The Pope's Bookbinder

by David Mason

  I phoned Bob.

  “Bob,” I said, “you’ve got to stop sending me your garbage. This is a bookstore, not the dump. And furthermore, I found a Purdy letter in it. And a good one, too. And just to teach you not to throw the letters of important writers in the garbage, I’m confiscating it. I’m not giving you any money, nor even a credit for it. Just to teach you a lesson. And I might just tell Purdy what you think of him, too.”

  On Church Street, about a week after that bank manager had told me that my father could have his Bell shares back and that he would loan me money on my personal bond, a man came in. He was interested in selling a book which I had never had, but which I recognized at once, for it was housed in that distinctive dark green cloth that John Murray used to bind all of Charles Darwin’s books.

  It was the first edition of On the Origin of Species (London, 1859). It had some problems, the worst one being that someone had put a thick coat of lacquer over the entire book, and the brittleness of that surface layer had caused both outer hinges to crack badly.

  Lacquering books in humid tropical areas was a fairly common practice meant to protect the covers from those predatory tropical bugs which would eat right through books. Robert Louis Stevenson, when he moved to Samoa, lacquered his entire library so that it wouldn’t be eaten, and the books from his library, when they occasionally appear on the market, are expected to be in that condition. Indeed, the lacquer is seen as an indication of authenticity.

  It looked pretty ugly, but it was the first edition of a book which had radically altered human history, changing our view of our origins and creating a controversy which has not disappeared yet, more than one hundred and fifty years later.

  There was also a single leaf missing from the table of contents. I figured that due to the brittle lacquer, probably the stiffness had caused readers to open the covers too forcefully and that strain had first loosened, and then caused that leaf to tear out and eventually be lost.

  On the free endpaper, in ink, was written “With the author’s compliments.”

  The owner had an accent suggesting that he was from one of the Caribbean islands. His grandfather, he explained, named Richard Hill, had been an amateur naturalist in Jamaica and, in fact, had co-authored with Philip Henry Gosse the Birds of Jamaica. Gosse, also a friend of Darwin’s, had suggested to Darwin that he contact this man for some specific information on the Jamaican fauna. Richard Hill had been helpful to Darwin, and his grandson showed me a copy of a letter from Darwin to Hill thanking him for his help and telling him he would receive a copy of On the Origin of Species on publication.

  I told the man I wanted to buy the book, but needed to do some research and would contact him to make an offer within a couple of days. I gave him a receipt and then started by taking the book to the University of Toronto, where they have one of the greatest collections of Darwin in the world, having purchased the private collection of Richard Freeman, Darwin’s bibliographer. I found out that there were only twenty-three copies of this monumental work which had presentation inscriptions, none of which had actually been written by Darwin. The custom then was for the author to supply a list to his publisher of those people whom he wanted to be presented with an author’s copy and a clerk in the publisher’s office would inscribe them “With the author’s compliments” and dispatch them to the recipients.

  For many years it was thought that no copy bore a gift inscription written by Darwin himself, but in fact several copies with Darwin’s personal inscription have surfaced, but none, as far as I know, from the first edition, which had been issued in only 1,250 copies. While Darwin had stalled publication for years out of fear of the controversy which was certain to occur, it seems that neither he nor his publisher had any idea of the extent of the demand which would ensue. Several editions were printed and quickly exhausted.

  At the University of Toronto I showed the book to Emrys Evans, the university’s master binder, who told me that he thought he could remove the lacquer and undertook to repair the hinges and tip in a facsimile of the missing leaf, which he would do from the University’s own copy. He said he would undertake the job as a private commission if I successfully purchased the book. After considerable research I decided that, fixed up, the book should be worth $6,500.00, so I phoned the owner and offered him $4,000.00, which he promptly accepted.

  Then I crossed the street to my bank and spoke to my manager, Ian Bain, my second-favourite banker ever since he had told me he would loan me money on the strength of my signature. My father was, of course, my favourite banker, in spite of the fact that after his initial $500.00 loan in 1966 he would never again loan me another penny.

  Mr. Bain sat me down in his office and asked what he could do for me.

  “I need $4,000.00,” I said.

  “Oh—buying a library, are you?”

  “Well, actually, no. It’s for one book.”

  “One book?!?” His face turned white—I could see that he was questioning his own earlier judgment. “You want $4,000.00 for just one book?” he repeated. You could tell that it had never occurred to him, that any book could cost that much. To place that amount in proper context, my rent for the combined home and shop was $500.00 a month or $6,000.00 a year.

  “Well, it’s a great book, the greatest book published in science since Newton’s Principia,” I emphasized.

  I could see that Mr. Bain, in spite of my earnest name-dropping, wasn’t too happy. But he’d said he’d trust my integrity, and he did. He signed the chit and I got the money. I had several other nice experiences with Mr. Bain and his bank, making his branch the last bank where I was taken seriously for the next twenty years, until I finally stalked out in a rage one day and switched to the University of Toronto Credit Union, where they actually treat small businessmen as important customers. I’ve been there ever since.

