by David Mason
The man at the National Library who hired me for the Canadian editions project had to be convinced of the importance of these editions, both bibliographically and for what they illustrated of Canadian publishing, bookselling, and, more important, the reading habits of Canadians in that period.
I did not learn until some years later, that while this man was a librarian, none of his assistants and underlings were librarians—they were, rather, civil servants and bureaucrats. So naïve was I then that it never occurred to me that a library could be staffed by anyone other than librarians, but such was the case in Ottawa, in one of our most important national institutions.
It all began when, after considerable effort, I convinced this man that it was important to amass a collection which showed so clearly what was seen as culturally important reading in Canada during the period covered. I sold him a collection of some seven to eight hundred titles I had formed, but pointed out that since this collection brought together only a relatively small percentage of the total output—from, say, the 1820s to the 1940s—produced in Canada, the really important part of our deal was to find some way of adding the missing titles to their holdings. After I managed to convince him that Canadian editions were a legitimate concern of Canada’s National Library, I suggested to him that he hire me to fill out the collection with new acquisitions. I explained that the only way to do such a project was for one person to have an exclusive contract to supply missing books.
It’s obvious why it needed to be exclusive, since careful records would need to be kept to avoid buying unneeded duplicates. I knew that though Canadian editions were ignored and cheap in Toronto stores at the time, they would not long remain so when the other dealers finally caught on to what I was doing. The man agreed, the principle being obvious, but he told me that he couldn’t put such a thing in writing because someone might consider it fishy, even perhaps a criminal conflict of interest. As a public servant he needed to think of such things.
The way he put it was to say, “I can’t sign anything but I’ll guarantee that we won’t buy anything from any other dealer.” He then gave me authorization to send all books $25.00 or under without quoting them; I could simply send them with an invoice. Anything over that amount I had to quote. Within a year he had upped my automatic shipping invoicing limit to $50.00; obviously I had passed the test.
I worked directly with his assistant, a young woman who had been present at all our discussions, and the project worked very well. A couple of years later, though, the young woman, with whom I had forged a very smooth working relationship, called me one day to tell me that she was leaving the National Library. I was upset, as she was very clever and our system of communication had worked marvellously. She had also become a collector of Edna O’Brien, whose red hair and patrician profile she shared.
“Where are you going?” I inquired sadly.
“To the Treasury Department,” she replied.
“Treasury? What the hell is a librarian going to do in Treasury?”
“Oh,” she replied, astounding me, “I’m not a librarian, I’m a civil servant. They move us around like this all the time.”
That’s when I learned that our national repository of printed material relating to our history is not staffed by librarians.
I kept a careful record of all transactions, compiling a list as I went, which effectively became the first written record of the publishing of foreign titles in Canada. Indeed, I am now working on cleaning up bibliographic descriptions because I intend to make a book of it. It will be the first published record of actual foreign influence on the Canadian literary psyche.
It was, of course, for this reason that I needed it to be an exclusive contract—even if not a written one—because I bought a very high percentage of the books from other dealers working on my 20% trade discount and adding more only if or when I felt that it didn’t inflate the price unduly.
Obviously, if I paid $80.00 for a $100.00 book which turned out to be one they already held I would be left with a $100.00 book on my shelves for who knows how long. That book costing $80.00 would not just obviate the profit from five similar books but would very quickly render the whole project pointless, disastrous, in fact, from any business perspective. I regularly scoured the other bookshops for titles and my colleagues were generally pleased to cooperate on this project because, except maybe for Twain and a few other major authors like Conrad and Fitzgerald, the world had not yet caught up and Canadian editions would have otherwise languished on their shelves for years.
Where my contract with the National Library really paid off was often out in the small towns, or in the really huge stores like Old Favorites in Toronto and Jaffe’s in Calgary, which never threw anything away. In those days the popular fiction from, say, the 1880s through the 1930s was still pretty common in used bookshops. Used bookshops generally sorted their stock in subject areas but literature sections were usually filed alphabetically. And since the proprietors of both the small-town shops and the large city ones weren’t sure who might want what, they tended to keep everything. The authors who weren’t named Hemingway or Faulkner lay forgotten and ignored, waiting for me to notice the Canadian publisher’s name on the spine. It became very common for me to pay for visits to shops in small town Ontario with just the Canadian editions I found. By this time it was apparent to the rest of the trade what I was doing, so I began to announce my project openly. I made a point of visiting every shop in Toronto every month or so and bought every book I needed at my usual twenty percent discount. By this time everyone knew what I was doing, and prices had risen dramatically, but I was happy to pass on a share to my colleagues working on the twenty percent and usually content to add another ten percent on top. Of course, for really cheap books my profit would usually be everything under $50.00, my free limit (although, there were books I considered not proper at $50.00 and therefore I often shipped them to Ottawa for less).
