Is it a Truth Universally Acknowledged?

RARE! Details below


As I may have mentioned I’ve been working on a book about the American explorer John Ledyard for about a year. Basically, the “plot” of the book is that I trace an early journey of Ledyard’s - down the Connecticut river from Dartmouth College to Hartford – by walking along the river and meditating on John Ledyard as I go. His America in 1773 and our America now. You get the idea.

After dropping out of Dartmouth College, Ledyard secured a position as Corporal of the Marines aboard Captain Cook’s Resolution on its third and final voyage to the South Seas. In 1783 he returned to Hartford and wrote a narrative of his adventures with Cook. A Journal of Captain Cook’s Last Voyage was the first American travel book, and its account of Cook’s murder in Hawaii differed substantially from official British reports. It is now a rare and valuable book.

I’ve owned Ledyard’s Journal once before.

Early in the 1990s I got a call from a gentleman on the west coast. He told me he had an assortment of rare maritime voyages and, because he was moving to smaller quarters and had reached the limit of his interest in such books, he wished to dispose of his collection. The standard chitchat ensued, in the course of which he disclosed that he was happily married, the father of children with no interest in his library, and that he had little tolerance for auction gallery b.s. He simply, sensibly, wanted a fair price for his goods so he could get on with his move.

I asked him about the books.

He named half a dozen high spots in the literature – Hakluyt, Cook, Vancouver, several Drakes, Anson, Frobisher - then mentioned John Ledyard’s Journal of Captain Cook’s Last Voyage to the Pacific Ocean.

I’d heard of it, never seen it, but knew that it was a rarity. Furthermore I knew from studying the catalogs of my betters that it had been published with a map delineating Ledyard’s travels with Captain Cook, but that few copies containing the map had survived. (Ledyard, with typical lack of foresight, sold his groundbreaking copyright to his publisher, who probably elected to save a few dollars by omitting the map from the rest of the edition.)

“Does it have a map?”

“Why, yes. It does.”

“I’ll be there in two days.”


The gentleman turned out to be as reasonable as he’d sounded on the phone. I was able to purchase the library, including Ledyard’s book, which soon sold to an institution for what I thought at the time was a magnificent sum. I’d pay twice that to have it back now. It had the map.

So, over the past year, as I researched Ledyard and thought about his life, that book has been much on my mind. I wondered if I’d ever own another copy. Then, sure enough, one came my way.

My new copy lacks the map, as almost all copies do. It’s in a crummy black buckram binding and it’s trimmed close, with partial loss of a page number or two (indicating its prior owners had no idea of its value or importance, and just sent it off to a cheap binder, who butchered it). But it is indisputably genuine, and indisputably mine. For as short a while as possible.

This reminds me of an aspect of our trade that I’ve been wanting to comment on for quite some time. It was true when I had a retail shop. It was true when I was selling used books in quantity on the Internet. And it’s true now that I am dealing in (or attempting to deal in) rarities. It is simply this:

Any real money I’ve ever made at this game has come from a big find, a lucky hit, a long-awaited score. Whether it’s a library or a single book, the sale is clean and the profit huge. However, these opportunities are few and far between. True success in the business has always been a matter of managing my affairs in such a way that I avoid starving in the interval between one big find and the next.

Over the years I’ve spoken about this with colleagues at every level of the trade, from scouting yard sales to the international book and antique circuit, and they all agree. The real trick is finding a way to survive between those big hits. Maybe I’ll call it “Gibson’s First Law of Bookselling.” Or maybe I’ll put it in the Ledyard book, right at the beginning. “It is a truth universally acknowledged…”

At any rate, the Ledyard is headed for California, where I hope it soon finds a home.

