You Can Quote me on That

Upside Down (see below)

Now that my enthusiasm for books and the good life, coupled with my financial ineptness, has brought me to the point where the bankers own my houses, my cars, my books, and all my goods & chattels, there is only one thing, other than my soul, that the bankers do not own


Like my soul it is of enormous value to me, but if the bankers chanced to come into possession of it, they’d have no idea what to do with it. I’ve watched over it for decades as carefully as a drunk nurses a grudge, cultivated it with all the care a Buddhist bonsai gardener lavishes on his stunted tree, nurtured it more lovingly than a lonely rich lady pampers her lapdog.

I am speaking, of course, of my mailing list.

I started assembling it, on file cards in a plastic box, in the 1970s. When people came into my shop I’d chat them up and, if it seemed even remotely possible that they’d spend a dime on my books in some distant future, I’d get their name, address, and area of interest. When I started doing book fairs this became a splendid way to pass the time. Forget about sales. If I gathered a dozen names it was a good day. This attitude, I’m happy to say, has stayed with me through the years, and now serves to justify the many book fairs at which I sell little or nothing – at least I got some new names!

There are about 5000 names on the list, though many of them are retired from collecting, out of the business, or just plain dead. My list reminds me of a giant coral, the result of years of teeny accretions, with only its outer edge alive. Of the 1995 currently “good” addresses on the list, only 400 are “live” in the sense that they have bought, or might buy, something I have on offer. But those 400 names are of utmost importance.

Here’s why.

I don’t have a store, and my office is not set up to receive customers. So I can’t sell books in the old fashioned retail way. If I wanted to, I could list my books on such venues as:

A1 Outlet
ABAA
Abebooks
Alibris
amazon.com (and national iterations)
Americana Exchange
Antikvariat
Antiqbook
Barnes and Noble
Biblio
Bibliopoly
Bookbase
BooksandCollectibles
Bookstores.com
Choice Books
Direct
Find-a-Book.com
IOBA
Livre-Rare-Book
Maremagnum
Scribblemonger
Tomfolio
UK Bookworld
Uniliber
World Book Market
ZVAB

But, except for ABAA and Biblio, I don’t list my books online. The material I sell inhabits too narrow a niche. No one out there in bookland seems to want it. So subscribing to all these services would be a waste of time and listing fees.

I issue catalogs, but that only happens every couple of months, and the cash flow they generate is too sporadic to keep the Repo Man at bay.

Of course there are the aforementioned book fairs. But since I never sell anything and usually buy heavily, they are a source of profoundly negative cash flow.

So, whenever I get anything interesting in (and at this point everything I get is interesting - to me at least – otherwise I wouldn’t have bought it) I look through my 400 and find someone “special” to “share” it with. Sometimes institutions, sometimes collectors, sometimes dealers. Out goes the quote and, often enough to keep this house of cards from collapsing, in comes the income.

That’s why, when people ask me what I collect, I reply, “Names.”





Dear_____

Here's a terrific yachting item I just got in.

It's a book of signals for the NYYC, with 3 pages of handcolored signal pennants and many pages defining the meanings of various combinations. 1876. Rare enough!

But the wife or girlfriend of whoever owned the yacht Alarm got into the book and penciled in alternate meanings to the signals on several pages, mostly having to do with social stuff - clothing, hair, etc... This enabled her to use the Alarm's NYYC signal flags to communicate such important matters as, "Wear your hair looped up." $1750

********************************************************************

Dear…

Thought you might enjoy this rare broadside:


