by David Mason
I started to see that for them the gesture had nothing to do with money, but by giving me money they wanted to show their appreciation for my part in it. I swallowed my distaste and accepted.
What made it even better was that I badly needed the money then, although I didn’t tell my relatives that. An added gift was the pride and pleasure my mother and father took in my accomplishment, even though I never told them all the sordid details of their son’s descent into the world of blackmail and chicanery.
And, of course, it should be obvious to the reader, that of the twenty-three copies of the infamous letter, one copy survives. It is in the Baillie collection at the University of Toronto, although access is restricted. I made sure that it was there for the future record.
I do not believe that my promise to destroy them all bound me to do that. I am a bookseller. My vocation demands that I save the written record, not destroy it. To ask a bookseller to destroy part of the historical record would be like asking a doctor to assist in a suicide; it would be a professional sin. No one has the right to ask that. I have in my personal archive a letter to me from a very well-known Canadian poet on certain personal matters. In a postscript she adds: “Dave, please destroy this letter. I know you will.” What she should have known is that I wouldn’t do that anymore than she would steal lines from another poet.
I hope that this account shows that I was a very accomplished blackmailer and that I had the time of my life being one.
But it’s been all downhill from there.
While I held Swann in contempt for his part in this debacle,
I found it ultimately sad, for he had impeccable credentials in his field. After an illustrious career at the Ashmolean, which included the publication of two books in his field of expertise, which had given him worldwide respect amongst his peers, he chose to effectively wipe out all of that by foolishly choosing local fame and no doubt attractive financial recompense over his real vocation.
Closer to home, I’ve known two librarians—both of whom had the real goods—true librarians, a much rarer type than might generally be realized, who opted for what they had mistakenly considered “advancement”—accepting executive positions with much more prestige and, of course, more money. Both came to realize that they had damaged their real careers.
For, as true librarians, their real loyalty was to books, and they exchanged, in effect, their vocations for the illusory rewards of power and advancement.
One of these men bluntly admitted this to me years later. His “advancement” had resulted in him spending the rest of his career chairing stupid meetings. He ended his lament by saying “I never got to play with the books again,” as effective a condemnation of power and prestige in the book world as anything I’ve heard.
The other one, who in his early years showed promise of being one of the two or three greatest librarians in the country, just sort of fizzled out. He and I remained mutually friendly and for years had dealings (although, even there, it was business and administrative matters, not book-related things). He became (I can’t bring myself to say “evolved into”) a consummate bureaucrat. Whenever I brought him some problem he would invariably reply, “I can’t do that Dave. I have to think of the consequences”—that financial restraint, that executive or union-driven decree—“I can’t do that—they’ll have my scalp if I do.”
He was defeated because he chose fancy rewards over his natural vocation. The single saddest aspect of his wrong decision was that, after initially showing such enormous understanding and feel for books, he didn’t enter my store or buy a book for himself from me or I expect any other bookseller for the last twenty-five years after he chose “advancement” and security over his vocation.
The moral I extracted from these two examples, among others, is that a vocation is a delicate thing. It must be nurtured and tended with the same sensitivity and intelligence as, say, a marriage. We are all, every day, offered inducements and temptations which seem to offer high rewards. A man with a true vocation must guard the integrity of that vocation with the same zeal that he affords to his family or his country. There can be no compromises of one’s truth, just as one can’t be a sometime patriot.
Both my friends lived to deeply regret their error, reduced to spending their time waiting for the freedom of retirement.
Chapter 11
Learning My Trade 1:
How to Scout
It might appear as if, in business three or four years and with my first U.S. scouting trip under my belt, I had progressed to a certain sophistication, but the truth is I was merely following my instincts—only forty years later do I see what I didn’t know then, that my instincts were pretty good.
It is not surprising that I didn’t realize that I was a natural, because I had either failed at everything I’d tried or, worse, lost interest after showing initial talent.
