by David Mason
The first edition of The Golden Dog was published in New York and Montreal in 1877. It was printed in Rouses Point, NY, just across the border, a ploy by the publisher to protect Kirby by securing a U.S. copyright, but which backfired, because Lovell, the publisher, after printing in the States, neglected to register it for U.S. copyright. And then, because it was published first in the U.S., he also lost Canadian copyright protection as well, leaving Kirby with no legal rights at all. Many editions were issued for years, both pirated and legal ones, and it continues to be reprinted, but I have never seen any copy of any of those many editions signed by Kirby. The whole story is fascinating and it can be found in the bibliographical essay published by Dr. Elizabeth Brady in the Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada, #15 for 1976 (Toronto, 1977). In fact I sold that copy to Elizabeth Brady’s then husband, as a gift for her, and as her essay shows it is part of her important Kirby collection which is now at Queen’s University.
I will say little about the scout as collector because a scout collecting is much the same as a collector collecting, although his experiences as a dealer or scout will have taught him a few of the necessary lessons perhaps a bit earlier and perhaps a bit more forcefully because of his experiences in bookstores.
I will, however, reiterate what I concluded many years ago and state at every opportunity—my belief that one can’t really excel at any function which relates to books unless one is a collector and frequents used bookshops. That is, you can’t be a good librarian, a good archivist, or even a good academic if you have no experience amassing a collection on your own for your personal use by frequenting bookshops. This said, it follows that I also believe neither can one be a good bookseller if one doesn’t collect. This view would be widely disputed in the trade. Indeed, I would guess that a very high number of dealers would disagree.
I think many—maybe half—of dealers would claim that a dealer who collects causes problems with clients, especially a conflict of interest, and that it is generally not proper for someone who is supposedly trying to make a living. This view is often as vehemently held as my contention that the opposite is true.
Having considered all the arguments against the dealer/scout as collector, I remain adamant: a dealer who does not collect cannot experience the emotional passion which fuels all collecting, thereby omitting from the equation its very essence. And with that lack of perspective he loses the ability to emotionally connect with his clients—and for that matter, even with books. We have all experienced the Doctor who is so accustomed to his own omnipotence that he has forgotten that he is also a human being and becomes so emotionally distanced from the suffering and fears of his patients as to get the reputation as “very good
perhaps, but cold”.
When one considers the collector as a scout it is of course
necessary to drop a major part of the motivation which we have ascribed to the dealer/scout: profit.
True collectors do not collect with profit in mind. In my experience, profit doesn’t seem to be even a long-term concern
with most collectors. Sometimes, chatting with a collector about their collection, the collector might mention some horrendous price he has paid for a single item; but I can’t really remember ever hearing one speculate what their outlay for a fairly big long-term collection may have cost them, even in general terms. And it is only with collectors who are getting quite elderly that one even has conversations about the eventual dispersal of their collection.
I am certain that profit has never been a concern of all of the real collectors I have known. If this assumption is correct we can infer therefore that collectors who are concerned with and constantly stress monetary value are essentially speculators and not real collectors. Maybe that’s why so many of them disappear so quickly.
Collecting is an emotional process, a hobby which seems to so engage the collector and which provides so much pleasure and comfort that I believe monetary reward is of little interest. When collectors sell their collections or put their books up at auction I think the price realized is for the collector only a measure for himself—a tribute perhaps to his cleverness and passion—but not really a monetary concern. Some collectors plan to give their collections to institutions on their death—and some do it before. Some are of the school that believes that they should return their books to the open market to give later collectors a chance to own them. Mostly though, a man who has spent many years acquiring books and assembling a coherent collection by imposing his knowledge, experience and passion on a subject will be very proud, and rightfully so, of his accomplishment, and will want to have what in effect is his creation left intact both for future scholars and as a tribute to himself. For that is what a collection is. Whatever other value it might contain, a collection is a monument to the person who builds it.
We have a man in Toronto who obsessively collects all of modern philosophy (this would be from the early nineteenth-century to today). This man previously formed the greatest collection of the work of Bertrand Russell in the world. A professor of philosophy, unmarried and therefore free of many constraints, he spent almost every summer scouting every bookshop in Britain and would return with three or four hundred additions to his Russell collection every year, in later years mostly magazine appearances, and often books where the index merely cited Russell, sometimes only once. Obviously he had the book-collecting disease badly and incurably by this time, the compulsion for completeness having become an obsession.
He once gave an address about collecting where he began by telling his audience that his collecting career had started when he collected the printed cards used to separate layers in the old style Shredded Wheat boxes. The roar of laughter which this elicited from the audience indicated that most of the rest of us had done the same thing as kids.
