My Dear Beatrice

Well, there I was again, setting up at the Albany Antiquarian Book Fair. In case there was any doubt we were in Albany, or that it was November 27th, snowflakes danced in the gray air when I went out to move my car.

No flakes on the management team, however. Promoters Garry Austin, Dennis Holzman, and The Albany Institute of History & Art flooded local media with advertising and promotion, and locals turned out in droves. Unfortunately, it was Albany, and it was November, and the droves weren’t buying high ticket items. Most of the sales I heard about were modest.

I drove home thinking about writing this entry, and about a letter I’d recently bought, and then about how many letters I’ve purchased and read in the course of my work as an antiquarian dealer, and how compelling those letters can be, how marvelously they reveal the personality and the world of the person writing them, and finally about how many purposes letters served – how in all ages, even this digital one, they are the fibers that hold civilizations together. (As you can probably tell, it was a long drive. The highway was thick with crabby, bloated people driving home from their Thanksgiving weekend.)

I’ve read letters from sun baked Pacific islands and frozen Arctic wastes; desperate letters from lonely, dying whalemen or frightened teenaged soldiers; letters scrawled in pencil on waste paper; fancy missives in a fine hand on creamy laid paper; letters dictated by illiterate laborers or typed on an Underwood by a gum-chewing secretary. Their variety is amazing, and the poignancy of the lives that generated them is sometimes overwhelming. Several years ago I had a sheaf of letters from a sailor in the 1880s to his betrothed back home. He wrote poems to her, drew pictures for her, and shared every detail of his life at sea, and of his constant longing for her. Near the bottom of the stack was a letter from her telling him her heart now belonged to another. Underneath that were documents pertaining to his suicidal trek across the unexplored wilds of Madagascar.

The language of a letter can tell us as much as the hand in which it was written. Does the author observe epistolary conventions of his time or simply blurt out what’s on his mind? Is the writing steady? A scrawl? Literate? Unlettered? And what about the many purposes letters served? They held families together, provided guidance to children, news to anxious parents. They communicated complicated schemes or emotions as basic as love or rage. They brought the best news, the worst news, and the most mundane. They connected businesses across vast oceans and continents, carried endless details of products, transactions and finance.

The China Trade letters I wrote about in the last blog come to mind here, but even more, this blog itself. What am I writing if not a letter to the few dozen hearty souls who follow my bookselling adventures? And what are emails but electronic letters? And how will they survive? What form of “letter” will my successors buy and sell a generation hence? An interesting question, I suppose. But the past is much more interesting to me.

Here’s a portion of that letter - written by the survivor of a shipwreck in 1919, telling his wife what happened:

My Dear Beatrice:
… Around 10:30 a.m. the chief eng. reported that all of the machinery was out of commission and then we lost control of the ship altogether and she was laying over on her side with half of her deck underwater and going over all the time… Than one man & myself ran to No. 2 boat which I had charge of and cut everything clear then I went to cut the working boat clear and while I was doing that a sea came and when I looked No 2 boat was drifting clear with one man in her. Well I said there goes one who may get ashore to tell how we went as I had no idea she would ever come near enough to the ship for any more to get in… I started from the bridge when I noticed the boat was working in towards the ship so I went to the Capt. and tried to get him to leave but he wouldn't and told me to go and get in if I could and save as many as I could. Than I left there & ran along the side of the ship until I got forward and waited a minute and than jumped overboard and swam to the boat and got in then we picked up all the rest thats jumped which were 9 besides my self then the wind blew us away from the ship and we could not get back again. At 11 am by my watch the ship rooled over and sank taking 27 with her and I'll never forget that night and we could not help them. I did not see anything of any of them again, then we started on what turned out to be 48 hours of torture… All we had to do now was to hang on the best we could & trust to luck, every once in a while some one of us would wash clear and we would haul each other back again only to be washed away again until finally we tore up what clothing we had and tied ourselves and then a new trouble started as the sharks started coming and playing around us but they kindly left us alone

