The Pope's Bookbinder

by David Mason

  I removed the beret. The paper towels were completely soaked in blood. He stood behind me looking.

  “Jesus!” he exclaimed. “That’s serious. I’ve got to get you to a hospital. Just a second.” He opened a cupboard, took out a bottle of whiskey. “Hold still,” he admonished and poured a few ounces on my head.

  “That’s for the outside,” he said, his tone now concerned and friendly. “You’d better have one for the inside.” He offered me the bottle.

  “No thanks. It’s too early for me,” I replied. In retrospect it was obvious that the blow had concussed me, leaving me indifferent to pain.

  “Well, it’s not too early for me,” he said, as he raised the bottle and chug-a-lugged a big slug.

  That told me plenty.

  “Let’s go, I’ll take you to the hospital. You’re going to need some stitches.”

  He handed me some paper towels which I again made into a ball and put it back on my head, holding it in place with the beret.

  The beret was damp with blood, but with its dark colour you couldn’t tell. He fortified himself further while I did this.

  As we headed out, I thought, no doubt irrationally, that I had wasted a trip and would have to come back another time.

  “Listen,” I found myself saying, “I might as well have a quick look at the books before we go. It will give me some indication of what to expect the next time. It won’t take me long to get a feel.”

  In fact, I felt great. My head didn’t hurt except for the burning caused by the scotch although I knew that the wet stuff running down my back was a combination of blood and scotch, meaning that my clothes were probably ruined.

  But I was in that disconnected state that could ignore discomfort.

  “Are you sure?” he said.

  “Yes.” I started to look.

  A picture quickly emerged. The heavy drapes, once a dark olive green, had turned grey from age and I suspected they hadn’t been opened for forty or fifty years. I’d seen that before—old, lonely people, enclosed, maybe by their wealth, in a cocoon of comfort. No financial problems, just a wasted life, waiting for the release of death and often supported by the cupboard full of scotch in the kitchen. A sad waste of life, but much more common than most people might imagine.

  All the books were covered, on their spines, with a grimy patina, a combination of time, mixed with dust and humidity, and something else I instantly recognized.

  “Your relative smoked, didn’t she?” I asked.

  “Incessantly,” he replied, “I don’t know how she ever lasted into her nineties.”

  I knew the signs, for smoking was not yet then the social abomination it is now. When I had moved from my Church Street store I had used Windex and Kleenex to clean my framed prints and had been very shocked at the disgusting yellow-brown residue left on the Kleenex from fifteen years of tobacco smoke. I could only imagine how my lungs must look.

  “These books are ruined,” I told him, pulling some off the shelf to demonstrate that the spines were several shades darker than the covers, the covers unchanged because of their proximity to their adjoining neighbours.

  The only real value of books like those is in their being first editions. When they are ruined for collectors they are really just used books. I was now sombre, depressed by the implications.

  He took me to the second floor to see more. On the way we passed a sun porch, which was enclosed on the outside only by screens. There were two or three open boxes containing books on the floor of the porch, all of them covered by a half-inch of snow which had blown in through the interstices of the screens.

  “What’s that?” I said.

  “Those were children’s books we brought down from the attic. I guess that snow is not much good for them, is it?” he replied, taking another swig from the bottle which he’d brought along, maybe in case I needed some more to kill the germs in my wound.

  “They’ll be ruined too,” I said. As soon as it warmed a bit, the snow would melt enough to ruin whatever was there.

  The second floor was the same, smoke film on everything.

  I knew I didn’t need to return, everything I needed to know I’d seen, and as we descended, I explained “These are now just used books, they’re ruined for collectors. There will be an enormous amount of work just transporting them and handling them. I can’t offer much. I’d give you $1,000.00 for the lot,” I ended, apologetically.

  “But you barely looked at them,” he protested, obviously extremely disappointed.

  “I don’t need to. It’s the damage.”

  He disappeared into the kitchen for a moment, no doubt for some fresh sustenance. He’d killed the first bottle.

  As I looked again I saw something I hadn’t noticed, a large poster in an old wooden frame. Even through the smoke-

  yellowed glass I could see what it was—a Beardsley poster, a very famous one, often reprinted then, showing a distinctive Beardsley woman standing in front of a bookshop, beside her a list of Fisher Unwin’s recent publications in their famous Pseudonym and Autonym Library.

  That has to be real, I thought. Bell was Lane’s rep here and he must have been Unwin’s as well. It’s got to be an original. The glass was as filthy as everything else, there was no way it could be one of those ubiquitous reprints which were everywhere with Beardsley’s recent popularity.

  “That’s very nice,” I said to my man, whose recourse to the kitchen hadn’t cheered him up at all. “I’d like to buy that.”

  I went on, deciding to gamble. I knew, if I couldn’t cheer him up, he would not sell me the books.

  “Yes,” I said. “I’d pay you $1,500.00 for it.”

  Which was about double what I thought it might be worth, if it was in fact real.

