The Donohue Effect

I heart New York.
When I first got in the book business “the City,” as we called it, (could there be another city?) was still a mecca of book stores – little holes in the wall all over town out of which great things came. There was a lady named Gertrude down in the Village (could there be another village?) who knew all the intellectuals and got their books and papers when they died. Or maybe she just went through their trash.

I started doing the New York Book Fair in the late 1980s. It was held in the Park Avenue Armory, as it is now, but back then it had more of a neighborhood flavor. The roof leaked and there were still $25 books on exhibit. I know, because I brought them. Hundreds of them. Sold a lot, too.

I stayed with this fair through thick and thin – race riots, union troubles, a misbegotten move to the Americana Hotel, then back to the Armory under the management of Sandy Smith. And that – no matter what you might think of Sandy – was when the fair blossomed into the world class event it is now. The New York International Antiquarian Book Fair is where the books are, folks. The very best of them.
This year I landed in the City early Thursday morning, and used my extensive knowledge of the place to secure a very reasonable hotel on the West Side.
Scouted shops all day and made enough to pay my hotel bill, then went up to Donohue’s, an old fashioned bar and chop house on Lexington Ave. for my ritual pre-fair drink.

Made it to the Armory just as the doors were opening.
These Thursday evening “Previews” used to be moribund affairs. In the panic following 9/11 New York’s armories came to be seen as something other than venues for track meets and flower shows. Stricter rules for using these buildings were put in place. Armory events now had to be held in coordination with, or under the sponsorship of, a bona fide charity.

So, in order to keep his book fair going, promoter Sandy Smith wangled a couple of prestigious libraries into participating in special “Preview Nights,” with ticket proceeds being donated to the sponsoring library. The Swells on each library’s list were invited to walk the floor, drink champagne, eat strawberries, and marvel at the bibliographic baubles on display. The public was allowed in only grudgingly and tickets were very expensive. As a result people stayed away in droves and we dealers sat fuming all night, feeling like zoo animals, while gaggles of socialites who couldn’t have cared less strolled the aisles, chatting one another up.

Somehow Sandy got that changed this year. Ticket prices dropped to $50 and, from the opening bell on Thursday evening, there were real live book buyers prowling the floor.
On the other hand there was a good deal of grumbling that Sandy had scrimped on advertising for the Preview and had definitely gone on the cheap with the hors d’oeuvres… celery and carrots with no dip! He also failed to provide complimentary tickets to the dealers. So anyone wanting to invite a favorite customer had to fork over fifty clams, a significant portion of which, I’m told, went right into Sandy’s pocket.

Still, he gets the people out. The cream of the trade and the big buyers. I talked with two dozen colleagues Thursday and Friday. Comments ran from “pretty good” through “great” and, if no one was having their best fair, no one was having their worst. Pre-fair sales among dealers (a significant percentage of income for many of us) was also good but not great. The Baumans, Bill Reese and Jeff Marks did their parts. The smaller dealers did not seem to be buying as aggressively. So what’s new? The market is increasingly stronger for big books, as little books (and booksellers) struggle to hold their own.

For me, however, the true indicator of the fiscal health of the trade was at Donohue’s.
I’ve been drinking (and eating lunch and dinner) there for two decades, and Jerry the bartender, and Maureen the owner, feel more like colleagues than barkeeps. In the old days the place used to be packed with book dealers – before, during and after fair hours. Since 2008 the place had been relatively empty, inhabited only by my buddies and me, and a few locals. But this year Donohue’s was mobbed as in days of old. It was like the swallows coming back to Capistrano. A good sign for the industry.

Then, Friday night, there was the so-called “Shadow Show.”
This is a smaller and less expensive New York event held on the same weekend as the big New York fair, and intended to provide an inexpensive alternative. It’s been through many venues and managers. For the past few years the valiant Flamingoz of Flamingo Eventz have been giving it a go. Unfortunately scheduling conflicts meant that it opened this year during the hours that the big fair was still running (it has traditionally opened in the morning before the uptown fair began) and the result was a thinner than usual crowd on Friday evening.

I hope more dealers came down from the big show during the rest of the weekend, because there were a few unhappy campers on the floor when I left the place Friday night.

I got out of town Saturday morning.

As was the case at the San Francisco book fair, it was nice but strange attending as a customer rather than an exhibitor. In New York this weekend the buying was tough. I spent about $6000 at the big and little shows. If I sell what I bought I’ll pay my expenses and my time, and not much more. I’ll be back exhibiting next year. I need to be where the books are, I guess.

But not right now. I’m off for Ireland until the middle of May, to write books rather than buy them (I tell people I’m making the used books of the future) so you’re on your own until then.

Sláinte!

What’s he DOING in There?