While the dealers had radically raised prices, they still had to consider what they would do with a book that they priced high if I didn’t take it, and generally no one got too greedy. After a few years on this project I had a good sense of scarcity, so that often I would buy titles by more interesting authors for stock, even if I had supplied them to the National Library already. So I built up a good stock of desirable Canadian issues of collected authors. I also began to get queries from foreign bibliographers seeking Canadian issues of their author’s titles. Most of the queries I was able to accurately answer by this time, but a few times I would find a title that I had been confidently assuring bibliographers and collectors for years did not exist.
A few such embarrassing errors will instill caution, and a good thing too. Everybody who ever attempted bibliography knows that perfection is never going to occur; every bibliographer knows that within a week of publishing something they may have worked on for twenty years some bookseller is going to catalogue a book as “not in so and so.” All bibliographers will presume after repeated comparisons of many copies that certain statements are exact, only to be later presented with some exception. That’s why bibliographies get revised, even the greatest ones.
My biggest early lesson came from Jack London’s The Call of the Wild, and I think it bears repeating for the lessons it teaches.
London must have been popular in Canada pretty early because almost all of his books had Canadian editions published by George N. Morang Ltd. Around 1910 Macmillan of Canada seems to have taken over Morang’s stock and list. Morang had also published many Kipling titles, as well as many of the most desirable international authors in Canadian editions from the early years of the twentieth century. When Morang was bought out by Macmillan it disappeared from Canadian publishing.
Therein lies the mystery of Jack London’s The Call of the Wild. Macmillan Canada, which began to publish in 1906, did an edition of The Call of the Wild in 1910 which is still pretty common, not surprising given London’s popu
larity here. I had seen so many copies of the Morang issues of his earlier books without ever having seen a Morang edition of the original 1903 edition that I eventually concluded, after ten or fifteen years, that for some incomprehensible reason there had been no original Canadian edition of The Call of the Wild in 1903.
After time, I often stated this quite confidently. With all my experience there was no one to confute my theories—I was already the acknowledged expert in the field. But then one day, after about fifteen years of buying Canadian editions, I found in Pat McGahern’s shop in Ottawa a Morang edition of The Call of the Wild, dated, not 1903, but 1905! It was in original printed wrappers, so I naturally assumed that this was the explanation for its great rarity, the wrappered issues, as one would expect by their more delicate format, being some ten or twenty times as scarce as the cloth ones. I bought it, sent it to Ottawa and promptly changed my story. A 1905 edition existed in paper covers and was very rare for that reason, I pontificated.
This worked very well for about six months. One day, while scouting another shop, I found the hardcover edition of the same 1905 date with exactly the same design as the paper issue. It was common for Morang to do both hardcover and wrappered issues of most of their books.
So surprised was I that I could have never seen a copy in over fifteen years of careful scouting that I immediately began qualifying everything I said about Canadian editions by prefacing my comments with “To the best of my knowledge.” I still continue that wise practice.
But this is not the end of my London story.
After another five or ten years of stating that I knew for certain that the first Canadian edition of The Call of the Wild had been inexplicably published two years later than the first American edition, I found a Morang 1903 edition too. And in another few years I also came up with the 1903 wrappered issue. So, after some thirty-five years in all, logic again prevailed, and what should have been turned out to be exactly what had occurred.
Not only does this provide a cautionary note to making too-facile assumptions (thirty years is nothing in bibliography), but it also demonstrates the true rarity of many Canadian editions.
In the last two years I have found and quickly sold two Mark Twains, both so rare that neither BAL or Roper knew of them, one of which I had heard of in a manner that made me think it existed and the other which I had never seen or heard of. This happens enough to keep me looking and to keep me keen. Unfortunately the collector to whom I sold many of the Twain rarities, who very astutely agreed with my assessment of both their importance and increasing value, died a couple of years ago. The institution which gets his Canadian Twains will be very fortunate, for they will get the results, often in unique copies, of forty-five years of scouting.
Things went very well for several years and this project, like my earlier one for the University of Toronto, gave me enough certain profit scouting other stores that based on that sure profit from the Canadian editions I was able to indulge myself by buying other nice books from the dealers I visited, so they doubly benefitted by getting rid of their unsaleable Canadian editions and selling the visiting dealer other books as well.
But the real beauty of the project was my $50.00 limit, because Canadian editions, especially in small town stores, were often the books of obscure authors, popular in their time but unread and forgotten today. I often found them very cheaply. And while lots of them didn’t justify my charging $50.00 for them, many did. So I was in the nice position that often the most obscure books were the cheapest and hence finding them was much more profitable than finding ones that I had to pay real money for.
But whereas my scouting efforts for the University of Toronto were seen as a great success by both parties, the National Library project ended in disaster, based on several common human failings, namely greed, spite, and envy.
