookseller to find your Chapelle book. All you need is a computer. My $35 copy doesn’t stand a chance. I’ve been cut out of that game as well.

This might sound like a whine, but it’s not.

These days I’m spending a lot of time and having a lot of fun looking for “paper.” Why? Because a letter or a journal, by its nature, is unique – written by a particular person in a particular place and time for a particular reason. There will be no competing copies on the internet. As books become more known, more relentlessly commodified by the internet, manuscript material, ephemera, oddball batches of stuff that people left behind, become more and more attractive to dealers like me.

If you happen to be interested in a particular person, or place or time, you’ll probably do a Google search. And if you do you might encounter an archive or letter or journal pertaining to that person, place, or time that Ten Pound Island Book Co. is offering for sale. And if you’ve gone that far, you’ll probably email me or call me. You might even send me a postcard, just like in the old days.

One thing for sure – the item that you’re inquiring about will be one of a kind. There will not be 252 other copies floating around in cyberspace. That’s good for me, as a vendor. And if I can supply you with the right piece of paper, it’s good for you, too.

The Invasion of England and the Demise of the Book Fair

England has always been a bit paranoid about a cross-channel invasion by the French. The events of 1066 probably didn’t help in this regard. It got bad during the War of Spanish Succession (1701-1714), when the Brits feared France might fall upon Scotland in a backdoor invasion, and again during the Seven Years War (1756-1763). We’ve got a book in our inventory published during this period by a nutter named Oliver MacAllester (item #52 in our Maritime List 189) which exposes the designs of the French Court, assisted by Jesuit spies in London, for an “intended invasion” by an army of 50,000 men, sent across the channel in flat bottomed boats. The bungled French attempt on Ireland in 1796 gave Britain a wicked case of the jitters, and when Napoleon sent armies toward the Channel in 1797, England began fortifying the southwest coast. Bush and Cheney would’ve had a field day.

This lovely hand colored engraving from 1798 represents one visionary’s conception of how the French hordes were going to come across. It is printed on heavy stock and measures 10 ½ x 15 ½ inches. I’ve priced it at $850.

I picked it up just recently at the Philadelphia Book and Ephemera Fair. This event was held May 22nd in a town called Oaks, just northwest of Philly.

Joe, Amanda and I had just finished getting Maritime List 190 – “Books from the POD” - up on our website. Once that was taken care of, I got the urge to hit the road again and, for a lark, drove down to Oaks to check out the book fair. I know that some people would consider 6½ hours in a car on routes 90, 84, 287 and the Jersey Turnpike on a 90 degree day akin to sitting in the dentist’s chair for the same period of time, but I happen to like these jaunts. I turn on the music and get into my head.

During this particular drive I thought about book fairs and the strange evolution they’ve seen over the past thirty years.

I did my first book fair in Cambridge, Mass. in the late 1970s, and it was a real eye-opener. I discovered that, as Willie Sutton said about money and banks, book fairs are where the books are – a vast profusion of them, more than I’d ever imagined possible in 1978. Not only books, but customers and colleagues as well – people I never would have met in my shop back in downtown Gloucester. Over the next two decades book fairs burgeoned and I became what an English colleague unflatteringly refers to as a “Book Fairy,” exhibiting in as many as two dozen fairs a year and piling tens of thousands of miles on my poor old van. I learned a lot, made new friends and met many new customers, some of whom are still with me. But then the internet came along. Book fairs got sick and nearly died.

One of the most useful aspects of book fairs is that they are brimming with books. Book lovers can search for desirable tomes, compare various editions, and check the condition and price of one copy against another. However, with the rise of the Internet these important functions could be done from the comfort of one’s own home – no travel, no parking, no admission fee.

With more people looking at books on computers, more books started getting sold by computer. First Interloc in the early 1990s, then ABE, then any number of competing services by which dealers could upload descriptions of their books to the internet, and people could browse entire bookshops digitally. Not only did these book databases usurp the primary functions of book fairs, they also had the advantage of being open 24/7/365. At the same time, real estate values were skyrocketing. Venues in many cities became too expensive for local book groups and organizers. Fees rose, dealers stopped signing up, attendance began to decline, and book fair promoters began to drop out. The fancy international antiquarian book fairs in cities like New York, Boston and LA held up well because the high end operates on a different dynamic (we’ll talk about that another week). But run of the mill, blue collar, provincial used book fairs across the country took a serious hit.

The event I attended on May 22nd was run by Flamingo Eventz. These promoters have been struggling valiantly to take up the slack in the market, and they may succeed just by virtue of their energy – this year alone they’re promoting over a dozen shows up and down the east coast.

But even if they do survive, the events they’re organizing will be quite different from the book fairs of old. At this show in Philadelphia, there were 58 exhibitors. Waiting in line at opening were (I counted) 42 attendees, and many of them were dealers.

For the reasons mentioned above, the provincial book fair has mutated from a trade show for the general public to a sort of farmer’s market, where “selling” dealers bring their wares to move along to “buying” dealers. Of the 58 exhibitors in Philadelphia, I’d say that at least a third of them were of the “buying” sort. They were doing the show primarily to purchase things from their fellow exhibitors before the general public – including dealers who were not exhibiting – gained admission.

Where once there were hours of questions from civilians and conversations with collectors who had made a special effort to attend the event, now there is a brief rush of people at the opening, and then nothing but boredom - yawns, half hearted conversations among exhibiting dealers, and jokes about being able to bowl in the aisles.

The venerable book fair has changed forever. Maybe those early, bustling days of excitement were only a brief moment in the history of bookselling, but I miss them.