All I Want for Xmas is a Droid with Apps

Here is my blog entry from last Christmas, back by popular demand. It made people smile a year ago, and I hope it rings in a chuckle this time, too. Happy holidays! We'll see you on the other side.

I’m old, and have made peace with myself, mostly. I suppose you could call it “set in my ways.” Hence, I feel no need to adjust my wardrobe choices to the dictates of whatever modern fashion might be sweeping the country at the moment. For the past thirty or forty years I’ve worn loose-cut jeans, plain or striped oxford shirts, and well-broken-in jogging shoes. I keep my cell phone in the left pocket of my pants, along with my car keys. No cell pouch. No man bag.

I own a modern primitive cell phone. I bought it a few months ago because my old phone, which was as battle worn as Han Solo’s Millenium Falcon, died…R.I.P. When I went into the Verizon store I told the kid I wanted the simplest model he had, that I didn’t want to do anything on it except make and receive telephone calls. He nodded knowingly and put me into whatever geezer model Verizon was offering at the time.

But even that phone was way more precocious than I wanted it to be. It was like having a sinister bug or a hyperactive child in my pocket. It loves to take pictures of the inside of my jeans and is constantly beeping and chirping when it bumps up against whatever else happens to be in that pocket. When I yank it out and flip it open to try to quiet it, a voice comes out of it and asks me “What would you like to do?” The first few times I shouted back at it, “I’d like you to shut the fuck up.” That didn’t work. The wife of a colleague has a phone like mine with duct tape up and down the sides. The tape covers the holes where the buttons had been. She told me the most fun was digging the buttons out with a strong, sharp needle. It empowered her.

Usually, the phone in my pocket bumps up against my key ring. The key ring contains the key to my car which, like my cell phone, enjoys doing things on its own. Last night I went out on the porch for a smoke and it all came clear to me. My phone was making noises and photographing the inside of my pocket. I reached down to throttle it, and bumped into my car key, which promptly locked, or unlocked my car. At that moment I was able to imagine a day in the not-too-distant future when the book trade has slowed and I spend more time on my porch, saddled with more and more “smart” devices that, just by wiggling my butt in my chair, will be able to lock my car, take a picture of my pocket, start my oil burner, turn on my TV, order some new goods or services from Amazon, speed up my pacemaker, download sports results, and cast my ballot for the winner of Dancing with the Stars.

Future, here I come!

He's Got a Scrooge Loose

Almost Christmas. Flurries outside my window. Sweet scent of balsam fir from our little tree downstairs.

I can feel my inner Scrooge coming to life as it does this time every year, rather like the monster in Alien bursting out of that poor spaceman’s abdomen. Kane, his name was. Just before the creature exploded from his innards he was euphoric, and very, very hungry. Kept exclaiming how delicious the grub was. I’ve been eating a lot lately, myself. Everything seems tasty!

So maybe it’s just me, but I’m getting awfully fed up with the landslide of Christmas catalogs and Special Holiday Sales on offer from my colleagues. They’re all as tacky, tasteless, and predictable as plastic Santas at the mall.

Without fail the rich guys want to hook you up with a Winnie the Pooh, or House at Pooh Corner, first editions, five figures, or the entire Pooh oeuvre in morocco for about the same. Don’t get me wrong. I loved Pooh when I was very young. I even named my dog Pooh, much to the delight of the neighborhood bullies. Various James Bonds, for sure. Eloise in her jacket is mandatory, as are the Grinch and assorted other Seusses, Jane Austen and Frankenstein first editions, bumping up into six figures. And how can we forget Dickens and his parts? Oy.

Then there are the Holiday Specials offered online by the not-so-rich-guys. As in, “Special Holiday Sale!! 50% off on ALL books under $10.” Good only through the holidays, of course. As if they wouldn't give their eye teeth to be rid of that crap any day of the year.

Gimme a break. It is a fact that people generally don’t buy used or rare books for Christmas. Unlike the retail new book trade, where December can be the month that generates the profit for an entire year, no used or rare book dealer ever turned giant numbers on Black Friday. Collectors, bibliophiles and gentle readers are much more likely to pleasure themselves with books after the holidays. The week between Christmas and New Year’s eve was also good, as I recall from my retail days at Ten Pound Island Book Co.