  By pure coincidence, my old friend Michael Thompson from Los Angeles had been in Toronto selling books and had happened to be in the store when the man brought in that incredible prize. Thompson had observed, open-mouthed and speechless, as I examined the book and gave the man the receipt.

  After he left, Thompson, on one of those rare occasions where he seemed genuinely in awe, inquired with disbelief, “Jesus Christ. Do you guys in Toronto get books like that walking in off the street every day?”

  He couldn’t believe that some stranger could walk in with a first edition of Origin, and an inscribed one on top of that. It was preposterous.

  I couldn’t resist.

  “Well, not every day. Probably only once a week or so,” I replied, trying to keep a straight face.

  I gave the book to Emrys Evans. I could hardly believe its condition when he returned it, even more so when I received his bill, which, if I remember correctly, was only $200.00.

  Emrys handed me the book and with it a glass bottle with a layer of solid, thick yellow-brown waste in the bottom.

  “That’s the lacquer,” he said casually. I don’t know how he did it, although he tried to explain the technical process. As far as I was concerned it was a miracle.

  The book was beautiful, the covers as unfaded and clean as the day it was issued, with not a trace of that ugly lacquer. He had also repaired the cracked hinges (called rebacking in the trade, the process whereby books are rebound with the original cloth replaced and missing areas camouflaged with a cloth of a similar type).

  It was a stunning piece of work. It needed very careful examination to even ascertain that Emrys had rebacked it. So beautiful was it, that I immediately upped the price to $7,500.00.

  I had that book for quite a while, gradually raising the price every few years to reflect the rising value of Darwin’s books in general and especially Origin. As always, I didn’t mind keeping a book of that importance. Indeed, I wish I still had it because the last copy I saw on the market sold for $150,000.00, and that was for the regular issue without a present
ation inscription. Sometime during that lengthy period I had a most distasteful experience with another dealer, a man whom I had first met when he attended one of our early Toronto Book Fairs. The Toronto Fairs became well-known in their heyday. Our Book Fair committee went to great lengths and expense to make Toronto attractive and comfortable for our foreign colleagues. We became fairly renowned for our pre-Book Fair parties. [There are hundreds of wonderful stories which cannot, unfortunately, be published while some of the protagonists remain alive. There is a rather repugnant book one encounters occasionally called Hollywood Babylon by Kenneth Anger (San Francisco, 1975), a purported exposé of the sleazy underlife of the Hollywood stars. The book I might write about those days on the Book Fair circuit will be entitled, I think, Antiquarian Babylon. This book will only appear if I outlive all of the other participants from those sordid times.] We went to extraordinary lengths to accommodate our visiting exhibitors’ eccentricities. As it happened, I was head of the committee when this man appeared for the first time (and I think the only time), so I bore the brunt of his childish whining. Nothing about his booth suited him, but we rearranged it, replaced his glass display case, and did everything we could to accommodate him, even though I quickly concluded that he was a man whom nothing would satisfy. By the end of the first hour I cordially despised him, but we provided him in the end with probably the best booth in the fair (certainly the most expensive if one considered the amount of time George Flie, our manager, gave him, all with the grace and equanimity George became famous for over the ten or so years he ran our fair).

  This man, whose name is Jeremy Norman, was the son of the great twentieth-century science collector Haskell Norman, whose formidable collection is perpetuated in the great catalogues, themselves now collectible, of that collection.

  Gossip had it that Haskell Norman had owned half of San Francisco, and it seemed to me that his son was a perfect argument against leaving anything to one’s children. One day, years later, Jeremy came into my store and looked at the Darwin. It was obvious he didn’t remember our early meetings—indeed I’ve met him a few times since, and he’s never given any indication that he is aware we’ve ever met.

  He looked at my Origin, then at the price (which told him he could only buy it if he remembered how much money his father had left him), and sneered “That’s not the clerk’s hand.” I knew instantly what he was doing.

  Chagrined that I owned what he coveted but wouldn’t pay for, he was attempting to instill insecurity and doubt in my mind; ruining my day was what he wanted to do. He was unaware that I had an impeccable provenance and I’m sure he thought that his credentials as a prominent specialist in that field would suffice to shatter my pretensions, and properly put me in my place.

  Actually, I was pleased at this comment, because what he was really telling me was that in addition to being a whiner he was a pretentious, petty bully.

  “Oh,” I replied casually, relishing it all. “I guess you haven’t

  read the correspondence between Darwin and Hill, where Darwin informs him he will receive a copy. This copy. I guess Murray had more than one clerk.”

  It was great fun. You see, not all booksellers are civilized and gracious. And even those who are don’t always feel the need to act in a civilized manner when faced with boorishness.

  Fifteen or twenty years later, now on Queen Street, a young man came in and introduced himself as a London bookseller. He looked at all of my nicest books, and after considerable examination and some negotiation I sold him the Darwin and a first edition of Wordsworth’s Poems (two volumes, London, 1807) for, I think, $22,000.00. When he pulled out his chequebook I became a bit nervous—the guy looked about twenty years old and was scruffy, dressed in jeans and running shoes, and I don’t think he’d combed his hair before coming out. I quietly excused myself, went into the office and phoned a colleague who travelled frequently to London in order to check him out. My colleague informed me that I could comfortably accept his cheque, adding, “I think he plays polo with Prince Charles.”