The second pm we saw a steamer coming but she didn't see us so that didn't do us any good by this time we were suffering from the want of water as we had not had any for two days & our tongues were all swollen up and cracking. The second night one man went crazy just as we sighted a lighthouse and tackled me with a knife but I overpowered him & hung on to him until I got to weak and had to let him go & he drowned… I thought it was all over with us but when day light came I saw land and we finely drifted ashore at Cape Florida where we were found laying on the beach by a man and his wife. I can not tell any more as I don't know what happened after we crawled ashore untill I woke up in the hospital in Miami. In all we were 48 hrs hanging to a sunken boat and I can't express the suffering we went thru and can seem to harly believe I am ashore yet.

Well Dear can not think of any more to write now only that I will be glad when I am OK again and wish I could be with you to help me forget a little. I see everything in my sleep but suppose I will get over it. You will have to overlook my writing as my hand shakes so I can hardly write at all. Will close now with best regards to all
Fondest of Love
Ben
c/o Ward Line
foot Wall St. N.Y.

$350

History and Ecology

One of the highlights of the Boston International Antiquarian Book Fair is the keynote lecture. This year’s talk was delivered by Michael Suarez, Director of the University of Virginia’s Rare Book School. He’s a scholar with a long list of publications and academic accomplishments to his credit. More importantly, he’s a terrific speaker – a man of seemingly boundless energy and limitless inquiry. Even the title of his talk,“The Ecosystems of Book History…” inspired me. As I’ve made clear in this blog, I am interested in tracing the history of our trade. When I heard the Suarez lecture I began to think in broader terms. “History” suddenly seemed linear, one-dimensional. “Ecology” suggests a systems approach, a study of relationships. I’d just finished reading David Quammen’s wonderful book about island biogeography, “Song of the Dodo,” and I began wondering if we could apply the ways ecologists think about animal populations to the way we think about the book trade – certainly we’ve got the animals for it.

That was going to be the subject of this week’s blog. But something else happened.

Like the New York ABAA Book Fair, the Boston ABAA Book Fair has a “shadow show” held during the same weekend in a less expensive venue (this year at the Park Plaza “Castle.”)

It’s a good chance for newer or smaller dealers to meet – and sell to – their high-rent colleagues, and it’s a good chance for the big fish to buy interesting material and to deepen their networks in the trade. The show has been run for years by Bernice Bornstein and it’s almost always successful in serving the needs of both groups of dealers, as well as the general public. This year was no exception. Indeed, there were well-substantiated rumors of the discovery of a multi-hundred thousand dollar piece of Americana at Bernice’s shadow show.

No, I wasn’t the one who discovered it. But I did discover something that, dollars aside, was just as interesting to me.

In a stack of paper in the booth of one of the shadow dealers I discovered a spiral bound notebook labeled in black magic marker “Ben Tighe: His Memoirs.”

I’d heard of Benjamin Tighe. He was one of the greats of the generation of New England book dealers just before my own, and his Memoirs are a powerful evocation of those days. Nearly every page contains descriptions of his dealings with dealers, librarians and collectors who were legends to me – Mike Walsh, Bob Kolvoord, Jim Tyson, Joe Frost, Clarence Brigham, Arthur Wesley Dow, Marcus McCorrison, Charles Streeter, the Whitlock brothers, Charles Eberstadt, William Coe, Ernest Wessen, Lawrence Wroth, "the Misses Hamill and Barker," and Howard and Phyllis Mott, to name just a few.


Although he earned his fame as a collector and purveyor of early children’s books, he also had a profound genius for sniffing out Americana, and was buying and selling ephemera before most people even knew what ephemera was. The “finds” he writes about in these memoirs are staggering – Lincoln letters, Zenger and Franklin imprints, unrecorded Confederate printing and the like – any one of which would surpass the six-figure item allegedly discovered this year at the shadow show. And, though Tighe is proud of his discoveries, he never brags about how cheaply he came by them.

In fact, one of his main principles was to pay good money for good material. Often he’d overpay for an item in a first buy when he suspected there was better material behind it. He also had a very strict code about how to treat colleagues and customers, and many of his stories revolve around violations of his beliefs and the consequences that ensued.