Ledyard, John. A JOURNAL OF CAPTAIN COOK’S LAST VOYAGE TO THE PACIFIC OCEAN IN SEARCH OF A NORTHWEST PASSAGE... Nathaniel Patten. Hartford. 1783. 208 pp. First edition of one of the rarest American travels. “This adventurous American enlisted as a corporal of marines under Captain Cook, who was then about to sail on his third voyage... Not only was he the first New Englander in the Pacific, but he went there under... Cook, and was with him when Hawaii was discovered. Ledyard visualized in great detail how the northwest coast-China’s trade should be carried out... The author’s narrative... includes a detailed account of the death of Cook.” - Hill 991. Streeter 3477. Howes L-181. Old ink writing on title page, pages evenly tanned, but clean. Lacking map, which Howes says is “usually missing.” Rebound in modern black cloth. $20,000

Next week: Report from the San Francisco Book and Paper Show

The End Game

I started this blog in June 2010, with the idea of making it a weekly record of my activities in the antiquarian book trade. And I’ve pretty much maintained that schedule. It’s just that some weeks are more active than others. This past week was one in which almost nothing happened. However, in keeping with my original intention, I’m making a record of it, too…

Spent all week packing for the SF/LA book fairs, a tedious procedure in which a few new items are hopefully cataloged, shined up, and put in mylar, and the remaining items – tired goods from past catalogs and fairs -- are sent like ageing streetwalkers into the world to try again. A rather depressing exercise, all in all. When it was done I had about 75 books and 200 flats – ephemera and the like -- in eight boxes. A little shy of $400K.
I drove these down to Washington DC, stopping Thursday night at a cheap motel outside Hartford. This wasn’t a rest stop. I usually do the 8 hour drive in one go. But I’ve got a writing project in hand, and I like to write in motels. So, after a walk through the snow to my favorite restaurant on Thursday night I put in a few hours of writing. Then another four hours the next morning. Hey, Nabokov wrote all his books in hotel rooms. My digs at “America’s Best Value Inn” would’ve done Humbert Humbert proud.

By Friday afternoon I was down in DC, delivering my load to John Thomson and Karen Griffin of Bartleby’s Books. They’re driving across the country to the fairs, and since we’re sharing a booth at both the San Francisco Book, Print & Ephemera Fair and California International Antiquarian Book Fair in Pasadena the next weekend, they kindly offered to chauffeur my books.

John and Karen have been through some changes of late. They lost their lease in Georgetown last year and decided to get out of retail and move their operation home. They refurbished their basement into a cozy and efficient work space and rented a couple of storage units to house what remained of their stock. Then they sat down and began quoting books to institutional and private customers. A catalog is coming soon. They’re making a go of it, but the transition has been hard work for them both.

They were on my mind during the ride back to Gloucester next day, and I had plenty of time to think about them, because I was driving through a snowstorm that covered the entire east coast. The trip took 11½ hours. Etta James had just died and, as I pushed my way north, I heard tributes to this wonderful singer on every college and NPR radio station in five states.

Maybe it was Etta’s death, or the Bartleby downsizing, or all the rolled over 18 wheelers and spun-out cars that sent my thoughts a strange direction, I don’t know. But the drive turned out to be a day-long meditation on the End Game. How will John and Karen exit this business? What comes after the move to the basement? What happens to Ten Pound Island Book Co. when I become too feeble for maniacal road trips?

Some people in this game have been careful enough to map out an exit strategy. Some have spouses with pensions. Some have been sufficiently disciplined to maintain IRAs. But many of my colleagues, I suspect, are like me. All our equity is tied up in our houses and our stock. Definitely not fungible assets. We plug along a day at a time. Our balance sheets are fairly healthy, but if something bad happened and we needed cash, we’d be in a tight spot.

This spring, when my new building across the street is finished, I reckon my monthly nut – including taxes, insurance and utilities -- will be increased by another $2500. There’s a 25 year mortgage on the place, so I’ll be hustling until I’m 91. And, seriously, folks. I don’t have a clue how I’m going to get that done.

I finished my white knuckle drive just as darkness was descending upon Gloucester, and I can’t tell you how good it felt to be home. By that time I’d come around to the happy realization that I do in fact have an end game, as simple and eloquent as the best financial planner could ever have put together. My retirement plan is to just keep working. My end game is to not stop.

And, as plans go, that one will work perfectly well until it no longer does.

So I suppose you could say I actually accomplished a lot this week.

