by David Mason
Ten years later a different manager said to me one day: “Mr. Mason, you can tell your father to come and get his Bell shares back. I still haven’t a clue how the book business works, but I can see that you aren’t going to let me down. You can now borrow on your signature.” He then informed me that I now had a $30,000.00 credit line. (Naturally the bank got rid of that man shortly after. That old-fashioned system, used in my father’s time, where a banker made a judgment, shook hands on it and the bank backed him up are long gone.)
Buying is the whole key to the antiquarian booktrade. (Any fool can sell a book, we like to say—it takes a pro to buy one.)
I was ten years in business before I got a chance to buy anything which could be called a library—before that it was scrambling for small lots and scouting other stores, flea markets, church sales, garage sales, anywhere one might find a “sleeper” or a saleable book. Painful as that ten-year period of scrambling and scouting was, punctuated by envy and self-pity as the less
worthy but wealthy and connected scooped all the desirable libraries in town, I was actually learning the skills necessary to excel in anything.
In Toronto—aside from Canadiana—the large academic accumulations and the fancy leather from the mansions of Rosedale usually went to one man, Hugh Anson-Cartwright, who had spent his entire career it seemed cultivating those people for just that reason. Naturally the rest of us were maliciously spiteful about his constant purchases and were certain, in our gossip, that he didn’t pay anything for those libraries. Actually, by chance, years later when I outbid him on two major libraries, I received some evidence of the truth behind our envy, when the owners revealed my competitors’ bids after accepting mine.
Here’re a few more buying anecdotes.
One time on Church Street I came down early on a Saturday morning to find a woman and her teenage daughter waiting on the front porch with an open box full of books, some of them exhibiting signs of having been neglected in some unheated shed for years. They were grimy, damp-stained, and soiled, all things which render collectable books unsaleable. They were all books by Charles G.D. Roberts, both his poetry and his animal stories—which must have been in his time as popular as those of Ernest Thompson Seton and the jungle books of Rudyard Kipling. They had found them in a shed somewhere up north and it wasn’t hard to tell they’d been there for years.
There were also some volumes of Bliss Carman’s poetry. Carman, first cousin and friend to Roberts, is in Blanck’s Bibliography of American Literature, evidence either that they weren’t aware he was a Canadian or that they were reversing the usual system where Canadians, grasping at straws, try to claim writers like Malcolm Lowry and Brian Moore as one of us. Now that we have a serious literature we no longer seem to feel the need to do that, especially given the fact that immigration has supplied us with quite a few good writers born in other places in the world.
I didn’t even open any of the books. What did it matter if they might be first editions, when they were so soiled. Their damaged state was so obvious that I didn’t even bother to check.
The women’s disappointment was so evident that I realized that they probably badly needed the money. I decided I should at least be able to eventually scrounge $100.00 or so from the books, and offered her $50.00 for the box. They cheered up as I gave them the cash, so I thought they’d at least be able to pay for their drive to Toronto.
Later I used some of the techniques I’d learned in bookbinding to clean them up. Although the books had looked horrible, it was largely grime and not water damage, so I got most of it off. In the end I was able salvage almost all of them in presentable condition.
But then I got an embarrassing shock. Opening them, I discovered that they all contained lengthy presentation inscriptions signed by Roberts. They were valuable—in fact, quite valuable!
Roberts is known as a signer in the trade. In his day he was a literary celebrity, and was often asked to read at ladies’ clubs and literary associations. In those days a poet had some status, and in literary circles it was known that Roberts used his prestige, much like a rock star, to seduce awestruck women. He had a reputation as a womanizer and I’ve always believed he used those signings as a seduction technique. Elsie Pomeroy, his biographer, was his long-time girlfriend; I’m told that she hated Roberts’ chasing of literary groupies, but probably kept quiet, hoping he might marry her.
Anyway, I felt terrible. For $50.00, I’d bought from someone who needed money badly books probably worth $1,000.00 or more. And, worse, I’d not taken their name or address, as I usually did, because I thought I was simply doing an act of charity.
I’ve felt guilty ever since. Maybe they will read this and come and get another $500.00. Usually, I keep names and numbers in case I overlook something and decide I should have paid more. You might be surprised to hear that I’ve called people a fair bit over the years to do that. I’ve written elsewhere of the time I sent Al Purdy $200.00 more for a book he’d sold me two years earlier for $10.00, only to find that Al didn’t even remember the book. He didn’t, however, think this any reason to refuse the money.
Aside from making me feel good, I believe this approach is simply good business. People talk. Just as you and I are terrified to call a plumber or electrician or to buy a used car out of a fear of being taken advantage of, so other people are similarly wary of booksellers. Most of what I buy from the public now comes from word-of-mouth referrals.
A bookseller learns early. People don’t know what their books are worth, and since they think we do they distrust us.
A bookseller knows he can steal, but he also knows that if he cheats people he has to admit, at least to himself, that he is a crook. And he also knows it’s like most other issues of morality. There’s no point in being half a crook or an occasional crook—it’s like pregnancy—you are or you aren’t.