As a skinny twelve-year-old, I once shot an 84 in golf. Playing with mostly wooden-shafted clubs so early in the morning that we would be soaked with dew to the waist before we reached the first green, I was very good but inconsistent. But I didn’t, once again, have enough interest to persist.
To understand my real education in scouting it is necessary to go back to my early years in my first store, as it was there that luck gave me a great opportunity to learn my trade.
One day I received a call from Cicely Blackstock, the librarian at the University of Toronto then responsible for book selection in Canadiana and Canadian Literature. She asked if I would be interested in taking on a project with the university. I certainly was. I was excited and flattered to be asked, and I felt that it would be an opportunity to both learn a lot and prove myself with an important client. We made an appointment and Miss Blackstock explained what the University wanted. The project was straightforward—to supply the University of Toronto with every piece of poetry, fiction and drama written by a Canadian which it didn’t own already. Now, when I say every piece of poetry, librarians will know that I mean precisely what I say. Every scrap, vanity publication or self-published piece of junk written by a Canadian was wanted. A collection of that sort may not teach a researcher much about poetry, but it will reflect a lot about Canada and how Canadians think, so amassing all the junk is not as silly as it might first appear. A country’s literature is not just the Shakespeares and Miltons: it is also the hacks and mediocrities. To accomplish our project, Miss Blackstock marked the university’s holdings on a copy of Watters. I was free to supply listed items that the university didn’t hold, as well as any item of Canadian literature that wasn’t listed by Watters. Here I should explain that “Watters” is the term used by booksellers and librarians to refer to a major, pioneering bibliographic project undertaken by Reginald Watters, a Canadian librarian. The full title is A Checklist of Canadian Literature and Background Materials.—To 1950. Watters’ students solicited the holdings of all major Canadian institutions and a few foreign libraries who had large holdings of Canadian literature. These included the British Museum, the Library of Congress, and Brown University in Rhode Island, which has a huge collection of Canadian literature. As far as I can determine, different universities sent copies of their file cards, which often carried erroneous information. Watters and his student assistants used these to compile the Checklist. Consequently, new errors were added to existing ones and, of course, many books were missed, but the first result, published in 1959, was the only game in town and a necessary pioneering effort. The second edition, published in 1972, was revised and extended to include the period from 1950 to 1960. It is also faulty, with less justification, but is still the only game in town. Although extended bibliographic treatment is now available on important Canadian writers, Watters remains an essential reference tool for Canadian literature as a whole. I must stress here that the books I was seeking were mostly the obscure titles that the university hadn’t bothered with in earlier years when it had concentrated on buying the work
of the important Canadian writers, but which were now required to fill the gaps in the collection. So there I was, one minute a used bookseller without books or customers, the next a special agent on a crucial mission.