Next week: California here we come!

Amazon’s Plan for Us (and Other Matters)

Rare whaling pamphlet (see below)


I like to have lunch every week with my pal Anthony Weller. He’s a novelist whose latest effort, The Land of Later On, was purchased and published -- as an e-book -- by Amazon. This is part of Amazon’s entry into the publishing world which, knowing them as we now do, pretty much equates with taking over the publishing world. The question is how they plan to go about it. Based on Anthony’s weekly narration of the adventures and misadventures of his novel, a picture begins to emerge.

On the good side Amazon did a Kindle special sale promo of his book in the UK and it sold thousands of copies in a single day. This pushed the Kindle edition up in the Amazon ratings, which called it to the attention of more potential buyers, which resulted in more sales. This cascade effect lasted several weeks.

On the bad side they steadfastly refuse to send review copies to ANY of the trade publications or influential journals such as the New York Times Book Review. They insist that the Amazon peer review process, in which readers critique the book in short reviews (ranked in a 5 star system -- 0 stars, bad, 5 stars, good.) is sufficient.

Poor Anthony is driving himself crazy trying to figure the reason for this apparently self-defeating policy. Don’t they want his excellent novel reviewed? Wouldn’t that result in still more sales? Every time he asks Amazon he gets corporate robot double talk. But I’ve got an idea about what’s going on.

It is Amazon’s aim to completely subvert the traditional publishing process. Not sending out review copies signals their belief that literary journals and trade publications are becoming, and soon will be, obsolete and irrelevant.

Instead of paying Anthony a five figure advance, then spending more tens of thousands on production and marketing, and hoping against hope that his book can earn back its advance, Amazon pays Anthony a very low advance backed by a very generous royalty on electronic sales. Amazon has practically nothing invested in its Kindle edition, and it’s making a profit of three or four bucks a unit after paying Anthony his share. Supposing The Land of Later On ultimately sells 20,000 copies. That’s a hefty return on a minimal investment.

Multiply that by hundreds, or thousands -- once Amazon gets rolling with its program to sign mid-list writers -- and you can see what they’re up to. Almost all of those authors will at least break even. Most will return a good profit. Such a model kicks the stuffing out of the way business is done in traditional publishing. And, when you think of it, the whole concept proceeds from their experiment in letting self-published authors put their own “vanity” productions right up there on Amazon with the “real” books. Some genius of a bean counter took a look at the numbers this business generated, and saw the future.

Here’s the interesting part as far as we book dealers are concerned. As a sop to its hired authors, Amazon promises to publish a hard copy edition, at some time after the Kindle edition has been released. Inevitably, it will be a small edition. Why? Because no one in the traditional world even knows it exists -- remember, Amazon has refused to send review copies to Publisher’s Weekly, Library Journal, Kirkus Review, or any of the other standard trade organs. Furthermore, bookstore owners are so pissed at Amazon, they generally refuse to stock Amazon products.

Now, suppose The Land of Later On is recognized as a classic in fifty years. There will only be a few thousand, or even a few hundred copies of the first hard copy edition in existence.

Thus, the Modern First Edition dealer’s dream will have been fulfilled.

Prior to the Internet they made their livings plugging modern firsts as rare. The Internet exposed that as fallacious, and the Modern Firsts trade collapsed. Now, thanks in a roundabout way to the Internet, the Modern First Editions of the future truly will be rare, and the trade in them will skyrocket.

Too bad we won’t be around to see it.

On the “other matters” side of things, my excellent book Hubert’s Freaks is currently weighing in at #158,381 on the “Amazon Best Sellers Rank." The book is in large part about legendary American photographer Diane Arbus, and that pitiful ranking got me wondering if Arbus has become chopped liver among photo collectors.