Helen Kelly of Boston Book Company, Ken Gloss of the Brattle Book Shop, Joe Phillips of Commonwealth Books, and Peter Stern of eponymous represent a pretty good spread in the retail trade, from used to rare, and they heartily confirmed my opinion at lunch last week. People simply do not buy gobs of used & rare at Xmas.

Why hog up holiday bandwidth or murder trees with your cheesy attempts to cash in on L.L. Bean’s market? Leave that to Harry and David.

Lunch was our reward, as Boston Book Fair Committee members, for paying Boston parking fees in order to spend two hours dissecting last November’s successful Boston International Antiquarian Book Fair and scheming on how to improve next November’s event.

One of the byproducts of the recent book fair was a video short produced by Nina See of Commonwealth Promotion. It gives a wonderful overview of the Boston fair and of antiquarian book fairs in general. Check it out.


You’ll notice that, consistent with my Scrooge take on holiday commerce, I am not offering any goodies from Ten Pound Island Book Co. this week.

Instead, I’ll leave you with another link. This one about “happiness” – as in “Happy Holidays” from one of my favorite writers, Jenny Diski.


And seriously, folks… Thanks for being such wonderful customers, colleagues, and friends. I feel truly blessed because of you, and wish you a healthy and, yes, happy 2012.

Showing Up for Work

Captain of the China trade ship Vancouver takes on three chests of opium. See below.


In the past couple of weeks I’ve bid on multiple items at auctions in Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Ohio, and New York. Just about everything I bid on sold -- not to me -- at what I considered high retail prices. When all was said and done, my only purchase was a 17th century English pamphlet on the fisheries. If I make $200 on it I’ll be a genius.

I have noted before that the ascendancy of the Internet and the resulting decline in the retail bricks and mortar book trade has been accompanied by, and is possibly related to, the precipitous rise of auction houses in the rare book and manuscript market -- most notably Christie’s and Sotheby’s, but also dozens of second-tier firms, as well as Internet auctions like eBay.

All these venues offer the attractive illusion of transparency and of sales driven purely by market forces. In fact, all kinds of shenanigans go on behind the podium, but the auction industry as a whole has been very successful in promoting auction houses as honest brokers in an open market. Where, a generation earlier, private collections and estates might have been consigned to book or antique dealers, now they are routinely sent to auction.

Because of the Internet there is, at least in theory, no auction whose contents can not be universally known. There are even web sites that connect you with online catalogs of every auction in the country. Now that auction houses have followed eBay’s lead and commenced online bidding, I don’t even have to leave my computer to be outbid by customers with more money than brains.

I still place bids, but my expectations are low. If I had to rely on auctions as my primary source of new material, I’d starve.

Meanwhile, I blunder bravely on, throwing up a new blog entry every week, dropping Twitter and Facebook notes here and there, distributing thousands of catalogs a year at book fairs all around the country, posting Internet only e-lists, and sending out traditional hard copy catalogs with links to extra-illustrated online iterations.

And once in a while, I’ll have a week like the one I just had, and I’ll think that maybe, just maybe, I’m doing something right.

Over the past eight days, while I’ve been getting my butt kicked at auction, I’ve managed to purchase from private individuals
Drake’s Universal Collection of Voyages, Brandt’s 1698 biography of Admiral de Ruyter, a clean “spare parts” copy (lacking title page and folding map) of Montanus and Ogilby’s magisterial Atlas Japannensis,an American China trade journal from the 1840s, the journal of a surgeon on an American merchant ship during the capture of Buenos Aires in 1806, and a colored lithograph, “View of New Bedford,” circa 1846, by Fitz Henry Lane.

Every one of these transactions, except for the purchase of the lithograph, came about because the seller had seen comparable material on my web page, had googled similar items from catalogs archived on my website, or had been referred to the Ten Pound Island web page by someone else.

Each year the Internet becomes a bigger part of my business. And if the web is reducing my chances of success at auction, it seems to be compensating by attracting the attention of an ever-wider range of people. I don’t really know how or why this happens, and I don’t know how to increase the beneficial aspects of the Internet except by trial and error -- by finding new ways to get text and images out there in front of people; by using the technology to find new people; by trying communicate to them the excitement of the wonderful material that comes my way. The truth is, I don’t know what I’m doing, but I’m doing it as hard as I can.

