Saving Private Ryan’s Daughter

This is the first weekend in a month that I haven’t had a book fair to attend, and I’ve been enjoying it.


Put the finishing touches on a killer rare book catalog that will appear in hard copy in mid-November, and started on my next project, a catalog of maritime manuscripts, documents and ephemera to be called “Wet Paper.”

But mostly I just mooched around in my bedroom slippers – reading, napping, catching up on junk TV shows like “Gold Rush,” and “Ice Road Truckers,” trying to stay awake for the most thrilling World Series in a decade (what does that tell you about baseball?), and eating and drinking too much, as always. Friday night Anne Marie and I had our Irish pal Mick and his daughter Nancy over for dinner. Anne Marie’s sister Mary Tess was there, and our daughter Celia stopped by too. It was a lively bunch, and we had a wonderful time.

As the evening wore on our conversation about good movies morphed into a running gag that we soon realized had potential as a contest or game. The idea is to combine the titles of two movies into a new, third movie, whose title is at once a syntactically correct and absurd combination of the original two. The farther apart the themes of the two movies are, the better. It’s my favorite kind of game. There are no losers, and when someone comes up with a good movie combo, everyone wins.

I started off with “Saving Private Ryan’s Daughter,” which gave the game its name. That hit was soon followed by the likes of Nancy’s “American Beauty and the Beast.” Celia, a Lara Croft kind of girl herself, came up with “Tomb Raiders of the Lost Ark;” Mary Tess with “Hannah and her Sisters Act,” and Anne Marie with the more down to earth “Sound of Music Man.”

Of course no sports fan would want to miss “Raging Bull Durham.” And, considering the season, “Hard Day’s Night of the Living Dead” is a must.

I guess you get the idea. I’m sure you could do the same with titles of the Great Books, but I’ll leave that for better minds.

Here’s an interesting item from “Wet Paper,” a whaleman’s shopping list. It’s hard enough to remember what you need at the grocery store when you’re shopping for dinner. Imagine shopping for supplies to last you four years!


Ephemera. OUTFIT BOOK FOR THE WHALESHIP DANIEL WEBSTER, 1858. 12mo. 37 pp. printed entries accomplished in manuscript and nine terminal pages of manuscript entries. The Daniel Webster was a 336 ton whaleship out of New Bedford, commanded by Dexter Bellows. According to Starbuck she departed June 11, 1858 for Cumberland Inlet in the North Atlantic, and returned November 23, 1859 with 50 barrels sperm, 1316 barrels whale oil, and 18,000 pounds whale bone. This book is dated in manuscript June 12, which corresponds roughly with her departure date. Outfit books listed products available from a provisioner or chandler that might be needed on a whaling voyage. These items were then marked, in manuscript, as to quantity or other specification, by whoever was responsible for provisioning the ship. In their day they served as handy shopping lists. To us they are esteemed as documentary evidence of exactly what goods in what quantities were taken on whaling voyages. This book is incredibly detailed. It lists thirty-seven pages of supplies, such as food, clothing, navigational aids, or whaling tools, each item marked as to whether or not it would be needed and in what quantity. In addition nine pages of manuscript notes give orders for slops and cordage. An excellent example, bound as issued in limp leather covers. $650

Next Week: "Long Day's Journey Into Nightmare on Elm Street?" - Nah...

Not Quite Ironweed

Promoter Garry Austin did his usual above average job on publicity and advertising.Karen and Garry Austin, Mike Daum, Bill Hutchison discuss Mark Twain first edition points

As a result he got a good crowd for the 37th annual Albany Antiquarian Book and Ephemera Fair.
There were no major glitches at setup, and more than 400 people and two dogs kept things busy right through Sunday afternoon. Most dealers reported good results and several said they had very strong fairs. As usual, sales of cheap books predominated. I didn’t sell anything, but lunch at Hot Dog Heaven was to die from. Last year we had snow flurries. This year it felt like we might. Albany remains an interesting, funky town. Seems stuck in the same rut as Hartford.
Now for the interesting news.

My buddy Anthony Weller just got his novel published. This is good news, but not particularly surprising. Over the course of a long career Weller has published six novels and works of non-fiction. He’s also written innumerable articles for the likes of GQ, Esquire, National Geographic and the New York Times Magazine. What is noteworthy about Weller’s most recent book, The Land of Later On, is that he sold it to a publisher who’s new on the scene – a company called Amazon.

That’s right, Amazon.

And I am not talking about a self-published text here, one of those vanity publishing products that have become so numerous in recent years. Weller’s agent drew up a contract with Amazon editors. Weller was paid an advance. He will receive royalties. The Land of Later On is a “real” book.

Amazon is now competing directly in the world of trade publishing. They’ve signed up a few high-profile non-fiction authors (this move received considerable publicity a few weeks ago) and they’ve added several novelists, of whom Weller is one, to launch Amazon’s publishing arm.