  His name was Simon Finch, and he was later very well-known for having two bookshops in London, one of them specially designed in modernistic fashion where he sold modern first editions. He also apparently had a shop where he sold guitars and other musical instruments to people like the Beatles.

  Some years later his empire crumbled into bankruptcy, which occasioned much gossip in the trade, although he seems to be back, establishing himself again, but on a more modest scale.

  There is a certain irony in my nervous phone call to my colleague. Here I am, a man who has mostly worn jeans himself for fifty years, getting nervous because another man, dressed in jeans, wants to write a big cheque.

  That Darwin is not the most expensive book I’ve ever sold, but it may be the most important one I’ve owned, or ever will.

  One of the most profitable purchases I ever made I concluded while operating under the effects of a concussion.

  One day a man called offering me the opportunity to look at the books of a recently deceased relative, a woman in her nineties, who had never married and who had lived all her life in the same house. The caller informed me that she had been the daughter and the last survivor of William Bell, a publisher. I got quite excited. All the indications hinted at a repository of nearly a century’s output of important books, publisher’s samples, review copies, perhaps inscribed books from that publisher’s authors, or from foreign authors that Bell’s firm had distributed in Canada.

  I knew who William Bell was. He, along with his partner Cockburn, had been a publisher’s rep for many years for the Oxford University Press in Canada. In the early years of the twentieth century they had formed a partnership and started their own company, Bell & Cockburn. They had had a long and friendly relationship with one of the most notable British publishers, John Lane, founder of the distinguished Bodley Head, publisher of many of what were to be Britain’s most important writers. John Lane also launched many literary innovations, perhaps the most significant being the publishing of Aubrey Beardsley’s risqué work. John Lane knew genius when he saw it and he had that rare gift, moral courage.

  Bell & Cockburn, as they were called, may very well have had the confidence to try it on their own precisely because of their good relations with John Lane, for they acquired his distribution rights, a guarantee of sales.

  And aside from all those important 1890s writers and illustrators, Lane was also Stephen Leacock’s publisher, so Bell & Cockburn got the benefit of selling his books in the Canadian market. Leacock was already enormously popular and sales must have been huge, because Leacock’s books are still fairly common here.

  Anyway, with that information I was quite excited to see these books and we set up an appointment.

  The books were in North Toronto and because I didn’t drive the man offered to pick me up at the Eglinton Subway station at nine am on the day in question. We exchanged descriptions, mine being my usual, jeans and a beard, probably easy to spot at Yonge and Eglinton. I lived then in a second floor flat over a store at Queen and Niagara, and the entrance was not on Queen, but in the alley behind it. It was mid-winter and a bad one, with much ice and cold. Our laneway had ruts where the cars drove and I walked with some care, for a storm, then mildness, followed by extreme cold the day before, had left an ice slick that made everywhere dangerous. But as I headed out of the lane I found a car parked, with a man and a woman sitting in it, talking. I thought

  it curious to encounter a couple sitting in a lane talking at eight in the morning and assumed that they must be engaged in some sort of questionable relationship to be hiding in this way.

  I was irritated as they ignored me, because the ice and snow meant that they were occupying the only safe route. I started to step around their car but I slipped on the icy ridge formed by the ruts, slipped hard, flew in the air right in front of their car and struck the back of my head a strong blow on that ridge.
I think I was probably unconscious for fifteen to twenty seconds, for I remember being a bit shocked when I recovered my senses that they hadn’t come out of their car to help. I had fallen not two feet from the car and when they didn’t respond it further confirmed my supposition that they were involved in some intense lovers’ scene.

  I slowly got up while they continued to ignore me and was about to yell at them and go on when I felt something run down my neck. Putting my hand to my head I found a lot of blood. Cursing those people, and now beginning to feel anxiety because of my nine am appointment in the subway (this was long before the ubiquitous cell phone) I hurried back to my apartment. My lady, drinking coffee, asked why I was back.

  “I fell,” I said.

  She looked at the back of my head.

  “You’re all split open. You have to go to the hospital.”

  She was towelling my head and the towel was already bloody. I took a few sheets of paper towel, mashed it into a ball and pressed it on the back of my head. I took a beret, put it over this mess, which both held the paper towels in place and hid them and my wound from view, and left again.

  The couple was still in their car and I abused them as I passed, but they were too engrossed in their personal drama to even be aware of my insults. I suffered strong anxiety all the way to Eglinton. I was half an hour late, but I instantly recognized my man—he was the well-dressed man fuming and looking at his watch every few seconds. He was barely civil as I greeted him, making my apologies for being late—due to a fall. He barely responded, nor even said much as we drove to the house. My explanation probably seemed phony for I was already, even if I didn’t realize it, talking way too much, a common response to a bang on the head. We arrived at the house, the man still angry and surly. We entered and I saw a large dark living room with heavy drapes closed, making it very gloomy. And every wall lined with bookshelves, floor to ceiling. Just what I had hoped to find.

  We went into the kitchen where he said, in a barely civil tone, “Okay lets see this cut that you say kept you late.”