Paleozoic Book Fairs

PS 3, Hudson Street, New York City


Since the decline of neighborhood used book shops, antiquarian book fairs have become a vital resource for book lovers who need more than Amazon can offer. Yes, the book is an outmoded analog information delivery system, but it also exists in the physical realm and hence is a potential Object of Desire. Book fairs are where collectors, curators, and librarians - who may need to heft, thumb, fan, browse, and even smell a book - get realtime facetime with the objects themselves (not to mention that odd subculture of pushers who purvey them).

There are two kinds of book fairs.

The first kind is run by promoters, sometimes at the behest of a local bookseller’s organization, but often simply as a profit making endeavor for the promoter. These kinds of fairs tend to come and go. Reasonably priced venues become unobtainable, exciting new locations turn out to be not so exciting after all, promoters burn out or go broke - or both.

The second kind of book fair is run by volunteers to raise money for a school or a church or some similar institution. These fairs generally have longer life spans because the venue and the labor are free and always available – supplied by the organization hosting the fair. They are usually well run because the collective wisdom of the volunteers is passed down from one generation to the next. They learn by trial and error what works and what does not, and after about twenty years, they have things down pat.

The Greenwich Village Book Fair, held (this year Feb. 25-27) at Public School 3 on Hudson Street in Manhattan’s West Village, is such a fair. It was started by parents as a fund raiser in the Paleozoic Era and, like the horseshoe crab, has survived very well ever since. I started exhibiting there some time in the 1980s. (It was at least long enough ago that two guys in leather wetsuits and studded dog collars making out on Christopher Street could get one’s attention.) I lucked into a good booth, right at the top of the stairs in the gymnasium, which I split with a woman named Iris who made marbled paper. She had the greenest eyes.(My old booth, now ably run by Penny Daly of WellRead Books)


My sons were little sprouts, junior high and grade school, and I have an image of them bravely huffing squeaky cartfuls of my $25 books up the steep wooden ramp from Grove Street. What they did the rest of the day is lost in the mists of time. I had an artist buddy who lived in an abandoned dentist’s office over in Jersey City. Friday and Saturday nights at the close of the fair I’d load the boys into the van and join the rush hour carnage at mouth of the Holland Tunnel to get to my buddy’s house. A reasonably cheap hotel might have cost $50-75 back then. Way too expensive. Sunday when the fair was over we’d deadhead it home.

Now the kids are grown up and my wife and I stay in nice hotels. I’m not exhibiting my books at the Greenwich Village Book Fair anymore, but when my schedule allows I still scout it, hoping to score an overlooked gem, and I continue to shop the book shops in Manhattan. For all our wailing and gnashing of teeth about bookstores closing, Manhattan teems with them, rents be damned. New ones seem to crop up like weeds pushing though parking lot asphalt, and the old ones – well a few survive. I can still find a book or two at the Strand and Jim Cummins almost always has something I’ve never seen before, and hence must buy.

The Greenwich Village Book Fair has changed very little over the years. Remember, the venue – PS 3 – is free. So all they need to do is keep the booth rents low enough to fill the space with dealers and their profit will be assured. The gate ($15 on opening night) is gravy. And the kids get new art supplies or lacrosse sticks for another year.

But even back in the Paleozoic Era, when I was proudly shelving my $25 tomes, the majority of books on display at Greenwich Village were only of average quality – good old fashioned Used Books. And so it is today, essentially a neighborhood book fair. That’s not to say you won’t find mindbogglingly high end treats at Lame Duck’s booth, or offbeat and affordable stuff at the booths of old hands like Will Monie or Dave Bergman (probably the last antiquarian book dealer on earth who does not list his books on the Internet, which only makes them seem more desirable). And if art, photography, and avant-garde lit are what you seek, PS 3 is the place for you. However, the antiquarian stock is pretty thin. Always has been, probably always will be.

So adjustments are made. Walking the floor at Greenwich Village I have eyes for the strange, the funky – the kind of thing that might have just come out of someone’s attic at a neighborhood book fair.