Under the terms of Weller’s contract, The Land of Later On will appear exclusively as an e-book until December, at which time it will also come out as a traditional hard copy book.

Anthony has been keeping me posted on the details of his dealings with Amazon, and they are fascinating - both in what they say about Amazon and what they imply about our future in the book trade.

Traditionally it can take as long as a year for a publisher to process a book. First, the text is subjected to a “copy edit” which may result in improvements agreed upon by editor and author. A “line edit” ensues, in which the text is fact checked, and spell checked, and the publisher’s conventions of spelling and grammar are applied. Then the text goes to a designer who devises a page layout that will be suitable for the book’s genre and content. While all this is going on, a jacket is designed and, the author hopes, a marketing plan is concocted, fueled by a healthy advertising budget. It is a prolonged process, and rightly so. Decisions about the design of the cover and the look and feel of the book could have a significant impact on sales and need to be carefully considered.

Or so we thought.

In Weller’s case, Amazon turned Land of Later On around in less than thirty days. He is a master of his craft, a meticulous workman, and was able to deliver a very “clean” manuscript. This was a important because Amazon seems to have dispensed with line and copy edits of his book. There were no lengthy conversations with an editor about plot points, no galleys to comb in search of typos. When Weller inquired about this startling omission Amazon told him that, because the text was electronic, changes could be made on the fly - even after electronic publication – at any time, in any quantity.

Usually, as publication date approaches, advance reading copies, or ARCs, are sent far and wide, soliciting reviews that can be used in advertising the book. Feature or starred reviews in trade publications like Kirkus or Publisher’s Weekly have a huge impact because such reviews can influence which other journals will review the book. Thousands of new titles appear every month; it’s damned difficult to get a review – even a bad one – in the New York Times.

Amazon eliminated this problem by eliminating ARCs entirely. No advance copies went out. No reviews were solicited. Weller got a wonderful “blurb” from John Casey, who won the National Book Award for his novel Spartina. This blurb will be the only extraneous text accompanying Weller’s book. As far as the traditional publishing world knows, The Land of Later On does not exist.

No one talked to Weller about marketing plans, book tours, or advertising budgets. The success of The Land of Later On will depend solely on the company’s ability to exploit its vast but hermetically sealed resources.

Weller’s book is a love story that spans space and time. The hero is a jazz pianist and, charmingly, his side kick is Walt Whitman. Much of the story takes place in the Afterlife. Obviously, Amazon will turn to its enormous reservoir of proprietary information about our shopping habits to promote Weller’s book - “If you’re interested in (Walt Whitman, jazz, the Afterlife, etc., etc.) you’ll want to read The Land of Later On.”

There’ll be plenty of reviews (as of this writing the book has already garnered half a dozen), but they’ll all be “peer” reviews, submitted to Amazon by people who have read the book and want to tell others about it. They’ll appear only on the Amazon website.

And if it turns out that Chapter Five was inadvertently omitted from the Kindle version, no problem! They just push a button at Amazon and the electronic text is corrected.

Incredible stuff! But it raises a few questions.

Where, and what, is the author’s manuscript copy of this book?

What constitutes the “first edition” of The Land of Later On?

Will the “first edition” include the Kindle it lives on?

What about later printings? How do we sell used copies of Kindle books?

When the paperback comes out will we be able to buy it at Barnes &Noble?

Will our local book stores carry it? Or will they be afraid of competing against the mighty Amazon?

Just in case to the answer to the last two is “no,” here’s where you can get your own copy of Anthony Weller’s The Land of Later On.

E book:
http://www.amazon.com/Land-Later-ebook/dp/B005J61DQA/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1316699383&sr=8-3

Paperback (available 12/14/11):
http://www.amazon.com/Land-Later-Anthony-Weller/dp/1612182259/ref=tmm_pap_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1316699383&sr=8-3

I give it a five star review.

Down in the Ghetto

Dealer Will Money diverts David Whitesell of the AAS while Peter Stern sneaks rare pamphlets from a box.

Took a road trip this weekend with an affable Brit named Iain Sinclair. He’s presently a visiting writer at the Gloucester Writer’s Center and, because he’d been a book dealer in London before he became an author, (one of my favorite Sinclair books follows the adventures of a ring of sub-noir book dealers in search of the ultimate find, juxtaposed with an inquiry into the true identity of Jack the Ripper, dragging the reader through Londons dark and darker) I thought he’d enjoy visiting the Pioneer Valley Book and Ephemera Fair.

We got a perfect day for it. Blue sky and blazing New England foliage. Breakfast at Sylvester’s followed by a quick booth setup (I only brought one shelf of books) followed by two hours of diligent but mostly fruitless scouting.