Sometimes it seems as if the most important thing is just showing up for work every day.

Brandt, Gerard. LA VIE DE MICHEL DE RUITER, DUC, CHEVALIER, LIEUTENANT AMIRAL GENERAL DE HOLLANDE & DE OÜEST-FRISE. Amsterdam. 1698. b/w full and double page engraved plates. Folio. (4), 717, (17) pp. First French edition of this biography of the famous admiral de Ruyter, who vanquished the French and English in the Anglo-Dutch wars. “De Ruyter” is actually an adopted name - “the Raider.” He was also a successful whaler. This is a very nice copy, bound in old full calf with gilt spine decorations and spine label. Text and plates (three of them are sea battles) are fresh and clean. Front hinge cracked at bottom but holding. $2000

Drake, Edward Cavendish. A NEW UNIVERSAL COLLECTION OF AUTHENTIC AND ENTERTAINING VOYAGES AND TRAVELS. Lon. 1770. b/w plates, maps. Folio. 706 pp. “A collection of voyages and relations of experiences by travelers from the time of the Portuguese navigators to the middle of the eighteenth century, including those of Magellan, Drake, Cavendish, Olivier van Noort, William Dampier, Woodes Rogers, John Clipperton, George Anson and Lionel Wafer.” Hill 492. The buccaneers are well represented in this 18th century compilation. Handsomely bound in half antique style morocco over boards. Two of the plates have been partially, clumsily, colored. Otherwise a good copy, complete with 64 maps and plates. $1500

Montanus Arnoldus and John Ogilby (translator). ATLAS JAPANNENSIS: BEING REMARKABLE ADDRESSES BY WAY OF EMBASSY FROM THE EAST-INDIA COMPANY OF THE UNITED PROVINCES, TO THE EMPEROR OF JAPAN Lon. 1670 b/w engraved plates. Folio. (2), 486 pp. First English edition of first major work about Japan. This copy lacks the title page, folding map of Osaka, and final leaf (pp. 487-488). The twenty-four double page plates and seventy half page engravings are present. Bound in half calf over boards, with spine label. $2000

VIEW OF NEW BEDFORD. FROM THE FORT NEAR FAIRHAVEN. FITZ HENRY LANE. Hand colored lithograph. A lovely view of the harbor, by America’s great luminist painter. Original colors are strong. A few spots of foxing and one small abrasion in the upper right quadrant, else very good condition. $4500

Manuscript. (China Trade). JOURNAL OF EUSTIS BACON, SALEM, MASS. ABOARD SHIPS GAMBIA AND VANCOUVER, 1844-1848. Folio. Unpaginated. Approximately 250 pp. manuscript entries. This is the personal journal of Eustis Bacon of Salem Mass., in which he records his voyages on the brig Gambia, 1844-1846, and the ship Vancouver, 1847-1848, as well as his activities ashore between and after these trips. An excellent account of the American China trade as it existed between the two Opium Wars, narrated by an intelligent, chronically depressed, observer. $3500

Manuscript. A PRIVATE DAILY JOURNAL KEPT ON BOARD THE SHIP PIGOU, BY JAMES WATSON, SURGEON. JUNE 1806 - MARCH 1807. Small 4to. Unpaginated. About 200 pp. manuscript entries. According to Fairburn p. 2767 the Pigou was a 359 ton ship built in Philadelphia in 1783. Watson’s journal contains an account of the British invasions of the Río de La Plata during which a detachment from the British army occupied Buenos Aires for forty-six days, then were evicted by Spanish troops. Watson’s medical entries are quite specific as to malady and remedy, and make up a good part of the journal. As well as military and medical action, a vigorous slave trade is taking place during the months the Pigou is detained in port. Watson also keeps track of the books he is reading, which include such diverse materials as the Naval Chronicle and Fanny Hill! Binding broken, old calf covers detached but present. $4500

Wool Gathering Season

"Wet Paper" -- More below

I love the interval between Thanksgiving and the New Year. I love to watch the world pull back inside itself, awaiting winter’s rigors. The lowering sun; the late afternoon blaze of orange through gray clouds; the cheering wood stove (soon to wear out its welcome); the holiday feeds; the Sunday couch-potato football games; the silhouettes of naked trees against the sky, each reaching for the sun in its own expressive way.