And this year I had a little luck, most notably this immaculate Victorian die cut of deep sea divers - $150

Or this illustrated article on whaling from an 1869 childrens magazine.$50

But mostly I just walked around and – like everyone else there – had a good time browsing through the wonderful assortment of used books on display. I even found one to take home and read.

Dealers I talked to reported sales a bit slow on Friday night, but up to expectations overall. This being the kind of book fair it is, a lot of business gets done on Sunday, when prices are slashed and boxes of good old used books lugged home, uptown or down, to be read and enjoyed as in days of old. If nothing else, the venerable Greenwich Village book fair provides this service to the book lovers of Manhattan.

Next week: A report on the Washington Antiquarian Book Fair.

And Now for Our Commercial Message

Cook's Method Taken for Preserving the Health of the Crew of His Majesty's Ship the Resolution During her late Voyage round the World. (with) Extract of a letter from Captain Cook to Sir John Pringle (and) Of the Tides in the South Seas. Published in PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS, OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF LONDON. Vol LXVI. For the Year 1776. Small 4to., pp.402-406, and 447-447. See Beddie, Bibliography of Captain James Cook 1289. Bound in half calf over marbled boards with spine label. Fine condition. $3500

I dunno, maybe it’s Seasonal Affective Disorder.

As the lightless, sad world groaned and cracked its way through another bitterly cold afternoon, I found myself cast back to a warmer winter two decades ago, just about this time of year, when we launched the first Gulf War. That got me thinking about the Second Iraq War, then about the greedy nitwits who got us into it, then about George Bush, then, for obvious reasons, about chimps. That cheered me up.

I remembered my favorite among the recent Superbowl ads, the one in particular that made me laugh out loud.

I’m speaking, of course, of the Careerbuilder.com ad in which a guy pulls his car into a parking lot and is promptly victimized by an old clunker of a vehicle which, in its lame attempt to park, pins his driver’s side door shut. The driver and passengers of the clunker jump out. They’re chimps. In sport coats. Carrying briefcases. Then another clunker slams into the other side of the poor guy’s car, trapping him in his vehicle. Out jumps a chimp. In a sport coat. Carrying a briefcase.

I ask you, friends, is there anything funnier in an ad than chimps in sport coats carrying briefcases?

Is there any television commercial in America that would not be infinitely improved by substituting chimps for the humans in the ad? Think about Viagra with chimps. Those moronic beer and car ads. The freaky talking babies. Chimps! Make them all chimps! In sport coats. Carrying briefcases.

At the LA book fair a few years ago I overheard two assistants to big English dealers talking about one of their colleagues – Did he operate his own firm? No, “He’s just a counter monkey like us.” I liked that phrase, and now, thanks to Careerbuilder.com, I can imagine vastly improved ABAA book fairs, populated entirely by chimps. In sport coats. Carrying briefcases.

On a seemingly unrelated note, my multi-talented friend Anthony Weller has forwarded me a link about the demise of South Street Seaport.

We’ve known for years that it was in trouble. At first it became difficult to collect payments for meager purchases. Then their librarian was let go, then the library shut down entirely. Now the entire place may be on the block. Mystic Seaport is in tough financial straits as well. The Mariner’s Museum and the Peabody-Essex Museum have cut back severely on their acquisitions budgets. “American Neptune” has long since ceased publication, and “Sea History,” the journal of the National Maritime Historical Society, is on life support.

It’s part of a trend that I am at a loss to understand.

Decades ago, old ships and maritime history used to be cool. Remember the great Tall Ships parades of Operation Sail? Remember when our presidents were also yachtsmen? When celebrities like Walter Cronkite threw their weight behind organizations dedicated to the preservation of America’s maritime history? When Mystic Seaport used to be a money machine, with crowds overflowing giant parking lots all summer?

Those days are long gone. I’ve already talked (see the “Bookman’s Log” entry for July 23, 2010) about the decline of interest in lighthouses, and I could write a similar entries about the decline of popular interest in ocean liners, and in maritime history in general.