Anyway, this man, when he pretty much ran out of Russell to buy, focused his obsessional habit on the entire field of modern philosophy, and did so with the same intensity he had applied to Russell. Both his Russell collection and, later, his philosophy collection were gifted to the University of Toronto, and every five years or so two appraisers are called in to value the latest addition, which is so large it generally takes most of a week to appraise. This professor (his name is John Slater, as almost any dealer in the world will have guessed by now) usually drops by when we are about to start on the latest batch to point out things which might escape our notice. This is usually necessary because much of it is so obscure only another philosophy professor might know who some of these people are.
It was very common for John to show us a book, the author completely unknown to us, and inform us what a sleeper it was at £1 or £2 or whatever. This would no doubt be a very scarce book, but the real point is that no one else seeing that book would even know who the author was, nor care. So it was a sleeper only to the man who found it, as in this case.
One year John casually mentioned to me, “You know, Dave, my collection will now be the most complete modern philosophy collection anywhere in the world.”
“Well, John,” I replied, “I guess you mean the largest in
private hands.”
“No, I mean anywhere in the world. I know that because I’ve checked my collection of American philosophy and it’s better than that of the British Library, and my holdings of English philosophy are better than what is in the Library of Congress.”
As I meditated on that later I realized that it indeed would be true. An important point. What that means is that one person, on his own, with imagination and passion, can supercede the resources of perhaps the two greatest public repositories in the English-speaking world. Think about that before you dismiss the private collector as a befuddled eccentric.
Vanity is the downfall of many scouts. The urge to boast of great finds often causes the scout to reveal his secret triumphs, especially late at night when the alcohol is flowing. And it’s not just scouts and dealers who do themselves
in, figuratively—collectors do it too. A smart dealer always has his ears attuned for the verbal slips which mean useful knowledge for the future. But just in case you might think I am revealing these secrets out of some innate superiority, let me admit right now that this syndrome is so familiar to me because I share the character flaws which cause it. I am also guilty. The temptation to tell the story of a great find, especially when you are the brilliant hero of the story, can prove overwhelming even when you know that in the telling you will be revealing things better kept secret. An example: many years ago when the Canadian art-collecting market became popular it overflowed into books. The new collectors of art, educating themselves, sought reference and history books on Canadian art, causing the field to become very expensive, rising prices reflecting both demand and intrinsic importance. Art collectors began to frequent bookshops. It became a common occurrence that an unknown visitor would casually inquire of a bookseller if he had any issues of a book-collecting magazine called The Colophon. We always knew what that meant.
The Colophon, perhaps the most beautiful and ambitious magazine on book collecting ever produced, appeared as a quarterly from 1930 to 1950. It was originally issued in ornate decorated board covers, with a number of different articles in every issue, each one designed and printed by a different fine printer. It was a beautiful piece of work, and because of the interest in book illustration it often contained etchings and woodcuts commissioned for articles, or simply on their own. So it was that in 1932 they commissioned a print from David Milne, a drypoint etching, entitled Hilltop, which has become very collectable, partly because it is one of very few signed Milnes that is accessible to a Milne admirer who is not rich.
The perhaps apocryphal story about it is that Milne did the etching by running the plate through the wringer of a washing machine, which caused wear to the plate, which ended up resulting in four states of the plate. This plate, extracted from the Colophon, readily sold from $1,500.00 to $2,000.00 then, and those of us who knew that often would put out feelers to American dealers and friends to supply us that issue. In those days single issues sold for $20.00 to $25.00.
Some art collectors learned where it had been published, which explains the seemingly casual inquiries for the Colophon we started to receive. Some dealers would even buy a complete run of the Colophon, expensive even then due to its importance and beauty—not to mention it’s very interesting content—just to get the Milne print. Even today, when one see complete runs of the Colophon offered in the market they are usually described as “missing a plate from issue No. Five.” Once, scouting in a huge used bookstore in San Francisco, I went to the Books on Books section to find that it contained only one issue of The Colophon
and it was No. Five! Probably part of a bigger run, it had remained unsold because half of the back-strip was missing. My great good luck, because it was priced at $7.00 and the Milne plate was still in it. That find paid for the whole trip.
All this was ruined by the vain boasting of Richard Landon, the Director of the Fisher Library at the University of Toronto, a known frequenter of bookstores and a serious private book collector himself. Landon once found in Michael Thompson’s shop in Los Angeles a copy of No. Five for $10.00 or $20.00, and later over drinks couldn’t resist one-upping Thompson by boasting of the sleeper he had just bought from him. This was particularly galling for me because until then I had been buying an average of two or three copies every trip to Los Angeles from Thompson and other dealers—mostly for $20.00 each. Thompson, being a very smart bookseller, continued to offer them to me, but rather than $20.00 I now had to pay $100.00 (US) and, of course, even that price rose in time. But I still bought them and Thompson and I continued to move them along for a while—a nice lucrative sideline for us both. However, gossip being what it is, that only lasted a couple of years before too many others caught on and another sleeper disappeared, the result of Landon’s loose lips. But that wasn’t Landon’s only sin. Another Canadian book often found cheaply in the States was Louis Hemon’s Maria Chapdelaine, illustrated by the important Canadian artist Clarence Gagnon, published in Paris in 1933. Because the book had been first published in 1916 and the French-Canadian artist Gagnon was not well-known outside Canada, it appeared to be just another of those later illustrated editions of literary classics that the French so love to issue, to the wonder of the rest of the world.