I mean, I bought three interesting things – a whaling log, a tattoo artist’s sample card or “flash,” and a run of maritime periodicals including a Fitz Henry Lane lithograph – but all of those had been quoted to me prior to the fair. I could have stayed home and gotten them in the mail.

I also had an interesting conversation with Tina Bruno of Flamingo Eventz, promoter of this book fair. She was concerned that I’d described one of her earlier shows as having been done “by the numbers” and wanted me to know that she was working on some new and innovative book fair ideas.

I’m rooting for Tina, but let’s face it. Under current constraints of contracts and venues, promoters like the Flamingos or Garry Austin are locked into a formula that leaves little room for innovation. The same dealers keep showing up at the same places with the same kinds of books for the same customers, and everybody gets a little sleepy. The finances of these events don’t leave much surplus for advertising and, as yet, no one has figured out how to successfully link a provincial book fair with the dog show, beauty pageant or stock car race necessary to fill the aisles with new blood.

Indeed, there was a decent line at the door, especially considering that it was such a beautiful day, but they were all the same faces. Iain went out to walk around Northampton, and I spent the morning looking at the whaling log – which turned out to be about a ship departing from the Hudson River on one of the most hellacious whaling voyages I’ve ever heard of. Three captains died; men deserted, mutinied and went mad, and the hunt was continually botched by crews too green or dispirited to be of any use.

Not wishing to go down that road myself, I spent a good part of the afternoon talking to my colleagues about their sales – high, low and average – and learned that, for the most part, dealer sales yielded a higher average price per item than retail sales. Just what you’d expect, right? The surprising thing is the degree to which dealer and retail sales diverged at this event. Dealer sales averaged in the three figures, while retail sales seemed to hover around the low twos.

Colleagues Lin and Tucker Respess reported a booming trade in pamphlets about books. They sold over one hundred of these – at $3 each retail, $2 to the trade. The rest of the informants in my admittedly informal survey reported retail sales predominantly in the $15 range.

Compare this with results as reported by Malcolm Kottler from last week’s Seattle Book Fair:
1. 24 invoices (for 32 books), no $ total given, but described as a "break-even fair"
2. 12 invoices (for 17 books), more than $23K "fewer invoices than normal"
3. 7 invoices, $16K (new customers accounting for only $3K)
4. 6 invoices (to 3 libraries, 2 individuals, 1 bookseller), $15 K ("not our best or our worst ... largely to the same customers who visit us every year" )
5. 3 invoices, $10K

Although the samples are small, this seems to point out another difficulty faced by promoters like Austin and the Flamingoz. An urban fair is going to yield bigger bucks for participants than a fair in a lovely college town like Northampton. The Boston Shadow Show (side kick to the Boston ABAA International Antiquarian Book Fair) will yield bigger numbers than the Boxborough Book and Paper Show.

Smaller venues will be less expensive for dealers, but the yield will be lower, attracting dealers with less expensive books – Don Heald or Bill Reese won’t be doing Litchfield anytime soon. The attendees at these shows will be other dealers looking for stock, hard working librarians like David and Vince from AAS, devoted bibliophiles and collectors, random passers-by, and the occasional nutter. Big spenders will not turn out.

So another interpretation of “by the numbers” might be that “the numbers” tend to lock promoters like Tina Bruno into economic limits from which escape is difficult.

If anyone has ideas about how to break out of this provincial book fair ghetto, Tina and I want to know.

A Smashing Couple and a Healthy Scene

“Back in Seattle again,” as the old Gene Autry song goes.

In the China and India trading days the Brits would send young men out to do their business, and if they didn’t die of disease, mishap, or loneliness, they’d ultimately make a bundle and then would be able to return to England and marry a proper girl, having established their “competency.” This weekend at the Seattle Antiquarian Book Fair I bought plenty and sold some too. So I suppose you could say I established my competency.

For example, how about this copy of J. C. Palmer’s Antarctic Mariner's Song? Ever seen it before?

Perhaps you recall a few blogs back when I described Thulia, J. C. Palmer’s rare book of poems about Antarctica. Well, twenty-five years after he published Thulia Palmer, who’d been a surgeon with Wilkes’s U.S. Exploring Expedition, wrote a second version of his poem about Antarctica, again with descriptive notes. And this one is even scarcer than the first. In fact, it is a genuinely rare book, not often found intact. Rosove states, “Antarctic Mariner’s Song is a far scarcer book than Thulia. Both editions were beautifully bound, but the bindings and paper have stood the test of time poorly; the majority of extant copies are worn or soiled, and the paper is usually foxed, often severely.” (See Spence 891, Rosove 246.B1a.) This copy has some foxing, and the covers show marks of old water staining. But the gold cover design is still fresh and the gilding on the spine, while worn, is intact.