THE GASPEE. KING GEORGE’S CROWN - TURN’D UPSIDE DOWN! (Henry Trumbull). Providence. (1826-36). Folio sheet; 8 ¼" x 10 ½" This is a broadside poem recounting the burning of the British Revenue Cutter Gaspee in Narragansett Bay on the ninth of June, 1772. The caption title reads, “King George’s Crown - Turn’d Upside Down!” printed above the inverted arms of Great Britain. It consists of fourteen stanzas printed in two columns separated by a decorative imprint column which reads “Printed and sold at No. 25. High Street, with 200 other kinds of Songs.” After running aground while chasing the sloop Hannah, the Gaspee was attacked by the Sons of Liberty, commanded by Abraham Whipple, who shot the captain, Lieutenant William Dudingston (Doddingston in this poem), bound the crew, set them on shore, and burned the cutter to the waterline. Bristol 3471 records a single copy of a broadside beginning with the same line, “Twas in the reign of George the Third...” 1772(?), but notes that it is “mutilated.” WorldCat locates only one copy of the present edition, at Brown, with the note that Providence directories list Henry Trumbull at 25 High Street from 1826 to 1836. (The broadside comes with a wonderful story, free of charge. Supposedly, after the Revolutionary War commenced, the British discovered it was Whipple who led the raid on the Gaspee. A Royal Navy captain named Wallace sent him a note stating, “You, Abraham Whipple, on the 17th day of June, 1772, burned his majesty’s vessel, the Gaspee, and I will hang you on the yard-arm. James Wallace.” To which Whipple replied, “To Sir James Wallace: Sir: Always catch a man before you hang him. Abraham Whipple.” Very good; several small marginal holes and fold marks, none effecting the text. $2500

My Partners

Basement, 77 Langsford St. April 22, 2012

When I started this blog a couple of years ago, I aspired to absolute transparency. I was going to “tell it like it is.” The unvarnished truth about the book business!

It only took me half a page to realize that, despite my lofty goal, this would not be possible in the real world. As much as I might assume the power to speak my version of the truth, I had to acknowledge that my unfiltered observations had the potential to do enormous harm – to blow up alliances, derail deals, and alter the way colleagues were perceived by others - based merely on my own myopic perception. So I adopted a generic reportorial voice. I reckoned if I told it like I saw it in the broadest terms, leavened that with a little humor and some big picture thinking, I could amuse myself and you.

But there is one topic about which I can speak with frankness, knowing full well what damage I’ll cause – and that’s Ten Pound Island Book Co.

If you haven’t guessed by now, I’ve spent a good part of the past week on Ten Pound archaeology. The exercise of emptying those shipping containers and digesting their contents provided long forgotten data about the history of my book company. I’m sketching that trajectory here in hopes that it might provide some amusement, diversion, or warning.

1976-77. Ten Pound Island Book Co., a partnership with my dear old pal Jean, operates out of an art gallery called Stagecoach House. Grosses about $5000 that first year. A typical week

After welfare runs out I paint houses and drive cabs to feed my family.

1977-80. Jean and I move to an old fish shack in East Gloucester. Business a little better, grossing $15,000 - $18,000. But I’m still painting houses.East of Eden 95 cents? Ouch!

1981. Move from the fish shack to 93 Main St. – Downtown baby!Start adding catalogs and book fairs, and gross jumps to $37,983.83.Rent $400. Still painting.

1982. Jean comes to her senses and moves to Maine.Rent goes up to $475, but paying for heat is the killer. It dawns on me that some books are considerably more valuable than others, but I still believe that if I could just find the right location in Gloucester my business would be secure.

1983. Move across the street to 108 Main. $400 rent, heat included. It’s a lovely space with generous windows, retail brings in about $16,000 annually, with roughly the same from book fairs and catalogs. Still painting houses BUT, in our Great Leap Forward, TPI starts borrowing money, $1000 at a time, 15.5% interest.

And I finally figure out that the people with the most reliable supply of good books are dealers, and the people to sell them to are other dealers.


1985 – 87. Incorporate, join ABAA, buy a computer. Still a struggle, but during one of those years I quit painting houses for good. Ransack them in search of books instead.

1987. Move around the corner to 3 Center St., my fifth location. Get serious about catalogs, book fairs, and dealer sales. Rent $350 with heat. The retail public, with only a few exceptions, becomes a source of terminal boredom. Fortunately, my kids are now old enough to work. They’re always bored, so it doesn’t matter. But it’s still a struggle – $1600 a month retail doesn’t cut it.