America’s attention has shifted from the past to the present. From the records and accomplishments of collective society to the endlessly fascinating minutia of the Self. From maritime history to Facebook reports – with photographs and videos – of this afternoon’s lunch.

Bad news for me as a maritime book dealer. Bad news too for the crumbling museums, and the lovingly restored ships and historical sites. Worse news, perhaps, for America as a whole. We’ll get sucked into our iPads and totally distracted by instanter miracles of social media. Our history will be forgotten. More greedy nitwits will fill the vacuum. Oh, we’ll long for chimps then!


And now for my commercial message. If you picture it being delivered by a chimp, it will be infinitely improved.






Back in the days those failing museums memorialize, sailors had different problems. Their teeth fell out. Wounds bled and bled. Limbs became painfully swollen. They had no energy, and yeah, they were depressed. Eventually they’d die. But the cause was scurvy, not Seasonal Affective Disorder, and it was a terrible affliction. In 1740, for example, on Ansons’s famous voyage, 1400 of his 1900 men died – most of them from scurvy.

In 1752 Sir John Pringle published Observations of Diseases in the Army which established him as the father of military medicine. Influenced by Pringle, James Lind sought to transfer this line of investigation to the Royal Navy. He published his famous Treatise on Scurvy in 1753, but it was ignored. Even he did not understand the true causes of the scurvy. Though he recognized the usefulness of citrus fruit in preventing and curing the disease, he thought it was caused by putrefaction of the body, which might be helped by acids. So citric acid was an accidental remedy, one of the many preventatives of putrefaction.

When Cook returned from his second voyage in July 1775, he had – astonishingly - not lost a single man to scurvy in the course of his four year sail. By this time Sir John Pringle had ascended to the presidency of the Royal Society. At Pringle’s request Cook sent several short essays to the Royal Society regarding that voyage.

Here, in a communication addressed to Pringle eight months after his return, Cook talks about the methods he used to prevent the dreaded disease. It is frustrating, poignant and fascinating to see him dancing around the answer that is so obvious to us now. He grasps that sauerkraut and lemon syrup (“rob”) are both effective, and that cleanliness is important, but he also endorses relatively ineffective methods, such as the use of sugar as an antiscorbutic.

Cook was elected to the Royal Society on March 7, 1776, the day this letter was read. Not until after 1800 was lemon juice issued as a matter of course in the Royal Navy.

Nocturnal Pigeons

Journal of a 49er, Boston to San Francisco. Details below.

The Long March down Market Street from dinner to hotel, under the incurious eyes of urban mutant nocturnal pigeons, homeless freaks, orchestras of ranting crazies, exploding beards, tenor saxophone geniuses born on the wrong planet. Jesus is coming. Sleeping bags in fetid windrows on the lee side of the street. Happily terrified tourists edge into the stream. In 1989 it was shocking. I saw a man in a wheelchair jingling his beggar’s cup into an alley where, by some miracle, he rose and surrendered the chair to his female accomplice who took the cup and rolled back out for her shift. Now it’s part of what I look for when I’m here. Not to be cynical about human misery, of which there is plenty on these streets, or to characterize diverse and lovely San Francisco as only that, but Market Street’s stinky human shower is as much a part of the scenery as the harbor in Gloucester or the mountains in Colorado Springs, or the Golden Gate Bridge. And in the same way whores have become the “sex industry” Market Street people are part of a show - and don’t think they don’t know it. They’re working it as hard as I’m working my schtick.

Which, late next morning, involves a stop at the Best Western Motel on Seventh Ave. - on my way to the 44th San Francisco International Antiquarian Book Fair. The legendary Peter Luke is having a book fair of his own. And the pickings are good.







Then lunch at Susie’s – a mandatory stop – then on to the San Francisco Concourse for the opening bell at 3 PM.
It’s all part of an experiment for me. After 25 years of exhibiting at the Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York book fairs I’m going cold turkey – not driving up and down coastal California for two weeks, not dropping insane amounts of dough (yeah, I can write it off!) to eat and live in Manhattan; not doing the ABAA and shadow fairs. No books to gnaw and worry, no fools to suffer, no invoices to nervously tabulate. No vanloads of unsold stock, no hassles with UPS or Caldex. Just me and my checkbook. In and out.

