by David Mason
By the time we experienced our final humiliation, walking through Winnipeg (easily twice the size of Toronto, I thought) an agony exacerbated by gale force winds at Portage and Main, I’d had it with winter, especially in western Canada. Knowing a fair number of westerners (I even married one) I realized a long time ago that the weather is not their fault and I don’t hold it against them. They also are victims. But I’ve never forgiven the RCMP. And I’ve never been back, not in winter anyway.
Back in Toronto I got a job at a stockbroker’s where I started at the bottom. It was around this time that I discovered used books in Old Favorites, then the only used bookstore I had known about in Toronto. (Britnell’s still had a couple of tables of used books, as did Eaton’s—and maybe Simpsons, but I didn’t know that.)
My mentor and first boss in the trade, Jerry Sherlock (Joseph Patrick), got his start at Eaton’s used book tables. He was working as a reporter, covering the crime courts at City Hall, and he would spend his noon hour browsing the 10¢ table in Eaton’s. One evening at his church the priest showed Jerry a list of books he was seeking for the church library. Jerry spotted one that he had bought that day for 10¢ at Eaton’s.
“I have that book,” he told the priest, and sold it to him for 75¢. So was begun the career of the best bookseller Canada has yet seen.
Back from the west and also by necessity back living uncomfortably in my parents’ home, I didn’t waste any time looking for work. As I said, a stockbroker on Adelaide Street called Davidson & Company needed a clerk and I applied and got the job. I was an assistant to the man who processed the transaction slips from the client sales on the floor of the Toronto Stock Exchange, around the corner on Bay Street. Several times a day the slips would be brought up to the office where my immediate boss and I recorded them and passed them to the people who recorded them against the customer’s accounts.
The best part of that job was the Saturday overtime. Friday, being often the busiest day in the markets because it was the last day of the week, often caused enough backup that my boss Dick and I would need to come in Saturday mornings to clean up the residue. At noon or so Dick would repair to the pub next door and I would head out with my extra overtime money—which was usually about $17.00—to Old Favorites Bookstore, then in its second venue on Front Street, between Yonge and Bay.
I still remember clearly the first time I had entered Old Favorites. I was awed, filled with the sort of wonder that would have been more appropriate to a cathedral than a bookstore. Earlier I had browsed there when I was seeking a break from the onerous and humiliating process of looking for work. In fact I had asked Lou Morris, the amiable, gentle owner, for a job. After a lengthy conversation he had pretty much decided to hire me when a chance question revealed that I couldn’t type. So I didn’t get the job. Typing was essential to Lou, for the job involved quoting from the huge file of customer-wants that Old Favorites maintained.
Surrounded with high shelves, seemingly endless rows of them, their height resulting in an atmosphere of gloom which caused the whole place to even more resemble a cathedral, all I could do was wonder at such a profusion of riches.
I spent the rest of that day, till closing time, looking, removing books from the shelves to examine them, all without any of the familiarity which I might have possessed had I had a normal education to fall back on.
Almost everything was new, unknown, mysterious, each book a possible experience waiting to happen. It was as though each book was trying to speak to me, with its title, or its colour, or even its bulk. Take me, read me, they seemed to be silently begging.
From this uncountable treasure trove I had to choose titles, and I had nothing to work with except the odd name of a known writer that I had read.
I would spend the rest of each Saturday deciding on which books I would spend my $17.00. General used books then sold for an average $2.00 to $5.00, so I could buy three or four books every visit. But measuring a book not as a monetary cost, but as a reflection of an hour-to-two hour’s work, made final decisions seem even more significant—a mistake could be seen as what it was, a waste of valuable time. And with no literary education or much experience to fall back on, I ended up reading some pretty weird stuff.
Within a year, the pull of adventure, so insidiously ingrained in me by Richard Halliburton, plus increasing boredom at the stock market, caused me and my pals to decide to go to Europe. That we had no money seemed irrelevant. Landing in England with hardly anything, we found that we could at least get work in London; I tried a few different jobs, some of which seemed incredible to spoiled young North Americans. Jobs under medieval conditions in factories where one worked from 6 am to 6 pm (compulsory overtime it was called.) Sometimes one saw two or three generations of the same family in the factory. Probably at fifteen or so dad took his son to the factory, so he too could put in a lifetime of drudgery. We were starting to get a taste of how horribly pampered North Americans were.
We lived in Bayswater, then still fairly rundown, while in adjoining Notting Hill Gate, there had been recent race riots.
Freezing to death in the worst climate I’d experienced (at least in western Canada you were warm as soon as you got inside), we learned what the English had put up with after the war. There were still huge craters all over the east end, shilling meters for electricity and gas, heat so pitiful that we had to gather in the kitchen every evening with the oven on and its door opened, hoping to keep warm until bedtime, when we donned our sweaters and overcoats before climbing under the covers. It’s a wonder that the English as a race has survived. I still don’t understand how they propagated in that cold.