The record sale price for a single Arbus photograph is about half a million dollars. Just recently Andreas Gursky (also mentioned in my book) took the world record for a photograph at $4.3 million. Here’s what the photo looked like. Nice, but I’ll take Arbus, thanks.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

Anon. PECHE FRANÇAISE DE LA BALEINE, DANS LES MERS DU SUD EN 1829. Havre. 1829/ b/w lithograph frontispiece and folding litho plate. 55, (1) pp. A rare pamphlet on French whaling. According to a prefatory note the text was originally published in an equally rare periodical, "Le Navigateur, Journal des naufrages." This edition is more than an offprint, having its own title page, pagination, and table of contents. It features a frontispiece lithograph from "Le Navigateur", and a handsome folding lithograph plate, measuring 8 1/4 x 12 inches, done for this edition by Periaux in Rouen. Not in Jenkins or Polak. According to Worldcat only the Bibliotheque National and University of Glasgow Library hold copies. A fine uncut copy bound in original blue wrappers. $2500

Half Full

Ed Arno Archive (see below)


Poor old Hartford. Poor old Papermania. I just don’t know what to think about them anymore.








Traditionally the first and strongest ephemera show of each New Year, Papermania been ticking along since the 1980s. I’ve been doing it for twenty years or so. It took me at least ten years to figure out what “paper” even was, but I got my mind around the concept just in time. The Internet killed books, and ephemera took off. Ephemera was fun! Visual, visceral, and almost always unique, or close to it.


I eat breakfast every morning during the show at Papa’s, a little joint across from the train station.

Jane, the waitress, is a prodigy. She remembers every customer from the year before, and she remembers every order – “Two over easy, hash browns, tomato juice, coffee and wheat toast, right?” I ask her how it’s going. She says, “Hartford is dying.”

Maybe it is. I walk back from breakfast and all down the main drag I see big plate glass windows full of emptiness. Realtor’s signs trolling for tenants. Mc freaking Donald’s has shut down for lack of business.
The lovely old Goodwin Hotel is shuttered.Even the bums have left.

My worries are not lessened on the floor during setup at the show. We’re missing half a dozen dealers, with only a couple of newbies to replace them. There doesn’t seem to be much to buy unless I want first issue TV Guides, a zillion postcards, or tired $300 political broadsides priced at $750. Oh, and don’t forget two zillion snapshots. Vernacular photography. The new rage. The other new rage is to just dump them in your booth and let the buyer do the work of sorting and picking.

Sometimes it feels as if Papermania is on its way to becoming Toiletpapermania.

But then I find a cache of seventy-three letters from an American merchant in China to his girlfriend, 1860s, in the booth of Tom Stanford, who’s been missing so long I thought he was dead. But he wasn’t dead. He was pursuing his career as an artist and gallery owner, and covering half his body with eye-popping tattoos. And now he’s back. Salut, Tom!

Then an unrecorded shipwreck account, illustrated, eight pages long, imposed on its original folio sheet, folded, but uncut. A 1753 chart of the New England coastline I’ve never seen before, and the final terrific piece – out of my field, but who could resist? – an archive of one thousand original cartoons for the New Yorker and Playboy, along with ten New Yorker cover designs in color, a sheaf of correspondence, and an idea file of five hundred punch lines, prior to their illustrations, on file cards, by the great Peter Arno. A dealer is offering each item in the collection individually, but it occurs to my pal Lin Respess that some enterprising bookseller might buy the whole lot, as an archive. Which we do, at considerable expense.

Only to realize, after we’ve coughed up the dough, that the artist was Ed Arno, not Peter Arno. I point this out to Lin and he replies, “Who cares? They’re great!” A half full guy, if ever there was one. Coincidentally, colleague Rich West of Periodyssey, comes up to me right after this and thanks me for providing, in my blog, a corrective to his “perennially half-full mindset.” Jeepers. I didn’t think my blog entries were that bleak! Anyway, the Arno cartoons ARE great.

Then the show opens and the crowd is as large and hungry as it’s ever been. People fill booths, heads bent, muttering quietly, like monks at prayer.

And I wonder what I was worried about. We’ve come through another year. And we’re back in Hartford, under that same lovely bad lighting, in a paradise of paper, and all is as it should be.

Rich West’s glass is half full, and mine is… far from empty.