Having absorbed the excitement of being hired, I had to face reality. How was I going to supply these books? Where and how would I find them? I had only one idea, and it was limited. I went to all of my colleagues and explained my position and asked if I could go through their stock, take what I needed and pay them after I got paid. My colleagues were very generous, or probably just indifferent, and I was allowed access to stock buried in basements and other repositories of the unsaleable—the long-forgotten and unwanted junk. I would spend the better part of a day scrounging through places that hadn’t been cleaned in many years. The length of time books had laid there unwanted would be reflected in their prices and the amount of dust covering them. I would pick up a book, laboriously check it against my list, and every once in a while—triumph—a book I needed would surface. At such moments I felt as though I had discovered pure gold and not only a $7.00 book that I was going to sell for $8.00. The system was working! I was too green to know even relative scarcity or values, so if a colleague’s price was $10.00 my assumption was that my colleague must know more than I did (after all, I knew nothing) and that, therefore, the book’s value was what he said it was. The truth was that none of these books had anything but a relative value, based not on merit but on general scales for used books. In those days, most books, not special or greatly sought-after, sold in the $3.00 to $10.00 range. The price was based on such important factors as thickness, interest of title, and colour, but I was too raw to know this. Later I learned that it wasn’t just me who was ignorant
about Canadian literature; so was every other dealer except my old boss Jerry Sherlock. Jerry actually knew scarcity, one of the few safe factors in the book world. My ignorance ensured that I never got to benefit from what we in the trade call “sleepers,” books grossly underpriced which, when located by a knowledgeable dealer, can be fairly priced very much higher. So, generally, I would get a twenty percent discount from a colleague and add ten percent to the price. Often I was too frightened to do that with books priced over $15.00, and chose to operate on just the discount. On any given one of these expeditions, I would buy perhaps six to ten books for $60.00 to $75.00, and then send these to the university with a bill for $75.00 to $100.00. This seems a pitifully small amount now for what would usually be most of a day’s work, but I was delighted with it. My monthly rent divided by working days was $13.00 a day (this was for both the store and home, for by this time I had opened my first actual store in the old Gerrard Street Village) and each day I put aside the first $13.00 I took in to ensure that I would always have the rent for the first of the month. There were days when I didn’t even take in the $13.00. So a gross profit of $15.00 to $20.00 for a day’s work was most welcome.
Soon I had scrounged through every filthy basement within travelling distance of Toronto. Unless one of my colleagues bought a big lot of Canadian literature, my resources were exhausted. I had to think of something new, so I started to study Watters, hoping to get ideas. Repeated study of the titles of the books I needed did indeed show a certain pattern. The books I wanted to find were mostly by obscure or unknown writers and had been published in the United States or, less often, in England. Gradually an idea formed. I would prepare want lists of all these obscure authors and titles, one for the United States and one for England. I would then put part of the list in a full page ad in the AB, a U.S. trade magazine, and see what happened. If that worked, I would advertise in the Clique, the British trade equivalent.
Now a word about the AB: AB is short for Antiquarian Bookman, which was a weekly trade magazine that contained some minor editorial matter and a few obituaries but was mostly devoted to lists of books wanted by dealers and libraries as well as lists of books for sale by dealers. It was the trade vehicle that we used to search for books (usually by title, although small box ads were also used for searches by subject or author—“everything by or relating to …”). I would advertise and those responding with quotations would be sent my full list. While I was compiling my list it occurred to me to add to it various writers’ names who were much sought-after and very saleable here but not needed for my project, the idea being that I might get some quotations for books that I could buy at a good price for regular stock. There were then several Canadian writers who had been very popular in the States and had been largely published there, but whom American quoters would probably not know were sought-after and selling at a premium in Canada. A few examples are Charles G.D. Roberts, Susanna Moodie, Sara Jeanette Duncan, Morley Callaghan, Ernest Thompson Seton, Stephen Leacock (who had been very popular in the United States in his heyday), the humourist T.C. Haliburton, and such poets as Bliss Carman and E J. Pratt. Also, just starting to be recognized, were the major Canadian writers of today: Margaret Laurence, Mordecai Richler, Irving Layton, and Earle Birney. Soon I had a lengthy list, baited with my cunning little additions. I sent in a full page advertisement and waited with great trepidation. No one else had tried such a thing before and I hadn’t a clue what might ensue. However, I did know what to expect in the way of quotations since I had advertised before and I knew something about the people who quoted books to that magazine.