Antarctic Mariner’s Song and Thulia make a smashing couple, and together they comprise a genuine Antarctic rarity. Both books $6500


Meanwhile, back in Seattle…

Thursday afternoon before setup, while walking around the city’s fine old Queen Ann neighborhood (also known as “the land of 10,000 Thai restaurants”), I stumbled across a nice little bricks & mortar used book store, Mercer Street Books.

It was the coolest thing. You walk in a doorway and there are shelves with real books on them that you can take down and look at, browse through if you want to… even purchase if you wish. Clean, well lit, with intelligently selected stock, no junk and no cats (their predecessor at this site had a bookstore cat, or cats – and you could always tell a book that had come from that shop. I’ll say no more…)

Had a brief chat with the owner, Deb, who is hard working, smart, and strong on customer service. She’ll let you browse her stock until you have a question, then she’ll do her best to answer it.

My question was, “How many books do you have on line?”

Her answer was, “See that section?” She pointed to a shelf with about 75 books on it.

So what we have here is something even rarer than those two lovely Antarctic books – a neighborhood used book shop with reasonably priced and carefully chosen stock, almost none of which is on line, run by a woman who is very happy to be living her dream, and shows it. Mercer Street Books has clearly developed its own “scene.” Every time I went past over the next four days, there were people inside browsing, standing up front talking to Deb, or milling around on the sidewalk chatting about whatever it is neighborhood bookshop patrons chat about. Deb had broken in to the trade by working for Wessel & Lieberman, (they and John Michael Lang are two of Seattle’s premiere antiquarian book shops), so there is a strong legacy factor here as well. To tell you the truth I find the whole Seattle book scene pretty lively. Maybe it’s all that coffee.

And I must say, this year’s Seattle Antiquarian Book Fair was lively too. As always it was smoothly set up (though Ken Karmiole apparently had a few rough moments)and run by impresario Louis Collins. But this year, for whatever reason, the crowd was extra big and plenty boisterous. The aisles were full for much of the day on Saturday and, though none of the dealers I spoke to had broken any sales records, most seemed happy enough. Ten Pound Island Book Co. had a total of three sales for the weekend which, as you probably know by now, is a splendid book fair performance for us. (We sold about $10,000 and bought another $15,000 so, by the Lou Weinstein bookfair metric, we had a $25,000 fair.)

They tell me that back in the days of aircraft moguls and computer billionaires, wealthy customers roamed the Seattle Book Fair the way dinosaurs once roamed the earth. Somehow, even though the gazillionaires have departed, the Seattle event has managed to maintain its place in the city’s cultural life. Surely a lot of this has to do with the tireless efforts of promoter Louis Collins and his staff, but I wonder if there’s any correlation between the health of a place like Mercer Street Books, Seattle’s still vibrant book scene, and the continued success of the Seattle Antiquarian Book Fair?

Make no mistake, Seattle is one of the strongest provincial book fairs in the country. After weeks of reporting from the floors of book fairs on life support it’s a pleasure to be talking about one like this.

Thanks, Louis. Thanks, Deb. And thank you, Seattle!

Now, where did I leave that checkbook?

Next week: The Pioneer Valley Book & Ephemera Fair. Check the website for details.

There's a Reason for Everything

Charlie Everitt, in his classic book about the trade, Adventures of a Treasure Hunter, (required reading for anyone with a love for old books and American history) claimed that he took a vacation from book selling every year and went off fishing with his wife. He said that while he was on vacation he never thought about books, not even for a moment.

In my younger days as a book dealer I found that hard to believe. I never stopped thinking about books. Family vacations were just excuses for book scouting trips. But as I got older I discovered that it was beneficial to take a break every once in a while.

Last Monday the wife and I headed up to our place in Cape Breton for a short vacation, but of course stopped in Halifax so I could look for books. There are two places I shop regularly, and these guys have often paid for my vacations, and then some. But this time both told me they hadn’t bought much since June when I was last there.

One fellow was leaving town to visit relatives, and the other fellow said, “I haven’t bought a thing in your line since you were last here.”

“Does that mean I’d be wasting my time if I looked around?”

“You could look around, but you wouldn’t see anything except what you saw last time. Why don’t you and your wife just go off and enjoy your vacation?”

I was a little surprised to hear myself replying, “That doesn’t sound like a bad idea at all.”

So my wife and I got a nice hotel down by the water,

Halifax PM

Had dinner at a Brazilian restaurant, walked around town in the warm evening, and watched TV until we fell asleep. The next morning

Halifax AM

we drove up to Cape Breton, and I spent a wonderful week not thinking about books, just like my idol, Charlie Everitt.


That’s why there’s no blog entry this week.

Next week – “Sleepless in Seattle” and other musings from the Seattle Book Fair where Ten Pound Island Book Co. will have a corner booth. Stop by and say hello!