He never issued catalogs, never had a shop, was never widely known outside bibliographic circles. He started dealing in 1915, and for decades he drove 45,000 miles a year when there was virtually no such thing as “highway miles.” He added materially to some of the great collections in America and he discovered books, pamphlets, and broadsides that would have been lost to history if not for his sharp eye.

Despite his many accomplishments he never made much money. This seemed not to have bothered him since, in his mind, he gained something more valuable by far.

“I may have acquired this stoicism from the days when I could play poker all night and wind up broke and still get some sort of satisfaction, vicarious or otherwise, in just thinking that at least I had the pleasure of playing. Of course this is not conducive to becoming wealthy but, as I look back at my past, I can’t and don’t complain. I made a host of friends...”

Back to ecology next week, with some healthy data from Benjamin Tighe. And stay tuned for news about the forthcoming Ten Pound Island Book Co. publication of "Ben Tighe’s Memoirs."

A Question of Security

For more about this item see below.

Security issues and union staffing are frequently trouble spots for book fair organizers, especially at ABAA or ILAB events where millions of dollars worth of property are exposed to the general public, and to the chaos of moving in and moving out. This entry is about a security experience I had at last weekend’s book fair in Boston.

It was with considerable trepidation that my colleagues and I walked down the long hallway in the vaguely Soviet vastness of the Hynes Convention Center to the room that had been reserved for the 34th annual Boston Antiquarian Book Fair. A band of cytologists, whatever they are, had usurped our traditional room, and we were consigned to a new space, about three miles from the main lobby. Everything about the room was just a little bit different – exactly the kind of disorientation we aging dealers find the most difficult – and there was a bit of confusion during setup. At one point I overheard Bill Reese and Don Heald taking stock of certain colleagues in whom “the cracks were beginning to show.”

We needn’t have worried, though. Because of the stock market, or the weather, or some butterfly three years ago in the Amazon, or just the sheer perversity of our business, a majority of us (by my informal survey) managed to have fairs that met or exceeded expectations. Attendance was up on the all-important opening night, and I saw people writing checks and slapping down plastic all weekend.

For Ten Pound Island Book Co., selling was good and buying was great. The best thing I bought turned up on Saturday – a trove of letters to an American China Trade merchant in Canton just on the eve of the first Opium War. The archive came housed in a late 20th century battered brown briefcase. The fellow from whom I’d purchased it wanted his briefcase back. I replied that for the money I’d just paid him, I was keeping the briefcase. I spent the rest of the weekend thinking about China.

Owing to our strange, new location, removing our goods at the end of the show was unknown territory for dealers and staff alike. But I didn’t see any fistfights or hear any shouting matches. My wife and I moved our six boxes across the street to our car in the parking garage and went to dinner. By the time we got back the hall was just about empty.

I woke next morning all set to start reading my China Trade letters, and realized I hadn’t seen the brown briefcase since Sunday afternoon. A frantic search of my car confirmed my worst suspicions. In the bustle and confusion of packing out, I’d left the damned thing under the table in my booth.

There was nothing for it but to hop in my car and drive through Monday morning rush hour back to the Hynes Convention Center, flogging myself every inch of the way. Down the three mile hallway to our exhibition space, now a litter of rolled up carpet, empty showcases, and union guys hollering instructions at each other in Boston accents. They hadn’t seen my briefcase. Suggested I contact Security.

I met a uniformed guard outside the hall and asked him if he was Security, and if he’d seen my briefcase. He affirmed that he was Security, but that he hadn’t seen a lost brown briefcase all weekend. He told me to go to Lost & Found at the other end of the three mile hallway. But the door to Lost & Found was locked.