One day a woman called me and told me she had some books for sale. I questioned her in the usual manner to try and decide if they warranted a trip out to see them. Booksellers learn many subtle ways to ascertain needed facts over the phone to avoid the waste of time involved in futile trips.
The woman announced that she had sold me a bunch of books some years earlier and mentioned them. I vaguely remembered.
“Yes,” she said, “we later saw one of the books you bought from us at a book fair. You paid us $5.00 for it and you were selling it for $200.00,” she announced, knowingly.
Now, young dealers learn very quickly never to give individual prices for books when they’re buying a lot. I had learned this early on at Joseph Patrick’s.
A young man offered three books of Canadian literature and Jerry Sherlock offered $2.00 each for two of them and $50.00 for the third.
“Okay,” said the man, “you can have the $2.00 ones but I’ve just remembered that my mother wanted to read the other one. (The $50.00 one.) I’ll bring it to you when she’s read it,” he said. Naturally, he didn’t.
What actually happened was that several other dealers around town called later informing us that the kid was trying to peddle it to them for $100.00. But, of course, they didn’t buy it. They didn’t even know it was a scarce book and were actually shocked to find that Jerry had really offered $50.00. I hope that man’s mother enjoyed reading it. This, incidentally, is not a bad example of a dictum I adopted and have repeated many times since. It’s not the public who need to be protected from rapacious booksellers, it’s us who need to be protected from the public.
But in spite of not revealing individual offers, a tactic I’d always used since that time at Jerry’s, this woman’s accusation was a shock anyway.
I paused to absorb it, then said, “Madam, that’s very interesting. But I have two questions for you. The first is based on the fact that I never divulge individual prices for books I buy, unless I’m only buying one—so how do you know that I paid you $5.00 for that $200.00 book?”
�
��Oh,” she said, “you bought about twenty books, so some of them must have only brought us $5.00.” Impeccable logic, I guess.
“Well then, Madam, my second question is this: If you think that I cheated you in our first transaction, stole your books, in fact, then why are you calling me again to sell me more? Do you enjoy being robbed?”
“Well,” she replied, “You were so nice.”
I had to bow before such lovely logic.
I have thousands of anecdotes about people who’ve tried to cheat me, no doubt justifying their behaviour by the assumption that they’re only protecting themselves. Not the most expensive case to me, but for some reason one that still irritates, happened when I travelled all the way to Oakville to view an estate where, knocking on the door of the massive stone house near the front gate, I found that it was only the servant’s house. The owners lived in a huge mansion further in. The books were nothing much, but I bought and paid for several shelves of Stephen Leacock firsts. I made the mistake of leaving them, returning the next day to pick them up. When I got them back to my store I discovered that the woman had torn out the free endpapers in every one, considerably diminishing their value, but worse, ensuring that they would be much harder to sell to any collector.
When I phoned her, she admitted she had done it.
“After all,” she justified, “our family name was in some of them. What if someone we knew saw one? They might think we had been forced to sell our books.”
When I informed her that they were now worth considerably less, she was quite unperturbed. I was learning more of the rich and their attitudes. And I’ve never not taken away a purchase on the spot since.
It’s not just the best buys one remembers. I once had a call from a man who wanted to sell me his deceased mother’s library. This man was dressed in that atrocious style from the seventies which we used to refer to as “full Nanaimo” (I don’t know why—it still seems unfair to the citizens of Nanaimo) which consisted of low-slung checkered bell-bottoms, with a white belt and shoes, shirt open in front and the ubiquitous medallion nestling on a hairy chest. This type usually switched to a Nehru jacket in winter. The man was as slimy in demeanor as his style of dress promised. When I saw the library I wondered what he could possibly have ever had to speak about with his mother. Her library was an entire room in the basement, all neatly sorted, and the books were evidence of a fine mind and scholarly passion. The focus of her collection was the migration of races throughout history. This subject has always fascinated me, and I wanted these books very badly for that reason. There were no valuable books in the collection except to scholars of that subject and of those areas, to whom every single book would be very valuable for its content.
All were neatly arranged by area, another indication to me that the mother had spent her entire life and probably most of her money on her passion.
Her vulgar son didn’t know or care, wanting only as much money as he could wheedle out of me. And he did a pretty good job—I paid him far more than I should have—I wanted those books badly. But I also, having recognized his mother as one of my people, wanted to treat her books with the respect that they—and she—deserved. While we were negotiating (that’s an euphemistic way to describe what was really going on—him selling a used car—me buying a monument to civilization) he happened to mention that his mother had written two books, both unpublished.
“Where are the manuscripts?” I inquired. I could tell from the contents and the arrangement of the books that she was a born scholar. If the manuscripts were not ready for publication I suspected that it would be because of her deficiencies in English, or, more probably, that she may have simply been too shy or too insecure about her lack of academic credentials to actively seek a publisher. No one who had amassed such a library could possibly have written a book that didn’t have considerable research value.