But London was still a wonderful place to be young and poor. Free galleries, museums and the greatest neighbourhood libraries I’ve ever seen. And as always, books provided so much.
I went on to spend several years living in London in the winters
and hitch-hiking all over Europe from April to November. There were several countries where one could easily get work, although it was naturally the work assigned to immigrants everywhere, those who couldn’t speak the country’s language: washing dishes, digging ditches (and graves), cleaning highways; the lowliest work, anything, in fact, which would provide the food to go on. I learned a lot about prejudice and xenophobia. When you are on the lowest levels you get a reprise of what I had learned as a young kid working as a caddy. You are of no importance, beneath the radar. In foreign countries you are subjected to that ancient instinctive dislike and distrust of the different. In Europe, if you were poor, you learned the real structure; you lived in parks, under bridges, in abandoned buildings. You also lived with the indifference and contempt of those people who operate on assumption and prejudice. My real education was always going on. But being so poor, it was always necessary to be somewhere which would allow a quick return to England. Which meant I never did visit Italy or Greece or the Middle East, although I spent most of a year in Tangiers and several years in Spain, through the great good luck of getting a job in a printing plant.
It was a communal atmosphere we seekers lived in. The grapevine would provide means to keep contact with a growing crowd of fellow travellers in most of the cities of western Europe.
Always there were books and talk of books; ideas were fuel, knowledge, the search for truth our passion.
In Paris, I hung around the Beat Hotel, mostly full of British and American writers or pseudo-writers, where we would congregate, stoned on the ubiquitous marijuana and the other drug of choice then, amphetamines, which caused us to sit up for days without sleep, reading the latest writing and passionately discussing it. Heroin was just then insinuating itself into the scene and later several of my friends and acquaintances succumbed to overdoses.
Once I got quite sick, along with being strung out on amphetamines. Taking pity, an American from Boston who lived there allowed me to sleep on the floor of his room during the days—the floor only, the
bed was forbidden. I couldn’t really blame him, as we never bathed; the only washing we ever managed was the occasional cold-water sponging. But along with the amphetamines, the constant clatter of typewriter keys from the next room ensured I rarely slept, at best dozing for brief periods. The man in the next room typed all day, every day, until 6 pm or so, when he would go down to the narrow bar downstairs. That man was William Burroughs, already treated with deference and respect because of Naked Lunch. We didn’t then know how important Naked Lunch would become, but we did know it was a very powerful book. We didn’t know its eventual effect on American literature, but we certainly knew that it had already changed our generation’s literature forever.
That summer, living in the back of a truck parked under Pont Neuf in Paris, Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, just published, had been passed around from hand to hand and read with great excitement. It was, of course, the first edition, which got rattier and rattier as everyone read it. Now, a fine copy of that first edition sells for $7,000.00 to $10,000.00. My crowd certainly contributed to its present scarcity.
I then went to Morocco and Spain for most of four years. I loved Spain and I loved the noble people who live there, an affection which has never diminished. I wanted to stay in that wonderful place which so fascinates foreigners, especially North Americans, and I studied the language and seriously sought work. Which is how I came to get a job in a publishing and printing plant. When I adanced far enough with the language and could read a bit, a Spanish friend gave me a volume of Lorca’s plays and as ever, when I could use books, my language skills blossomed and I became quite fluent. I read little modern Spanish history because Franco’s censors allowed only their version of events to be published. But so deep was my fascination that back in Canada I ended up with a major collection of some five hundred books on the Spanish Civil War, now in the University of Toronto.
After three years, during which I learned the essentials of bookbinding, I left Spain and returned to Paris where I lived in a seedy hotel (even then, $2.00 a night meant just what you can imagine).
My parents, by now uncertain if they would ever see me again, offered to pay the fare back to Canada, but I took a couple of weeks to decide. I was starving again, surviving on less than a $1.00 a day for food, wandering the Paris streets, looking in shop windows at food I was unable to buy. The only safe places were the English language bookshops, George Whitman’s Shakespeare and Company, across from Notre Dame, and the shop run by, I think, a Swedish woman on the Rue de Seine.
But I was now also experiencing a recurrence of my old
nemesis: boredom. But this time it came in an entirely novel way: instead of the old familiar boredom of jobs, I realized I was bored by my lifestyle. I was sick of drugs and inane pointless conversations with stoned hippies. I was sick of listening to putative writers and artists prophesying their eventual triumph and fame. And I was sick of trying to figure out how to get enough money to eat everyday, of the incessant conversations about attempts to bleed more money from helpless parents so one could relax for a week or a month.
For a bunch of people who considered ourselves refugees from capitalism and respectability, we spent an inordinate amount of time discussing money. It was like my starving period, where all we talked about was food. This crowd, intent on changing society, was obsessed I came to realize with what we purported to despise.
I was depressed and dismayed by the number of junkies amongst my friends and acquaintances, especially when word would filter back through the grapevine about those who had succumbed to overdoses or other drug-related deaths. A few years later that would include old friend Don Tough, one of my original “reading” pals, who had travelled to Europe along with Alfred and me all those years ago. He had become an addict, and stayed in England where he could legally maintain his habit. Except for one short visit back to Canada he made some years later I never saw him again. Another overdose.