  “$1,500.00?” he said, perplexed. “But Waddington’s has been in to see the furniture. They said it might bring $500.00 at auction. How can you offer three times that?”

  “Because I like it,” I replied.

  It had worked. I could see that he now knew he was dealing with an honest man and that the offer for the books had been fair.

  He accepted on the spot and, not taking any chances, I wrote him a cheque on the spot.

  He then drove me to the hospital, where I got six stitches, all the while jabbering on at the doctor who sewed me up.

  “Oh, another one,” said the doctor, looking at my head. “You’re the fifth one I’ve stitched up so far today. Must be pretty icy out there.” It was still only 11 am.

  I spent the rest of the day talking compulsively to everyone I encountered and couldn’t sleep at all that night. In spite of that, I got a vehicle and emptied the house the next day. Even the books covered in snow were all right. The snow was so fine I could flick it off like dust, and because it had remained very cold, it hadn’t even left a trace. And those boxes contained very nice decorated children’s books from the late nineteenth century.

  In the end I did extremely well. What I hadn’t thought of in my concussed state was that this library would contain many Bell & Cockburn imprints which were on the books of foreign authors, thereby making them eligible for my project of supplying Canadian editions to the National Library.

  Therefore I had quite a few immediate sales which I hadn’t even considered earlier.

  It took a while until I began to see that I was going to do very well from this purchase and I began to feel guilty that I might have cheated them. Luckily, I found a way to repay the owners quickly in kind. They had told me they had a great batch of Leacock manuscript material and letters, and I went to a great deal of trouble to arrange that it be given to the University of Toronto. I further arranged that they get a substantial tax credit. In that period a fair bit of Leacock manuscript material had been auctioned, and I had bought some of it at far less than its real value. Being able to arrange their tax credit at the real value of the
Leacock collection allowed me to salve my conscience in the belief that they had been properly compensated. That made me feel better as, book after book, interesting presentation inscriptions to Bell surfaced.

  But the real profit proved to be the Beardsley poster. After offering twice what I thought it might be worth and three times what Waddington’s said it might bring at auction my research showed that the last copy I could trace had sold at auction some three years earlier for $5,000.00—I had a winner.

  Peter Stern, a Boston dealer I had known forever, wandered in by chance, saw it, and tried to buy it. Peter had begun dealing in Sherlock Holmes material, issuing specialized catalogues which he filled out with other detective fiction. He had recently begun widening his range into modern first editions in general, and today he is one of the pre-eminent American dealers in all the most desirable in English literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I told Peter I was still researching it, whereupon he asked for first refusal when I had arrived at my price. This is a very serious ritual for serious dealers. What it means is that a book on which a dealer gives such assurance cannot be sold elsewhere nor even offered without first being offered and refused by the person who has “first refusal.” Professional dealers take this trade protocol seriously, and I shall here show you just how seriously a dealer with integrity takes his word. I kept and studied that poster for some years. Thirteen years after I had promised Peter Stern first refusal Debbie and I decided to participate in the annual Boston Book Fair. I had exhibited at the first four or five book fairs that our international association had sponsored in Boston and had concluded that it was not nearly as good a fair as Toronto’s. I had ceased exhibiting there, and in America generally for very different reasons, many years ago. I hadn’t been to any American fairs for fifteen years or more, but I now decided that Debbie, who more and more was making the most important decisions for our business, needed to get to know our foreign colleagues just as I had all those years ago. I had forged during those early book fairs friendships that still survive, and I earlier came to believe that Debbie would operate at a disadvantage running our business if she didn’t form such friendships herself. So we signed up for the Boston fair. It was quite an experience in several ways I hadn’t anticipated. People I hadn’t seen in fifteen or twenty years had sometimes changed beyond recognition. A slim curly-haired friend was now bald and fifty pounds heavier. Another I simply didn’t recognize till he smiled—everything had changed except his smile. Identifying women proved even harder, though it’s best not to go into that.

  Before we went I phoned Peter Stern, who remembered the poster but obviously had forgotten that I had given him first refusal on it. I told him the price, which was now $15,000.00 and that we would bring it with us. Peter didn’t feel he could buy it at that price. It went through the fair much examined but unsold, and when we returned to Toronto we hung it in the store for a couple of months before deciding that the public had had its chance. We took it home, where it now hangs in our living room, giving us much pleasure.

  Chapter 13

  Canadian Editions

  Another project, similar in style if not content to my early Canadian literature project, was conducted with the National Library of Canada, our equivalent of the Library of Congress and the British Library. The mandate of the National Library of Canada is to acquire, quite simply, all things relating to Canada. This project I am about to tell you about was virgin territory, ignored till I happened on it as a very young scout, and which, if the truth be admitted, I believe I invented. It is my most significant contribution to Canadian bibliography. This is the field known now as Canadian editions, that is, books by foreign authors published in Canada.