1993. I finally realize that success in this business is NOT determined by location. And it’s not about retail, either… not walk in retail, anyway. I buy the property across the street and fill it with books. Interloc! $200,000 credit line! Big Time Book Dealer now!

1995. Gross hits $500,000 and stays there, with minor fluctuations (as low as $450K, as high as $820K), while I put kids through college, spend out my $200K, and open another credit line.

1996-present. While gross income flattens out, “cost of goods” increases, as I cheat, lie, and steal to make up the difference. Begin to economize by buying cheaper copy paper, stopping daily UPS pickups, and not answering the phone. Squeeze one last credit line out of my local lender.

***

As you can see, it’s been a good run and a wonderful life. I told a colleague at the New York fair, “Every morning I wake up and I can’t believe they haven’t found me out yet.”

“Oh,” he replied, “They HAVE found you out. And this is what you get.”

So now the bank owns my house, my new building across the street, my cars, all my books, and my future, which is guaranteed to be spent in bookish toil until the day I keel over.

I suppose I could get nervous about the situation, but I prefer to think of the bankers as “my partners.”

Field Day for the 1%

Exhausted after purchasing Big Books, the 1% engage in conversation



A colleague approached me on the floor of the New York Book Fair and asked if I’d composed this week’s blog yet. I told him I had not. He kindly offered to write it for me himself. It’d be a snap, he said – first the obligatory picture of booksellers slouched around the bar at Donohue’s,

then a photo of an unhappy dealer at setup, surrounded by more books than he had room for, a shot of the eager line at opening, and two or three more showing people in the act of purchasing things. Add a funny story about something that happened to one of our colleagues, and a picture, with price and description, of a really neat item that I bought at the show, and it’d be done.

I was tempted to take him up on his offer and give myself the week off, but then I realized that my colleague’s blog-by-the-numbers would not tell the remarkable story of this year’s New York Book Fair.

Thanks in part to the efforts of bookfair committee chair Don Heald, the floor area at the armory has been expanded, allowing us to accommodate another dozen dealers. We now have a show approaching San Franciscan proportions, of over two hundred dealers.

The added exhibitors may have been the cause of some logistical hangups this year. A shortage of folding bookcases prevented several dealers from getting their booths arranged until the second day of set up. Also, the usually excellent lunch served to exhibitors on Wednesday seemed done on the cheap this year. Promoter Sandy Smith proved himself no Savoir when it came to feeding the multitudes.

The multitudes, feeding

But back to the numbers.

About a third of this year’s exhibitors - seventy-four dealers by my count - hail from outside the continental US. Obviously, the Foreigners have figured out that New York is where the money is at the moment, and they’ve brought Europe’s best and finest books with them. The results are spectacular. I don’t think there’s ever been a more breathtaking display of rarities than are on exhibit at this year’s New York Book Antiquarian Book Fair.

A veritable museum. And it’s all for sale!

Wonderful viewing, but at what price to the American trade?

All these fancy continental dudes in their skinny pants and leather soled shoes, taking our jobs, confusing our customers, stealing our women. We’ve GOT to get this immigration thing under control. A fence, maybe…

Many of the high end dealers brought big books – elephant folios two or three feet tall. They look gorgeous, with their pages fanned like peacock tails inside their glass cases.

Furthermore, there have been numerous reports of actual sales of these behemoths, with eyewitness accounts of Sherpas staggering out the front doors under two or three hundred pounds of vellum.

The stellar array of material makes it more obvious than ever that there are two levels of customers attending this show. On a good day, the blue collar, lunchpail types might stop in booth D-21 and drop ten or twenty thou on Respess or Ten Pound. Then there are those customers (known as “clients,” actually), who think nothing of spending ten times that amount on some high spot of western thought. But we never see them in booth D-21. They never see us. They exist on a different vibrational plane. Like nuons, quarks. Strange particles. Over the years I have been able to deduce their existence by carefully measuring the degree to which certain booths bend light rays. Reese and Heald, or any of those dozens of Dutch, Swiss, French or Italian firms.