As I walked away considering whether to jump from the Tobin Bridge or the Prudential Tower, I heard a voice behind me asking if I’d knocked. I told the man I had indeed knocked, and was in search of a brown briefcase that some idiot had left behind from the book fair. We both looked over to the Lost & Found bin. There, all by its lonesome, was my brown briefcase. Apparently it was the only item that had been lost all weekend. A union guy had found it while breaking the show down, and had given it to some security guy who had turned it in to Lost & Found. Everything was in the briefcase exactly as I’d left it, even the gorgeous quarter plate daguerreotype portrait of the rather porcine China Trader. Nobody had even opened the briefcase.

The Lost & Found guy told me to have a nice day. I told him I already had.


Here’s a brief description of the contents of that briefcase:

William Shepard Wetmore was born in Vermont in 1801. At the age of fourteen he went to sea, as many New England boys did. In 1833, after an active career as a supercargo and merchant, Wetmore was advised by his physician to go to China for his health. There, he established a trading company with Connecticut merchant Joseph Archer. Wetmore & Co. soon became one of the major players in the American China trade – despite the fact that, aside from the Quakers, Wetmore was one of the few who did not condone the trade in opium. He returned to America and in 1844 established a successful business in New York from which he retired in 1847, a very wealthy man.

Wetmore moved to Newport, RI, where he built Chateau-sur-Mer, the first of the grand Bellevue Avenue mansions, furnished with treasures he’d brought back from China. He led an active social life in Newport, being one of the founders of the Newport Historical Society and a Director of the Redwood Library. He died in 1862.

This archive consists of one hundred forty five letters written to Wetmore in Canton between 1833 and 1839. Correspondents include family members and business associates, including partners John Cryer and Joseph Archer, and associates George Peabody and Henry Chauncy. Locations include Macao, Canton, Lima, Valparaiso, London, and Manila, as well as major cities in the United States. As would be expected, the letters deal in great detail with Wetmore’s business affairs in the China Trade.

These were troubled times, particularly during the latter years of Wetmore’s stay in Canton. Postal deliveries were uncertain, and relied on privately contracted “fast boats.” For this reason, and because many family archives are already in institutional collections, Canton letters are scarce in the trade; the appearance of such a continuous run of them is rare indeed. Some are copies or duplicates, but most are the original letters, in their own addressed stampless covers, doubtless delivered by naval or merchant vessels and then by fast boat to Wetmore in Canton.

Approximately 400 pages of correspondence, with a quarter plate daguerreotype portrait and a cameo bust of Wetmore. Details on request.

Tools of the Trade II – Price Guides

(Sorry to be a little late this week. I've been packing up my treasures for the Boston International Antiquarian Book Fair at the Hynes Convention Center this coming weekend, Nov 12-14. If you're in town, stop by and say hello.)


It was February, 1977. I’d been in business for a few months - long enough to realize that I’d found my life’s work – and I was beginning to get curious about what my roomful of randomly gathered books was really worth. After drooling over the the ad in AB Magazine for Mildred Mandelville’s Used Book Price Guide, I finally decided to take the plunge. It cost a lot of money - $45, I think, which was about a week’s salary for me. But when the two volume set arrived it proved to be worth every penny.

It’s hard to describe the feeling of power that resulted from looking up the author and title of a book and finding it in my price guide. No more guess work. No more getting taken advantage of by savvy dealers! I stayed up most of the night and found a price in Mandeville for nearly every book in my little shoppe. (Only later would I realize this was not necessarily a good thing. If a book is listed in a $45 price guide, it's probably relatively common.) A few months after that I felt sufficiently motivated to purchase the Supplement volume to Mandeville. This was a five-pound behemoth that contained updated prices and even more titles.

I was on my way down the slippery slope. As my business grew I began purchasing the annual volumes of Bookman’s Price Index. They were insanely expensive, but I felt I couldn’t afford to be left behind in the race for Total Price Knowledge.

At some point, probably after comparing wildly varying listings for the same title in Mandeville and BPI, a light went on for me. Both of these reference works, I realized, were composed of listings gleaned from other dealers’ catalogs. They were, essentially, retail prices, and there was nothing to prevent dealer A from charging three times what dealer B might ask for the same title. This disparity didn’t matter to the compilers of the price guides. Their job was to gather information. My job, I now understood, went beyond simply looking up a price and penciling it in the book. I had to interpret the data that the price guides provided.