But mostly I was bored and disgusted by the aimlessness of it all. I was almost thirty and I knew now what all those years of reading and experience demanded: some aim, a mission. Intelligence needs some direction, some challenge, it needs to be applied to practical aims or it will atrophy.
I began to realize what was necessary. It was time to go home. This phase of my life, this part of my education, was done. I picked up the ticket my parents had sent to the Canadian Embassy and flew back to Canada.
Chapter 3
The Pope’s Bookbinder
One of the things about history which most fascinates me is how events which can be seemingly so insignificant when they occur can have such resounding consequences later. This is what learning bookbinding did for me.
I got into bookbinding by a fluke, just as I later did with bookselling. There are deep parallels. The truth is bookbinding, like bookselling, is not really a job; it is a vocation. For anyone who might not know the difference between a job and a vocation, a vocation is a job where you don’t earn enough to live on.
As I mentioned earlier, I lived in Spain for a while, and one day I got a job in a printing plant. I thought it would be more interesting doing printing than my usual work in those European countries, but I hadn’t counted on the difficulty of setting type in a language which I spoke abominably, albeit fluently. And the linotype machines were so primitive they scared me. They must have been the original models, belching gasses and liquids of unknown composition but of obvious chemical danger. Even with the lax safety standards prevalent then in Spain they only allowed the operators to work a year or so without a break because of the lead, so I wasn’t about to tempt fate. But I discovered that they had a small bookbinding department of three or four guys, mostly binding periodicals and government publications, and one man who bound leather to order under the direction of the maestro of the bindery. He, it turned out, was a master binder who had been properly trained in the European apprenticeship tradition.
When I got a chance I grabbed the opportunity to take up binding. I thought it would be an interesting potential hobby when I was back in Canada since it was both creative and practical—after all, damaged books could be rescued from oblivion—and it was a solitary activity, which suited my temperament, and most important, it involved handling books, my lifelong passion and love. And of course, being ignorant, it seemed to me fairly simple.
I was able to join the binding department and was put to work at the bottom, that is, preparing books for sewing, taking them apart, cleaning off the signatures, and then sewing them. As it happened, I liked sewing, I liked the preparation, getting the signatures ready and the methodical stacking and sewing gave me plenty of time to daydream—perfect work for the lazy kid I was. I loved to watch a pile of signatures rising neatly until a full book manifested itself, ready for covering.
I gradually advanced, learning most of the basic techniques and, more importantly, practicing them incessantly. For as anyone who has done binding will know, the basic techniques are fairly straightforward, but what is needed is practice—and yet more practice.
I was soon made assistant to the guy who bound leather to order and was then able to watch all the advanced techniques and, gradually, to practice them myself under the eye of my teacher. As a bonus I was allowed, on my own time, to bind my own books if I paid for the materials, and eventually I had all of the few English books I possessed in leather bindings. Not always appropriately bound I’m afraid, as those who have seen them know. Because I only owned a few English books, about half paperbacks, and because of a complete lack of any historical knowledge of bookbinding, my bindings are often inappropriate for two reasons: one being a lack of relation between form and content (in the most extreme case this resulted in a Penguin paperback being bound in full morocco with raised bands, gilt); and more embarrassing, books which were bound in somewhat questionable taste.
In my defence, it should be understood that this bindery was commercial and I saw only work that was done there, so th
ere was no criteria with which to compare except the work of the maestro and my boss, who himself owed his skills to the maestro.
Both these men were of the excess school of binding, that is, the more garish the better: this meant more and bigger false bands and tons of gilt, gilt and more gilt; and edges gauffered with four colours of dye hammered into them. All this embarrassing excess is also evident in my own bindings: in other words, the more or bigger-must-be-better syndrome.
Curiously, the only exceptions to this are my earliest attempts, when I was so concerned with simply finishing a binding properly that I kept to basic technique. Those earliest bindings are the most aesthetically pleasing, a compelling argument against too much education. The worst example of any of my bindings, one which gets shown only to my closest friends, exhibits all those vulgar elements I mentioned, combined with excruciatingly bad taste. The book in question is the Modern Library Giants edition of Freud’s Collected Works. I have to digress here. This was, after all, the sixties—just about every kid in Europe had Freud’s Collected Works in his knapsack. In fact, while I’m at it I might as well tell you some of the other books I rebound: The Tao Te King, The Bhagavad Gita, The I Ching, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls (then banned in Spain, incidentally), and Joyce’s Ulysses (also then banned in Spain). And Petronius. And my beloved Knut Hamsun, who along with Ezra Pound and Celine is one of those great writers who continue to embarrass their admirers by their flirtations with Nazism. There was also my morocco-bound Penguin edition of what I, along with Somerset Maugham, consider perhaps the greatest novel ever written: The Charterhouse of Parma. As you can see, I was educating myself and searching for answers,