  I can only remember one early major bibliography which properly attempted to cite Canadian editions, and that was James McGregor Stewart’s Rudyard Kipling: A Bibliographical Catalogue (Toronto: Dalhousie University Press and Toronto University Press, 1959). Stewart was a Canadian and would have been regularly exposed to the Canadian editions of Kipling’s books, of which there were quite a few, demonstrating Kipling’s importance at the height of the British Empire. Jacob Blanck’s Bibliography of American Literature, the major attempt to categorize American literature from its beginnings into the early twentieth century in ten volumes (generally now referred to as BAL, or sometimes just Blanck) was a major achievement, and it notes Canadian editions when it locates them. The single most interesting section of BAL for Canadian editions is the entry on Mark Twain, who was constantly pirated in Canada, and some of whose true first editions were thus published in Canada.

  It didn’t take long for me to discover that Mark Twain had been extensively pirated here in the nineteenth century, because international copyright didn’t exist before 1890.

  The Americans regularly pirated English authors and I knew that for that reason many true first editions of British authors were actually American piracies. And some of them therefore commanded very high prices due to the rarity of these often cheap paper-covered editions.

  It didn’t make sense to me that Canadian piracies shouldn’t be equally important. The Canadian pirates would steal the text from a periodical, or sometimes directly from the English or American text, printing so quickly that they often were offering their cheap productions within a day or two of the American publication. And when they stole from periodical serials, they were often out with their piracy before the proper first edition was issued, and they thereby usurped that position, becoming themselves the true first edition (a phrase loved by booksellers—it makes us appear knowledgeable). So incensed was Twain by his enormous losses at the hands of the Canadian pirates that he moved to Montreal for six months, the legal statutory period to gain Canadian copyright protection. He did this to protect Life on the Mississippi (Montreal, 1883), which is therefore a legitimate publication, although there is an earlier pirated version of part of it called Old Times on the Mississippi. A Canadian librarian once compiled from Canadian sources his own checklist of Canadian piracies of Twain’s books, which is a good 50% larger than BAL’s. I have specialized in this field for almost 40 years and I have done well supplying foreign institutions and collectors with the Canadian editions of their writers. I believe the situation in Australia was similar, although I am ignorant as to whether piracy was as prevalent there.

  I have made a lot of money over the last forty years with Canadian editions, and so I should have, because until I started buying them they were almost entirely ignored. I will tell the full story of this, but the real significance, I believe, is not these variant issues themselves but the obscurity they rested in until I discovered and exploited them. The first one I discovered—in my second year, still working for Jerry Sherlock and scouting for my own second catalogue—in Bela Batta’s Yonge Street store. It was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tales of the Jazz Age. Pulling it off the shelf, thinking it was the first edition, I was surprised to find instead, that it bore the imprint of the Canadian publisher Copp Clark, although the copyright page information was precisely the same as the Scribner’s U.S. issue. This was because the Canadian issue were often merely printed from the plates of the U.S. edition, changing only the imprint on the title, the spine, and the dust jacket.

  The second surprise was the price—$10.00. The first edition of that title at that time would have been $100.00 to $150.00, the significance of the dust jacket (which this copy lacked) not yet having reached the ludicrous point it occupies today. It didn’t make sense to me that there should be such a discrepancy in price, so I bought it. These books were usually part of the first edition and I assumed, and later research confirmed where print-run figures could be learned, that there would have been a very small percentage of an entire edition with a Canadian title page. Sometimes evidence shows the Canadian issue could have been as few as fifty copies. This seems almost a silly number, not justifying

  even the resetting of type to print another title and stamping on the spine
, but it does explain the great scarcity of some of these editions.

  Investigation quickly showed that there were lots of these Canadian editions in the Toronto shops, mostly priced as cheap fiction—$2.00 to $5.00, depending on the author. I decided that these should be considered more valuable and I started quietly buying up authors who were then collected.

  At first, while just looking for good authors such as Twain, Trollope, Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence and others, I found that there were hundreds of other authors, mostly the ordinary popular writers of the period, who were also issued in Canadian editions. I started to study the subject, but unlike what occurred with bibliography in other areas, I found I was on my own. It was while doing this that I began to understand that I was a natural-born bookseller.

  After some time I became very proficient at finding these books on store shelves from spotting the Canadian publisher’s name on the spine. Indeed, I eventually got very proficient at guessing, even with no imprint on the spine, what foreign titles in a certain period should have been first Canadian editions. Pulling them off the shelf I would be enormously pleased when I was right most of the time; a good example of what I have come to call the “educated instinct.”

  My Catalogue No. 2, issued in 1968, contained a section devoted to Canadian editions which I prepared with great trepidation. After much agonizing I priced some of my Canadian editions right up there with nice copies of the first editions, and I was frankly scared as to what the reception would be. After all, I was exploring a field that had been ignored by everyone and had no established bibliographic foundation. This is why I priced the books with such trepidation. I, a relative newcomer, was setting the prices.

  When you are a beginner, everything provides a lesson. Some of the ancillary lessons I learned with this Canadian editions project were difficult and in the end painful, although necessary to learn.