I’ve got a stack of receivables that will trickle in over the next six weeks -- enough to see me through the holidays. And I must confess, although I’m excited by the idea of my next catalog, an assemblage of maritime ephemera to be called “Wet Paper,” I have little desire to work on it. The same goes for my next book. I’m deep into the third chapter, but am finding it difficult to bang out the necessary letters, words, sentences and paragraphs. There’s an old saw about writing that has to do with applying one’s ass to the seat of the chair every day. Believe me, after forty-five years of practice, I’ve got the chair amply covered. But in this season, the moment ass hits chair, brain wanders off.

I find myself staring out the window for extended periods, watching my son and his crew work on the new Flatrocks Gallery building across the street – known to all, for obvious reasons as “My Big Hole.”
Occasionally I’ll return to consciousness in the midst of some strange, uncharacteristic activity, like organizing my files or cleaning my room, and wonder, along with the Talking Heads, “Well, how did I get here?” I spend hours wondering who will bat cleanup for the Red Sox next year, or pouring over high end auctions and rich-guy vanity catalogs daydreaming about material that that would cost me a year’s gross income.

I’m reading Moby Dick again. I guess that says it all.

Occasionally, in the midst of my day dreaming, I’ll realize once again how lucky I am to be self employed. No clock to punch, no boss standing over my shoulder, no performance standards to meet. I’m free to spend my time as I wish and, by God, if I wish to stare out the window for an hour at a stretch, I’ll do it.

Thus I puttered through most of November and the beginning of December, not really getting much done, but enjoying the mellow feelings that accompany this time of year for me. Then one night I read chapter XXXV in Moby Dick, called “The Mast-Head,” in which Melville describes a man keeping watch from the masthead, slipping into a distracted, philosophical reverie not unlike my own, and losing himself in a waking dream. Here’s how it ends:

“There is no life in thee now, except that rocking life imparted by a gently rolling ship… But while this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror. Over Descartian vortices you hover. And perhaps, at mid-day, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek, you drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise for ever.”

That was when it all came rushing back to me with a half-throttled shriek.

Cash flow!

Who am I kidding with all this talk of reveries? I’m like a small creature of the fields. I have so little mass that I must eat constantly to maintain my metabolism. Nothing wrong with a bit of sitting around, but if I gobble through that stack of receivables and there’s nothing behind it, I’m going to be in big trouble in the early months of 2012.

Colleague Rusty Mott describes the experience as a pendulum swing between complacency and terror. There’s little margin for delusion, less for self indulgence. One simple jolt of reality is a better motivator than any boss could ever be. These are the true benefits of self employment.

Back to “Wet Paper” for me…
Print. (Currier & Ives). AMERICAN WHALERS CRUSHED IN THE ICE. Handcolored lithograph. Paper size 12 ¼ x 15 ½ inches. Image size 8 ½ x 11 ¼ inches. This is an iconic image of Arctic whaling, capturing a sense of the devastation that resulted when, in 1871, thirty-three whaleships were crushed in the ice north of the Bering Strait. The subtitle reads, “Burning the wrecks to avoid danger to other vessels.” Brewington 5 says the image is attributed to William Bradford. Judged one of the “Best 50” Currier & Ives prints by the American Historical Print Collectors Society (AHPCS). The print is in good condition. Paper lightly tanned, colors strong. In old frame with glass.(Causing reflections in this image) $1750

Kendall, Edmund Hale. THE WONDERFUL ADVENTURES OF ABEL SAMPSON, RELATED BY HIMSELF; WRITTEN BY EDMUND HALE KENDALL. Lawrence City (MA). 1847. b/w engraved frontis. 12mo. 91, (4) pp. First edition of a rare account by an American seaman. He was born in Maine in 1790 and first went to sea on a merchant schooner in 1808. The next year he was pressed on board a British Man of War. He escaped and worked on a slaver for a time, shipped on the privateer Saratoga in 1812, then did a second, more successful tour on the Yorktown before being captured by the British. These adventures were followed by tours in the European, India, and West Indies trades. He swallowed the anchor in 1820, and went back to his original trade as a carpenter. Howes S-59. Not in Smith. Bound in original pictorial wrappers. Some chipping and old sewing loose, but still a good copy of a book that is quite scarce in the trade. The last copy for which I can find a record sold in 1979. $750