About this time I discovered American Book Prices Current. ABPC collected annual results of hundreds of book auctions in America. Theoretically, the difference between a public auction and a private dealer’s catalog is profound. A dealer can ask whatever he hopes his book might sell for. At auction the price of a book is determined by any number of people competing to purchase that book. The book values in ABPC seemed more reliable, more real, because they were determined by the market rather than by a single, possibly crazy, individual. Furthermore, the auction process was public and transparent - or so I thought at the time.

As the years rolled by I relied more and more on the auction records, and less and less on my wall full of BPIs (though I continued to purchase them for the dramatic lawyerly look they gave to my shop). Eventually I discovered that auctions were anything but transparent, and that the values generated in that market could be rigged, and might be as wacky as those dreamed up by a greedy dealer.

When I took up my maritime specialty, I began assembling my own proprietary database of maritime book prices asked by other dealers. I started with index cards in shoe boxes, but have continued that practice to this day. Now my database of maritime book prices consists of nearly 40,000 entries, each indexed to the dealer’s catalog from which it came. Yes, they’re retail prices, but if you assemble enough of them, a median will emerge. This effort was aided immeasurably by the advent of the computer. My shoe boxes got transcribed into Filemaker – tens of thousands of records available in an instant.

Still, the process retained its shoe box structure until the Internet came along. Then the world exploded. I’ll never forget the first time I hooked up to Interloc on my creaky telephone connection. I had access to hundreds, even thousands of books for sale, right on my home computer! Talk about a feeling of power…

Of course, all this came to its inevitable conclusion.

Two decades later I’d be scouting some hole-in-the-wall shop in back country Pennsylvania, whose proprietor wouldn’t dream of spending good money on BPI or ABPC - in the unlikely event he’d even heard of these references. There among the drek would be a title I’d been seeking for years. With trembling fingers I’d lift the front board to see what give-away price this rube had penciled on the upper right corner of the endpaper, only to find the three highest listings from ABE, Biblio or Amazon printed out and tucked neatly into the book.

Years of frustration ensued.

Greg: How much do you want for this book?
Dealer: “X.”
Greg: (Mind you, I customarily sell this book for 1/3 X) - "X?" What makes you think it’s worth "X?"
Dealer: It says so right here on ABE. See? It says the price is "X."
Greg: Grrr.

But gradually, over the course of thousands of iterations of the above scenario, I crafted the following speech:

Greg: Sir (or Ma’am, or Miss). You have been able to find a price for this book listed on the Internet because the book has not sold at that price. If someone had bought the book for its listed price, it would no longer be on the Internet. It would be sold. Therefore, even in the best possible circumstance, the price that you have found for this book represents the lowest price at which this book will NOT sell.

Dealer: ???

Here is a book that’s currently listed on the Internet by two different dealers – one is an ex-library copy for $495 and the other is a rebound copy for $975. Of course there are dozens of Print On Demand copies available for $20 or $30, but that’s another blog entry.

Nevens, William. FORTY YEARS AT SEA: OR A NARRATIVE OF THE ADVENTURES OF WILLIAM NEVENS BEING AN AUTHENTIC ACCOUNT OF THE VICISSITUDES, HARDSHIPS, NARROW ESCAPES, SHIPWRECKS AND SUFFERINGS IN A FORTY YEARS’ EXPERIENCE AT SEA. Portland. 1848. b/w wood engraved frontispiece and plates. 12mo. 314 pp. A wide-ranging narrative of mercantile, naval, and whaling voyages. Nevens began his career as a merchant sailor, was impressed into the British navy during the Napoleonic wars, and captured by the French. After his release and subsequent adventures at sea he went whaling on a number of Pacific voyages between 1825 and 1839. This small book contains much of interest regarding whaling in the Pacific. Scarce, especially in this condition. Not in Hill or Smith. Forster 73. Jenkins p. 130. A fine copy in gold decorated cloth binding. $750