A corollary of all this splendor – perhaps expectable, or even inevitable – is the absence of dealers who sell primarily to the trade. Back in the 80s and 90s many dealers on the floor brought goods that were meant to be sold to their colleagues. These days, aside from firms like DeWolfe and Wood, or Caliban Books, nobody is set up to sell primarily to the trade. Simply a matter of economics. The real estate is too expensive.

Of course “selling to the trade” is what the downtown Shadow Show is supposed to be all about, but this year the event was a little less than the usual mosh pit. There seemed to be fewer dealers, and more dealers with oversized booths, so that there may have been somewhat less on display.

Still, most dealers I spoke with reported good sales and a smoothly run fair.

From a visitor's point of view, the Shadow Show’s 5PM opening on Friday was a problem. Those of us who wanted to shop the fair had to leave our booths back at the Armory and schlep downtown during rush hour. Why they don't have setup all day Friday and open Saturday morning, before the ABAA fair opens, is a mystery to me. Certainly, the promoters at Flamingo Eventz depend on the gate for income, but is the crowd that much bigger on Friday and Saturday than it would be on Saturday only?

More disturbingly, change has come to Donohues. Bartender Jerry is out, after decades of stalwart service, replaced by Bruno of the Croatian growl who, like seemingly everyone in this city of 8 million stories has his own fascinating back story, including a career at McCall’s Magazine when it was the biggest womens weekly on the planet. Here, he is seen charming Lin and Tucker Respess. I cannot tell you for sure at what hour the picture was taken. I think it was not the Last Hour.


Worst of all, for the first time in sixty-two years, they were out of lamb chops on Saturday night. Maureen says it will not happen again.

(Here follows the obligatory cool item for sale)

New York Yacht Club. 1859. CONSTITUTION FOR THE GOVERNMENT OF THE NEW YORK YACHT CLUB. NY. 1859. Color folding plate. 12mo. 54 pp. Officers, member yachts, members, constitution, uniform and dress requirements, and folding color plate of private signals of yachts. NYYC was founded in 1844, but any of these yearbooks prior to WW II are scarce. This is a rare one. Worldcat shows no institutions holding copies. Bound in original flexible wrappers. Text clean. Some foxing and a few pinholes in folding plate. $750

And finally, John Reznikoff of University Archives scouts books on his I Pad, while an old-school colleague looks on in horror.

Ten Pound Archaeology

American Congress Authorizes Privateers (see below)

Much to my surprise last week’s blog, “Auctioneers as Enemies of Archives,” elicited a strong response. I’d always thought of archives as collections of letters from whalemen, or the accumulated papers of a pioneering family, or some sailor’s assembled records and journals. Americana, in other words.

But I received several impassioned emails from colleagues and collectors who specialize in politics, entertainment, and sports, telling me that the situation with auction houses was as bad, or worse, in their areas of interest. Come to think of it, some bygone movie star’s attic could be just as much an “archive” as last week’s tidily assembled group of papers pertaining to the loss of the whale ship Richmond. Having some greed-head root through that attic in search of love notes from Clark Gable does it just as much a disservice as the dissection of the Richmond papers did to that archive.

These were my thoughts last weekend as I confronted another archive – my own.

In the chaos surrounding the destruction of my old building

(more than two years ago!) books, papers, and prints got thrown into boxes without a thought,

and packed hastily into fancy insurance company PODs.

Then, after the insurance money stopped coming in, the boxes got piled into cheaper steel shipping containers.

Never once did I have the opportunity or the inclination to stop and consider the material I was handling. At the time I was just dealing with a monumental problem in logistics.

Then the new building was finished – at least to the point where I had a clean, dry basement – and it was time to start thinking about landscaping.

So, on Saturday and Easter Sunday, Joe and I emptied both containers.


Talk about a Resurrection!