For there was an exception to the general satisfaction my colleagues felt by my coming to their shops and buying, at good prices, what would otherwise have remained unsold and unnoticed. This exception resulted in a broken friendship, a near-legal mess with the National Library and waves of speculation and gossip throughout the Canadian trade for some years. As far as I could see dealers took sides based largely on their personal views of the participants.
As I said, I had made clear to my colleagues from the beginning that I had been granted exclusivity in my dealings with the National Library, and when I explained my system, the necessity of recording every title and the consequences of paying, say, $80.00 for a $100.00 book which would then ruin any chance of making the project feasible, they all understood this. Except for one person. To make the consequent debacle even worse, this one exception was my old friend and frequent drinking partner Steve Temple, a bookseller who had his own business, but because of various economic setbacks had come to work for me, both part-time and, on occasion, full-time.
He, better than any other dealer, understood the necessity of exclusivity on this deal, because he had worked so closely with me on my project. The first clue—which I didn’t get—was when he asked me if he could copy my list of Canadian editions—not the prices he quickly assured me—just the checklist of items supplied. Because I had a vague thought in the back of my mind that such a checklist might some day be a potential book—a checklist of foreign books published in Canada—I said no, something that I wouldn’t usually have done. I am not normally secretive, and I am mostly too lazy to waste a lot of time trying to be smarter than others. And this has always worked for me. Just as I don’t lie because I’m too lazy to remember my lies, by trusting people I don’t have to concentrate on a lot of boring suspicion. If only one in ten people you deal with tries to cheat you, you still win nine of ten times. And you don’t have to waste 90% of your time distrusting what people say. Most people will act decently, and I like to play using those odds. It takes up a lot of time being clever. I prefer to assume that people will act properly, and most of the time they will.
But one day the bad stuff started.
A man in a small town, an antique dealer who also dealt in books, bought the library of a man who had been an agent for one of the Canadian publishers who had been hugely involved in publishing foreign writers here. It was full of Canadian editions in fine condition, in dust wrappers. I found out when I was offered one very important volume by a major writer, the only copy seen before (or since) in the dust wrapper. I intended to visit this man to see the rest but I didn’t drive then, while my soon to be ex-friend did. Temple went right out there within a day or so, returning with several boxes of Canadian editions, mostly very fine copies in dust wrapper. Chagrined at what was probably caused by my loose lips—and certainly my laziness in not going out there sooner—I waited for Temple to price them, whereupon I expected to pay the consequences for my laziness by having him get all the profit while I worked within my twenty percent discount. Many people seem to think that such a casual approach to business is an invitation to cheat me, but like others who prefer to assume the best in people, I am, when that trust is abused, pretty ruthless with those who mistake trust for stupidity.
But that didn’t happen. One day, visiting Temple’s store, chatting, I noticed on a hold shelf beside the counter a huge pile of dust-wrappered books which I knew were probably the new load of Canadian editions. There was a sheet of paper sticking out, in the manner dealers use when they quote somewhere—but where could he be quoting them, I wondered? I was the only customer, and like every other dealer he knew that I would buy them all without questioning. For individual authors there might be a customer, but not for an assorted lot. It looked as if Temple must be quoting them, but to whom? There was only me. When Steve went into his back room, my curiosity overwhelmed me and I pulled out the paper to be utterly stunned: “Dear _________, Here is the new batch of Canadian editions for your consideration.”
He was quoting them to my customer. He had gone behind my back and approached my customer, selling that woman at t
he National Library the books which I had an exclusive agreement to supply them. No one knew better than Temple—for he had worked on this Canadians editions project for a very long time—the precise record-keeping necessary to keep the project feasible. I could now never confidently buy another Canadian edition for any sort of money for fear it would be a duplicate; my project was effectively ruined.
And this man was, I had thought, my friend. My friend? I had loaned him money innumerable times, paid his rent, run his business, sold it for him, given him my mailing list, and committed many acts of kindness—though not even considered kindness when done for a friend—and he had stabbed me in the back in this manner?
On the professional level he was breaking one of the strongest unwritten rules of the book trade—that information learned working for another dealer must never be used later, contrary to that dealer’s interest. When I left Jerry Sherlock’s employ I never would, and never did, approach any of his customers, not even to mail them a catalogue. This is standard procedure in the trade. If a customer I had known through him came into my shop that was both natural and okay, but one could not, nor ever would, seek out those customers.
I’d heard a few stories of assistants who, while working for a dealer, had tried to solicit the purchase of libraries from that dealer’s customers for themselves, but this was the greatest professional betrayal (excepting cases of outright theft from the employer) that I had yet encountered (and it still is).
And, worse, when I came to think on it, were the implications and the consequences with which I would have to deal.
For Temple could not be unaware of what my reaction was certain to be when I learned of his iniquity. He had drunk with me for twenty years or so, he knew my character well and had he given it five minutes thought (I’m not sure he ever did) he must have known I would do exactly what I did. I left, returned to my store and phoned the woman at the National Library in Ottawa.