Gratifying, standing in line, to see the security people resolutely examining every handbag, man bag, newspaper, courier pouch, briefcase, tote bag and non-essential clothing item that might, over the next few hours, conceal a purloined book or manuscript, confiscating them all, stoically enduring the howls of the few over-entitled, clueless visitors. “What are you, the Gestapo?” – “No, sir, but you’ll have to leave that duffel bag in the coat check.” I never realized how hard those security men and women work on our behalf.

And it feels odd at first, not being a part of the show. But almost immediately I experience a wonderful lightness of being. I can leave whenever I want. Floating up and down the aisles in that vast hall, buying what I have eyes to see and explaining to my colleagues that they’ll have to mail me the goods. Ten hours over two days to cover two hundred twenty eight exhibitors. How many seconds per booth is that? Clearly a lot of selection is needed, and in the process, I’m sure, a lot gets missed.

In the spirit of full disclosure I will admit that I also missed – because I was not on the floor during set up - a terrific 49er sailing ship broadside. The guy who’d brought it sold it to another dealer the day before the show opened. He told me after I’d learned of its sale that he’d been “saving it for San Francisco.” Shit.

But back to that lightness of being.

Dealers I talked to reported steady crowds, slightly lower dealer sales, but decent retail and institutional buying. No one was having their best San Francisco book fair, but none of my informants were having their worst. A couple of dealers yelping on the ABAA chatline about how much worse this fair was than the Pasadena Book Fair had been the week before, but I ascribed that to the strange NoCal/SoCal battle that’s been sputtering along for years. Listening to those boys, you’d think you were in Bosnia. No complaints about move in; no complaints about the weather (sunny, 60s), and certainly no complaints about security.

The most interesting comments I heard indicated that people had again begun buying lower-end material. Since 2008 we’ve been surviving, for the most part, by selling expensive stuff to people with plenty of money. But now the “little people” seem to be coming back. It’s counter-intuitive to peg the health of the trade on the nickel-and-dime “my wife/husband will kill me” customers, but the fact is they’re the people who pay our rent. If they’re back in the game things are getting better.

So I made my buys, had my dinners (with extra daughters Sarah and Stacey somewhere in the Mission, late at night for an old man, and with famous SF writer Rudy Rucker and his lovely wife, not in the Mission.

I missed that Gold Rush broadside, bought mostly chowder, but lucked into one purchase that made the whole trip worthwhile. When I got on the plane Sunday noon I thought about nothing else all the way home - which, by my standards, qualifies it as a good buy. (See the January 23 entry.)
Gold Rush Journal of Charles Plummer, who sailed from Boston February 1849, landed in San Francisco July 1849, and went broke and quit his journal December 1849.

Brave New World

Lane, F(itz ) H(enry). VIEW OF GLOUCESTER, MASS. Colored lithograph, 35 1/2 x 21 1/2 inches. There is nothing more to be said about the composition and artistry of this work than John Wilmerding said in his 1971 work on Lane. “Without question Lane’s finest lithographs were the two he executed in 1855, of Gloucester, and of Castine, Maine, the culmination of long and full familiarity with the graphic medium. His early training and subsequent practice came to maturity in these two prints, done when he was producing his most beautiful oils as well.” - Wilmerding, Fitz Hugh Lane. p. 29. The colors are strong and bright in this copy. Small paper repairs in four spots. In original frame. $3500

I’ve subscribed to BruceMcKinney’s Americana Exchange for several years now. I never sold any books on the site, but I’ve enjoyed reading the monthly newsletter – particularly news about the auction side of the rare book business, to which McKinney is very partial. This month, he’s rolled out, in its most complete form to date, his vision of the Brave New World of rare books.

He has been an ardent advocate of “transparency” in book sales, and of course the auction is the model that appears to offer the greatest transparency. Ideally, he’d like a completely open marketplace, where everything is known about every copy of every book that comes up for sale, and each book sold is sold by an open bidding process, whereby the market, not the dealer, determines the selling price.