The bubble burst one year when the New Yorker published a profile of Larry McMurtry, the writer and Academy-Award-winning screenwriter, who has been an antiquarian bookseller for some fifty years. One of the people the author of the profile chose to interview was Landon, who could not resist boasting that he had bought a copy of Maria Chapdelaine from McMurtry’s Washington store for $10.00. Even worse, he revealed its value, (it was then selling for upwards of $2,000.00), to the entire readership of the New Yorker. Soon we were getting offered the Milne print for $1,000.00 to $1,500.00 by our American colleagues and Maria Chapdelaine for even more. Landon seemed unperturbed when he was informed that his loose lips significantly lowered the average yearly income of half the dealers in Canada.
Now I find myself back where I started, Justin Schiller’s visit, which prompted these musings and memories of my forty-some years in the trade.
While my general purpose has been to amuse, with some of the many stories that long-time dealers can relate endlessly, it seems clear to me that the real purpose in this and all anecdotal histories of the booktrade, is to impart some sense of the sheer richness of the bookseller’s life and how important what we do is. I have come to believe that, more important than my or my colleague’s petty concerns or our personal ambitions, the true significance of our work is social, and our main contribution is the salvaging and retention of important artifacts of our civilization. The sense of continuity and the importance of the long-established traditions of the trade are, I hope, apparent here, as they are so well-reflected in the sadly few memoirs left by my betters in the trade.
For many years, in discussions about the literature of the trade, I tended to praise Charles Everitt’s Adventures of a Treasure Hunter as a wonderful book for booksellers. It has always been the first book I give to recently hired employees to introduce them to the literature of bookselling, but it has always been received with a mixed reaction. Some liked it—or said they did—others barely bothered to mask their indifference, and quite a few have eventually expressed open contempt for my choice.
My choice for second best is David Randall’s Dukedom Large Enough, but the book most book people seem to prefer is David Magee’s Infinite Riches, which is a delightful book by a delightful man and presents civilized reminiscences by a very witty Englishman who transplanted to San Francisco and never left. That Magee personally collected Wodehouse will tell you what to expect from his own book. The first time I met Magee he welcomed me into his house, where he was ensconced in a sunken living-room space having a gin and tonic with a visiting collector and exchanging gossip and witticisms. It was not yet eleven am. The bookshelves in the area behind this space had huge gaps. “Yes it’s those Heritage boys,” he said, “they’re up here buying books about once a month. I can’t keep the shelves full.” The Heritage boys: Ben and Louis Weinstein had founded Heritage Books in Los Angeles in the early-to-mid-sixties.
They were very aggressive buyers for many years, building one of the most impressive and successful bookselling firms of the twentieth century. Magee was, by this time I guess, buying back the libraries of those of his collectors who had died before him, and like many older long-experienced dealers he was either out-of-date with the aggressive pricing favoured by ambitious young dealers or perhaps—what I prefer to believe—he just didn’t much care about profit at this stage of his life. He was very cordial and inscribed a copy of his book “To my young Canadian colleague.” I was so impressed by Magee that those images played in my mind for a long time. That’s how I want to end my so-called career, I thought—not so much swilling
gin and tonic at eleven am, but enjoying the fruits of all those years of struggle, surrounded by old friends, cronies, and the learned and civilized people that booksellers get to deal with, ambition and money being relegated to where they belong at that age—down near the bottom of the list.
Now I’d like to provide an answer to a philosophical dilemma which has haunted the booktrade certainly during my time and probably since some Babylonian or Greek manuscript peddler hawked his wares in some early pre-Christian marketplace. For as long as I’ve been around there has existed a controversy over whether bookselling should be considered a trade or a profession. Well, here is the answer, and like all great truths it is succinct: Bookselling is a trade; bookscouting is a profession.
Chapter 9
Britnell’s
The Albert Britnell Bookshop was a great bookstore, probably the best in the country, and by the time it petered out, another victim of the tumultuous changes we are still in the process of absorbing, it was being run by the fourth generation of the Britnell family.
Albert Britnell had emigrated to Canada around 1887 and founded the original shop, which was on Yonge Street, down near Eatons. By the ’30s it was run by his son, Roy Britnell, one of the great characters of the book trade and a man for whom I had an enormous respect and affection.
Every year Albert or Roy or maybe both of them had travelled back to Britain and brought back huge loads of books for stock. This was in the time when England supplied the English-speaking world with what was no doubt seen as an endless source of wonderful and very cheap books.