Starbuck's History of the American Whale Fishery

Last week’s blog entry was devoted to the subject of whaling logs, and it felt so good not to be writing about the relentless demise of the antiquarian book trade (see "Amazon/ABE acquires ZVAB" if you want more of that sort of thing), that I thought I’d spend another week on whaling logs and the process of reading, understanding, and selling them.

Over the past thirty-five years I’ve peddled used and rare books and manuscripts at a number of venues - the five different shops I’ve owned since 1976;
at book fairs; through catalogs; via telephone, fax and, more recently, email and the worldwide web.

The setting may change - from the stone age barter transaction at a typical book store, in which a customer thrusts a book in your face and asks how much you’d really sell it for, or tries to wangle a steep discount by paying in cash – to the modern iteration of that transaction, in which the customer tries to wangle a discount electronically, sometimes by offering PayPal dollars. But the heart of the deal is eternally the same. A customer wants something you’re offering, and hopes to get it on the most favorable terms possible, whether he’s talking wampum, clams, US dollars or digital funny money.

It sounds straightforward, but books are not widgets. Good booksellers don’t simply throw books before a hungry public like farmers feeding hogs. To succeed at our trade, to grow our businesses, to make our livings in this difficult line of work, we have to know our wares, and we have to be able to succinctly and clearly let the customer know what’s important to know about them.

Every time we catalog a book or manuscript we are creating a vital link between that text and its end user. Primarily, we are describing it as a physical object, so that others will have a clear idea of what it is. But such a description is also an opportunity to locate a book in the context of its time – to explain why it is, how it came to be, what it has to tell us, and why it is important. This is true whether the process occurs in a catalog, or whether it is delivered orally across a desk in a bookstore or a showcase at a book fair.

I’ve seen many catalogs of books, described to a T, bulging with bibliographical references, and completely devoid of any narrative content – as if the cataloger were confident that the books were good enough to sell themselves. Well, here’s a news flash. Books do not sell themselves. Booksellers sell them.

That’s what I’ve been doing since 1976.

Naturally, as in any other line of work, booksellers have tools. Along with magnifying glass and whiskey bottle, the most important of these tools are reference books. Each reference book has its place and particular purpose in the process of learning about a book or manuscript. (For the moment I’m ignoring the computer, which obviously has a huge but not all-important role as a reference tool.)

Let’s take the case of last week’s whaling log, documenting the five-year Pacific voyage of the Triton, which I listed in Maritime List 200 (sorry, it’s been sold).

I first went to Judith Lund’s Whaling Masters and Whaling Voyages Sailing from American Ports. This is a compilation of whaling records assembled by the tireless Judy Lund and published by Ten Pound Island in cooperation with the New Bedford Whaling Museum, and it’s quite handy because it allows me to look up any voyage by ship or master. One bit of information was sufficient to get me started.
Using that information, I turned to Starbuck’s History of the American Whale Fishery which is pictured at the top of this page. It’s a more detailed but cumbersome compilation of data about whale ships. From it I learned That the Triton was a 300 ton bark owned by the Howlands, that Roland Packard was her master, and that she fished in the Pacific Ocean from October 10, 1860 to April 23, 1865. Starbuck used to be a rare book. When I first started it was worth $600 or $700 dollars – big money back then! After the copyright expired it was reprinted several times. Now the original edition is a tough sell. (This is the story of reference books in general. My reference library used to be worth a lot of money. Now there would be few customers for any of the books it contains because everything has been reprinted or is on line. Good thing I don’t want/need to sell it.)

To get a better sense of this particular log book, I then went to Sherman’s Whaling Logbooks & Journalswhich lists all such manuscripts held in institutional libraries as of the early 1980s. From this I gleaned the valuable information that there was only one other journal of this voyage in captivity, and that it was only a partial account. Good news for me!

There are literally dozens of other references I might turn to for specifics about whaling history and technology. In my opinion, Clifford Ashley’s Yankee Whaler is still the best of them all.
Once I got the Triton and her 1860 voyage “surrounded” intellectually, I began to read the actual log. I spoke about this process in last week’s entry and won’t go into it here except to add that there’s one other reference book I depend on heavily at this stage – a good old fashioned atlas, with a view of the globe that lets me plot a whale ship’s course, day by day.
As for pricing the Triton log, I had two essential kinds of information. First and most importantly, I knew what I paid for it. Second, after thirty-five years of compiling sales records, I had a pretty good idea what similar items sold for in the past and what they are selling for now.

A straightforward calculation ensued, which promptly got demolished by a freight train of emotional, aesthetic and financial considerations. (This is where the whiskey bottle figures in.) When things calmed down a price emerged, like you-know-who rising from the sea.
There’s a time-honored and respectable school of thought that holds the “what I paid for it” part irrelevant. I disagree – especially in today’s economy. But that’s the subject of another blog entry.

And speaking of other blog entries, next week will be a report on the 51st New York International Antiquarian Book Fair. Stay tuned...