When you enter a bookstore such as mine you are viewing something which may appear simple but is not. Perhaps the most common question we get in a store is “Where do you find all these books?,” a question booksellers try not to answer, because the system is very complex and any reasonably accurate answer would take far longer than that sort of casual courteous question would warrant. There is a very complex system which has worked reasonably well for centuries, and when you walk into an antiquarian bookshop you are seeing the apex of the pyramid, the upper levels, but even here there is a hierarchy. So if Quaritch and Maggs in London or Kraus in New York represent the pinnacle of the trade, there are books on their shelves that came from a hundred lesser shops from around the world. And underneath the antiquarian shops are the used bookstores, and under these are the junk shops and the antique shops, and under these are the runners, the scouts, the amateurs, and the collectors with a bit of an eye. Please don’t think I refer to these lower levels as in any way inferior, for they are, in fact, as necessary and as important to the well-being of the book trade as the loftiest dealer, although often those lofty dealers would like us to think otherwise. Scientists now point out that every part of the world’s ecosystem affects every other part and that, perhaps, all systems are the same. When Miss Blackstock hired me, she in fact hired about a thousand people. Or to be more precise, she hired me to handle those thousand other book people on her behalf, and I often wondered if she had any idea of the nuts and eccentrics and downright fools and crooks that came as part of the package.
So we can see that there are many people involved in the
antiquarian book world who are invisible to the final customer, and perhaps that is for the best. The people who quoted through Antiquarian Bookman were not perhaps the lowest in the scale, but they included the most eccentric. Anyone who has used the AB as a means of getting books has hundreds of stories about the eccentricities of the quoters, and anybody who used it regularly kept a file of names to be avoided, usually designated “DANGER.”
Actually, most dealers tried not to use it at all, for the paperwork alone could drive you nuts. Most quotations arrived on three-by-five inch file cards or postcards. Now, normal business practice indicates that if you are trying to sell someone something, your first priority is to let potential buyers know what it is you are offering for sale. Not so for quoters from the AB. Many quotations arrived completely illegible, some written in huge scrawl and others with tiny crabbed letters. On one occasion I put in the AB a small block ad requesting anything by a writer whom I collected personally. I received one quotation which was completely incomprehensible except fo
r the author’s surname and the prices for the seven or eight books quoted. I couldn’t decipher a single title. I pondered it for a while, trying to figure out what the books were, but had to give up. I was just going to throw the card in the waste basket when I realized that the prices asked weren’t very high. I decided to take a gamble. I wrote the man: “Dear Sir, Thank you for your quote. Even though I can’t tell what you have quoted me because I can’t read your writing, I have decided to take a chance so I enclose $25.00. Please send all the books. P.S. Please print next time. Yours truly,…” A week later seven books appeared, all written by my author, all in a series he had edited which I had not known about and none of which I had in my collection. Furthermore, all of them were in fine condition and were properly packed (another area of great peril). Unfortunately, this sort of happy resolution was rare. More common were exchanges like the following.
In my early days there was a man who quoted $50.00 U.S. for every book he offered for sale, perhaps on the assumption that sooner or later he would quote one at $50.00 which was actually worth that much and he would sell it. He was famous and this went on for years, so maybe he sold lots of them. Another quoted me an original, signed photograph which turned out to be a frontispiece from a book and signed on the plate—not quite worth the $30.00 I had paid, and certainly not worth the six months and three letters it took to get my money back. The real trick is to not offend the quoter when you ask for the return of your money. It takes a fairly high degree of stupidity to make such an error, and it requires the skills of a politician to tactfully suggest that someone could have made such a mistake without letting on that you actually believe your quoter to be an idiot. My favourite example of the perils of the quotation system is that of a friend of mine who, having sent a man a cheque for a needed book which had been quoted as a fine copy, received a book that was badly dog-eared and filthy, with detached covers which were water-stained and soiled so badly that the title had been obliterated. Sending the book back with a rather sharp note demanding his money back, my friend couldn’t resist asking (even though he knew he shouldn’t get further involved) how someone could possibly describe such a copy as fine. Back came a reply of such unassailable logic that we can only marvel at the quoter’s fine sense of the fitness of things. “Well,” this quoter replied, “if I had told you what it was really like you would not have ordered it, would you?” Another common occurrence was the receipt of a large group of quotation cards on which the quoter forgot to put his name and address. This was particularly painful if the books were very good and inexpensive, because there was no way to contact such a quoter.