He didn’t know where they were, he said, and he obviously didn’t care. They weren’t going to bring him any money, so why should he? After I succumbed to what he obviously considered his superior worldly skills, I handed him my card and tried to impress on him that should the manuscripts ever surface I knew several universities which would welcome them as gifts. But it was obvious that with no money involved he would throw my card in the trash just as soon as my cheque cleared the bank. I never expected to hear from him, and I didn’t.
When I got the library back to my shop and began that wonderful ritual of sorting, pricing and arranging, my pleasure started to bring me back to normal after the bad taste his sleaziness had left in my mouth. As I opened one book to price it, a sheaf of cash fell out—$200.00. I knew instantly what it was—it was his mother’s secret stash of cash, for emergencies. (My mother kept her secret stash pinned between her window drapes and their lining.)
With anyone else there would have been no moral dilemma—
I would have called the person and returned it. With this guy my moral dilemma lasted no more than about ten seconds—the time it took me to remember his indifference to his mother’s life passion and his obvious contempt for anything so boring as culture. I put the money in my pocket and offered an explanation to the ghost of his mother, with whom I had been communing during the handling of her library.
“He doesn’t deserve it. He’d only blow it on booze or some bimbo. I’ll use your money to buy some nice books, that I know you’d approve of,” I said to the shade of my friend. And I’m sure, however sadly she might have witnessed her son’s desecration of her life’s passion, she would have preferred that I have it.
I’ve found lots of other money in books, but except for that one time, it was never again anything I could spend. I’ve found U.S. Civil War currency and lots of other money from other countries and times. Somewhere I have framed a German banknote, found in a book, in the sum of one hundred thousand Deutschmarks. When I checked it out I discovered it was from 1923 when it would have bought me a loaf of bread—but only if I’d spent it immediately on the morning it was issued, because by the same afternoon it probably wouldn’t have bought a single slice of the loaf.
It’s a very bad idea to hide anything in a book, but some people do. Whenever I’m pricing a library, if I find, in flashing the pages of a book, any ephemera, I flash all the books in that lot, for people who do that tend to do it as a habit. I’ve found, along with all that useless money, some pretty interesting ephemera.
Once, in my earliest shop on Gerrard Street, I was pricing a book when the cover of an envelope fell out with a stamp still affixed. It was a nineteenth-century book and the stamp was dark brown with a picture of Queen Victoria on it and a price of 1d (a penny). That could be a penny black, I thought. Although I knew nothing of stamps, I knew Marty up the street did, for he had collected them as a kid.
I phoned him.
“Marty,” I exclaimed, “I think I’ve found a penny black!”
“Don’t be silly, Dave,” said Marty. “You’re acting like one of those people who think a book-club edition is a first edition. It won’t be.”
But I walked up the street to Marty’s with it just to see for certain.
“Jesus, Dave,” said Marty, examining it. “It is a penny black.”
“I’m rich! I’m rich!” I yelled. “What’s it worth?” I asked Marty, excitedly.
“It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty nice,” he said. “It’s worth about $10.00.”
“$10.00? The first stamp ever printed and it’s only worth $10.00?”
“They’re still not all that rare, Dave,” said Marty, amused by first my excitement and now my dejection.
“That’s ludicrous,” I voiced my disgust. “$10.00? If you had the first book ever printed, a Gutenberg bible, it would be worth at least a million. And you’re telling me that the first stamp ever issued is only worth $10.00? That’s it for me with stamps.”
I put it back in a book, deciding that my career as a stamp collect
or had both begun and ended in the space of half an hour.
The trouble is, I forgot which book I’d put the bloody stamp back into. Some years later, telling that anecdote to a customer who did know stamps, he casually (too casually, giving away his interest) said that he’d like to see it.
“It would be worth a bit more now,” he slyly hinted. “I might be interested in it.”
But I couldn’t find it, and it’s still missing. That’s what really taught me never to put money, or anything else, into books for ‘safe keeping’.
I’ve known Robert Fulford for some forty years, during which period, until I could no longer deal with recent review stuff, I would take the books that people like him are regularly inundated with and issue him a credit which he would use to buy other books he actually wanted. Bob would throw his review copies in cartons and when he had ten or a dozen boxes ready he would deliver them and I would assess his credit.
Once, fairly early, I discovered that Fulford, like most people who receive or buy many books, often read several at once and sometimes didn’t finish reading them. Bob in those days had formed the habit of using $1.00 or $2.00 bills as bookmarks. One shipment he brought had about $10.00 in ones and twos that he had obviously forgotten he’d left in the books.
I phoned him.
“Bob, you left a fair bit of cash in the last lot of books you brought me,” I said. “That’s very foolish. And just to teach you to smarten up, I’m going to keep it all.”
But my favourite Fulford credit story was the time he delivered a dozen cartons, one of which, when I opened it to look at the books, turned out to contain the contents of his wastebasket. Obviously, he had emptied his trash, put it in a carton and forgotten to put it out, and it had been placed in the stack waiting to come to me.
I naturally went through his trash, which was mostly insignificant, except that I found a very interesting letter from Al Purdy.