Sounds good if you’re a buyer, or even a private individual looking for the best way to sell his books. Certainly, the wealth of information routinely provided by the Internet may make this kind of marketplace inevitable. But for people like me, it promises to be the end of a way of life.

Here’s what McKinney has to say about the situation: “Our approach will achieve better outcomes for the seriously rare and outright important material. The disadvantage for dealers is that anyone can offer their material in this way. They get to sell but they don’t get to control or constrain the market. It will be fair and the outcomes natural, not contrived. Given that dealers have been trying to control prices since Gutenberg first announced that the ink was dry, there will be resistance...”

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not hating on AE, just telling it like it is. If you follow Bruce’s argument to its logical end, there is no room for the trade. It will have been replaced by “book matching.” By the open market. Dealers, if they survive, will be salaried consultants, or boutique artisans, advising clients as to which books they should be competing for in the open market.

In this brave new world, the only books not subject to the hegemony of the open market will be those of sufficient rarity to be unique. In such cases, the dealer will have proprietary knowledge of the book, and the advantage of its discovery. How many unique books are there? Damned few.

However, there is another class of goods that is by its nature unique, and these goods are being affected quite differently by the forces McKinney conjures up.

I’m speaking, of course, of manuscript items. A letter or a journal, or a logbook or a diary is, by its nature, 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. There will be no direct comparables, no prior sales records to “track.”

So, to summarize, the “race to the bottom” created by online book databases, and the “open market” envisioned by Bruce McKinney and others are destroying the traditional trade in used and antiquarian books. As a result, more dealers than ever are turning to unique ephemeral or visual items, or manuscript material.

This “Internet Effect” has been accompanied by, and possibly related to, the precipitous rise of auction houses - most notably Christies and Sotheby's, but also eBay and, eventually, model marketplaces like those proposed by Bruce McKinney. Where, a generation earlier, collections and estates might have been consigned to book or antique dealers for sale by private treaty, they are now being routinely sent to public auction. This has already produced some interesting consequences.

First, because of the World Wide Web there is, at least in theory, no auction whose contents can not be universally known. Now that auction houses have followed eBay’s lead and commenced online bidding, the computer has become the marketplace. This kind of global access has produced tremendous pressure on the material. Papers are coming out of attics like never before, and more dealers than ever before are competing to obtain them.

However there is a parallel negative effect. The more an archive becomes subjected to public scrutiny, the more market forces operate upon it. Inevitably, these forces produce a disintegration rather than an aggregation of the material.

Let me give you an example of how this operates in the real world.

Nino Scotti was a brilliant antique dealer and appraiser in Rhode Island. He probably knew as much as any man living about the minutia of New England’s history, and his skills as an antiquarian and professional appraiser made him an invaluable resource to the probate departments of every bank and law firm in the state. In the course of his active and interesting life in antiques he managed to assemble a remarkable personal collection, especially strong in China Trade goods, American silver and furniture, and maritime paintings. When he died in 2008 a New England auction gallery sold the best of Scotti’s holdings at several auctions, totaling millions of dollars.

After a couple of years the auction company had gotten to the bottom of the barrel, so they put the remainder of Scotti’s estate in with a mishmash of stuff that, in their opinion, didn’t merit individual cataloguing.

Only later did I learn that among Scotti’s papers were family archives of William S. Wetmore, one of the great American China traders. These papers were broken into more manageable lots by the auctioneers. The person who bought the lot containing the bulk of the Wetmore papers broke them into still smaller groups and sold them that way, after first removing all the letters with Chinese postal markings and sending them to a specialized philatelic auction in Hong Kong. This action, in conjunction with the ignorance of the auction gallery, destroyed an irreplaceable archive. I’ve spent months and tens of thousands of dollars trying to put the Wetmore papers back together, but some of them are gone forever.

In short, auction houses are not our friends. They compete with us for material, and they destroy archives. And it’s all Bruce McKinney’s fault.

See you next week with a report from the San Francisco International Antiquarian Book Fair.