(Just FYI, the Arno archive is $22,500. And don't forget to check our website at http://tenpound.com/ for Maritime List #208 - "Wet Paper." This is a catalog devoted solely to maritime ephemera. No books!)

Time Travel for Dummies

The Whaleship Essex Lost in Translation. See below

When my accountant said, “Hey, you’ve had another good year,” my response was, “You’ve got to be kidding!” But then, looking back, I remembered some happy referrals, several fascinating consignments and, in general, quite a bit of successful book scouting. Ten Pound Island’s invoices and check stubs (all digital!) told the story in detail. My "new business model," concocted so painfully over the past year, paid off. I dropped the California, Florida, and New York book fairs, cut expenses way back, moved from hard copy to web based catalogs, and quoted a lot more books using specially tailored, richly illustrated e-based catalogs.

About 400 transactions pushed income to a new high.

And what did I do with my riches? Signed up for the California, Florida, and New York book fairs, and went back to printed catalogs. As a result, my costs of goods and business expenses were a scary percentage of my income. Still, on paper at least, there was a surplus. I was left wondering, as I wonder every year, “Where did it all go?”

Well, among other things it went to paying down debt, to inventory, and to development costs for My Big Hole (the new gallery across the street) as well as toward funding my several writing projects, which consumed hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars in expenses – while grossing a cool $3750 for 2010.

A more perplexing question was, “Where did the time go?” It seems like just a few weeks ago I was sitting at this very desk, in front of this same computer, same coffee, same cup, writing my blog entry summarizing the year gone by. Now here I am again.

The feeling is less “Groundhog Day” than a kind of time travel, a state in which the only thing separating January 2, 2012 and January 2, 2011 is the thinnest membrane of a miraculous, selectively permeable fabric. Memories get through; sensations, thoughts, and feelings pass from then to now effortlessly. But my knees aren’t coming back, nor is that whaling log I should have bid on more boldly.

Another property of this strange boundary is the condensation of time. I reach through the membrane to grab a memory from last year, and find my hand full of 1990 or 1970. I watch my granddaughter dancing in the living room and I see my own daughter dancing in the same spot twenty-five years before. For the past few years I’ve been saving my date books. But it isn’t “the past few years.” Suddenly it’s a mighty tall stack.
All this puts me in mind of an excellent novel by colleague Stuart Bennett. It’s called A Perfect Visit and the “visit” involves excursions back through time to the eras of Jane Austen and William Shakespeare. There’s adventure, romance, and just enough bookish content to keep a smile on my face. Come to think of it, isn’t that kind of time travel every book dealer’s dream? Imagine walking into a printer’s workshop and picking up a First Folio! I don’t need to worry about spoiling the ending for you because I haven’t gotten there myself.

But that’s just a matter of time.

Meanwhile, back in the shop, the present churns away – a phenomenon for which I am, and will continue to be, most grateful. And grateful, too, for the cool things that come my way.

LE NAVIRE AMERICAIN LE SUSSEX CAPT. POLLARD ATTAQUE PAR UNE BALEINE MONSTRUEUSE... 1820. The whaleship Essex left Nantucket in 1819. On November 20, 1820, while cruising the offshore ground, the ship was rammed sunk by a large sperm whale. Twenty-one survivors set off in three whale boats for the coast of South America, 2000 miles to the east. The mate, Owen Chase, published an account of the harrowing sail which featured agonizing deaths, madness and cannibalism. His book, which Melville recieved from Chase’s nephew during his whaling career, accounted for the key plot point in Moby Dick. The incident became one of the best known sea stories, inspiring the likes of Philbrick’s “In the Heart of the Sea.” This is a rare early French lithograph, probably contemporary with news of the incident. Charmingly, in the excitement of the moment, it has the name of the ship wrong - “Sussex” instead of “Essex” - and shows a baleen whale rather than a sperm whale ramming the ship. Rare. Not in Brewington. No holding on Worldcat. Image size 12 1/4 x 16 1/2. There are a few spots of light abrasion on the right end of the caption, partially obscuring the name of the lithographer. Otherwise this print is in very good condition, with rich, strong tones and generous original margins. $4000