Don’t know how I missed it the first time, but all the sudden I was lugging boxes of records from 1978, say, or the paperweight that my daughter had made for me in kindergarten twenty-two years ago. Books I hadn’t seen in years, charts and maps that I’d forgotten I even owned.



It was dizzying. All the more so because I knew that soon I’d have to open each box and deal with its contents - file, shelve, or discard all that history.

I’ll be starting right after the New York Book Fair, and I may not come out of that basement for weeks.


And speaking of the New York Book Fair… Somehow, while this archaeological dig was taking place, I had to get my goods ready to bring to New York. Sorting, cataloging and packing took place amidst heightened chaos,


with more than the usual dread, enhanced by the fact that the fair kicks off on Friday the 13th – “What if I don’t sell anything. How could I sell anything? I’ve got nothing to sell…” etc. etc.

Years ago I asked Bill Reese if he’d had a good fair. He gave me a crooked smile. “Any fair I survive is a good fair,” he told me.

That’s where I’m coming from this year.

Tune in next week to see if I made it.

Broadside. IN CONGRESS WEDNESDAY, APRIL 3, 1776... INSTRUCTIONS TO THE COMMANDERS OF PRIVATE ARMED VESSELS OF WAR, WHICH SHALL HAVE COMMISSIONS OF LETTERS OF MARQUE AND REPRISAL, AUTHORIZING THEM TO MAKE CAPTURES OF BRITISH VESSELS AND CARGOES. SIGNED AND ANNOTATED BY HENRY LAURENS AS PRESIDENT OF CONGRESS. Folio sheet, 13 1/2 x 8 1/2 inches. According to Evans this broadside was printed by John Dunlap in Philadelphia in 1776. The first issue printed John Hancock’s name as president of the Congress in type, but the form continued to be issued by other presidents of the Congress for the instruction of American ships as late as 1780. South Carolinian Henry Laurens succeeded Hancock as president of the Congress from March to June 1776, so this is a very early issue of the broadside. The text elaborates eleven paragraphs of instructions for American privateers. These vessels far outnumbered ships of the fledgling American navy, and had a huge effect on the outcome of the war, accounting for the capture of hundreds of British ships and millions of dollars in prize money. This document shows light rubbing along three horizontal folds and some light toning along the edges, but is in excellent condition overall. Interestingly, as well as signing the document, Laurens has made two manuscript alterations to the text, changing “Inhabitants of Great Britain” to “Subjects of the King of Great Britain” in article I, and inserting the additional condition, “or acquitted” in article V. A rare document. Evans 15137 locates only the Library of Congress copy. Worldcat shows several locations for the John Hancock and later John Jay issues, but makes no mention of this Henry Laurens signing. $9500

Auctioneers as Enemies of Archives

Poor Ole General Whitelocke (see below)

Back in the 1930s Randolph G. Adams – bibliographer, historian, and first director of the Clements Library at the University of Michigan – wrote an amusing and controversial essay entitled “Librarians as Enemies of Books.”


For the past few years I’ve been slowly coming to the realization that the current equivalent of Adams’ ironic trope is “Auctioneers as Enemies of Archives.” Here’s the latest piece of evidence.

I got a call last week from George Fox at PBA Galleries, a book auction house in San Francisco. As he occasionally does, George was calling to let me know about some items in a forthcoming auction that might be of interest to me. Of course, it was actually a sales call – PBA trying to drum up interest in the material it had on offer – but I always appreciate the information. Especially since, in this case, I was engrossed in preparing Maritime List 210, and hadn’t even glanced at the PBA auction catalog, sitting unopened on my desk.

The material to which George was referring pertained to a whaling captain named Philander Winters whose whaleship, the Richmond, ran around and was wrecked in Bering’s Strait.

It was a fascinating and coherent archive, centering around the drama that accompanied the wreck and the legal complications that followed it. There were interesting letters and documents, and some wonderful examples of Hawaiian printing, including a crew list printed in Hawaiian and English.

Unfortunately, PBA had broken this archive into twenty lots.

I followed the auction online – another marvel of the Internet age – and was able to purchase a wonderful set of charts of the Yangtze River printed in Shanghai in 1889.
When the Richmond lots came up, I followed the action closely.

There was serious competition for almost all the items, from the floor, left bids, phone and Internet. I did not purchase any of them myself, but noted from the real time results posted on my computer screen that all the sales went to someone bidding from the floor. Since I wasn’t physically present in the gallery, I could only hope that the same bidder had gotten all the items, and that the integrity of the archive had been preserved. I called George the next day to arrange for shipment of my charts, and was happy to learn that the entire Richmond archive had, in fact, gone to one institution.

The ascendancy of the Internet and the resulting decline in the retail bricks and mortar book trade has been accompanied by, and 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 such as eBay. All these venues offer the attractive illusion of transparency and of sales driven purely by market forces.

It’s hooey, of course. Just smart PR. There are as many hinkey deals going down in auction rooms as were ever perpetrated by book dealers. The auction companies have simply been better at selling themselves. Bruce McKinney, who has otherwise done an admirable job with his Americana Exchange, seems to have been completely won over by the idea of auctions as a free and transparent markets. And he’s not the only one. Remember when book dealers bought estates? Nowadays well-meaning heirs consign estates to auction, certain that they’ll get a better deal.

The rise of the Internet and the corresponding advance of auction houses produced other important changes in the landscape of antiquarian books and paper.

Because of the Internet there is, at least in theory, no auction whose contents can not be universally known. This kind of Internet-driven global access puts new pressure on the material. More attention than ever before is paid to archival material. Competition increases, prices are driven up, and more material is pulled out of hiding. An unfortunate side effect is that more material than ever before is being stolen from institutions and offered for sale on those wonderfully transparent, free market, open venues like eBay.

Even without the criminal element, it’s not a pretty picture in my view. The current dominance of auction houses makes it more likely than ever that, when new material emerges, it will be sold at auction.

And, generally speaking, the financial realities that govern the auction market make it likely that an archive will be broken up to achieve maximum commercial value. The cream of any lot will be stripped out and sold individually. The rest will be jumbled together with no respect for the continuity or chronological integrity of the archive.

That’s what almost happened last week to the Richmond archive.

A NARRATIVE OF THE EXPEDITION TO, AND THE STORMING OF BUENOS AYRES BY THE BRITISH ARMY, COMMANDED BY LIEUTENANT-GENERAL WHITELOCKE (and) THE WHOLE PROCEEDINGS OF THE COURT MARTIAL, HELD ON GENERAL WHITELOCKE, FOR MISCONDUCT; THEREBY OCCASIONING THE DEFEAT OF THE BRITISH FORCES DESTINED TO CAPTURE BUENOS AYRES, AND THE EVACUATION OF THAT TOWN.HELD AT CHELSEA COLLEGE ON JANUARY, 28, AND FOLLOWING DAYS. SIR W. MEADOWS, PRESIDENT. Bath and Lon. n.d. (ie., 1807 and 1808). b/w frontis. map and frontis. portrait. 38, 32 pp.

Two rare pamphlets about the botched British invasions in the Rio de la Plata Basin in 1806 and 1807. As part of the Napoleonic Wars, British forces against Spain occupied Buenos Aires and Montevideo, in both cases being expelled by Spanish forces. In this incident the British General Whitelocke was defeated by a ragtag army in street fighting in Buenos Aires, and eventually pulled out of the area with his tail between his legs. Apart from its considerable effect on the Argentine independence movement, the defeat went over poorly in Britain. Whitelocke was court martialed and sacked. Worldcat shows five libraries holding copies of this title. The first pamphlet lacks the title page but has the map of the battle scene and key as frontispiece, as called for by Sabin 51805. The second title is complete and features a wonderful frontispiece portrait of the hapless General Whitelocke. Original wrappers bound in. Both bound in half calf over marbled boards. Two vols. VG $1500