The Pope's Bookbinder

by David Mason

  It was quite a spectacle. Except for his books Joe was a minimalist. There was a large eighteenth-century desk in the living room, French I would guess, and obviously quite valuable, with a matching chair, a very nondescript, almost shabby chesterfield, an early wooden bed that, I think, was probably French-Canadian and probably seventeenth-century, and worth I would guess even more than the desk—and nothing else. Just bookshelves, lining every wall, and all filled with Alice and her cast of characters. On the bed was a shabby, worn quilt, also quite old, perhaps some family heirloom. It was obvious Joe didn’t care about most things, except his books. Just as he was unimpressed by important people, he seemed indifferent to decor. Of course he could only get away with this because he never married.

  The collection was stunning. Row after row of the familiar red and gold Alices, in every printing, all the early editions. And thousands of illustrated reprints. We had seen nothing like it in scope or size. Justin Schiller called it somewhere the second greatest collection in private hands in the world. This is high praise, for Carroll is much collected.

  Joe had always told us that his collection was willed to Carroll’s own college, Christ Church, Oxford, where the author was a professor under his real name, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. In an interesting aside I once called Joe to inform him that I had received a catalogue from a dealer I didn’t know which contained an Alice title inscribed and signed as Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. It wasn’t cheap, but neither was it outrageous. Joe’s immediate reaction was, “That’s a forgery. Carroll never used his real name when he signed or inscribed any of what he considered his ‘non-professional’ books, Alice and the others. There is no known copy of any ‘Lewis Carroll’ book signed as Dodgson.”

  I learned a lesson there and discreetly sent a postcard to that dealer, in case he was an honest man who also didn’t know that.

  One day Joe came in, quite upset. “I’m changing my will, David. I’m not giving my collection to Oxford.”

  After such certainty, over so many years, I could hardly believe it.

  “Why, Joe? What happened?” I asked.

  “I’ve just been in Oxford. The librarian took me into the basements to show me something in the Carroll Collection and I saw a room with stacks of cartons piled in a corner.

  “When I asked him what was in those cartons, he told me he didn’t know. It was just a bunch of stuff Carroll’s family had given them after Carroll’s death in 1898.

  “In all those years no one had even bothered to look inside them, never mind treating them properly in spite of the obvious importance they must have. They’re not going to do that with my collection.”

  I guess I should have added bureaucrats to Joe’s earlier hate list. He didn’t trust them either, as I found out soon enough.

  I already knew that Joe meant what he said, so when he followed that by asking me what I thought he should do I knew he had made up his mind. He had graduated from McGill so it was his first thought, but I began right then my campaign for what I considered the most appropriate place in Canada, the Osborne Collection in the Toronto Public Library, one of the greatest if not the greatest collection of children’s books in the world. That collection came about in a curious manner.

  Edgar Osborne, I was told, had been in charge in Britain during the Second World War with the responsibility of handling the books that citizens donated to be pulped for paper needed for the war effort, another form of those scrap drives where people were urged to hand in scrap metal which could be converted into weapons. Osborne loved children’s books and searched through these donations and rescued many important early children’s books.

  After the war, visiting Toronto, he had been so impressed by the Toronto Public Library that he donated his whole collection here. It resides now on its own floor in the College Street branch of the TPL with the magnificent sculptured griffins, modelled on Maurice Sendak’s drawings, who guard the portals. It is a library very close to my heart because of the immeasurable debt I owe to the TPL children’s librarians in their northern St. Clements branch, who guided me as a very young child in my reading and started me on the path I’m following still.

  A few years back I gave them the first major collection I have donated, my Thornton W. Burgess collection, my earliest favourite author. I told Leslie McGrath, the current custodian, about my reverence for those unknown librarians who so influenced me all those years ago, and one day she gave me a photograph of a woman who was the head of that branch then.

  “But Leslie,” I said, “She was the head. I wouldn’t have met her.”

  “Yes, you would,” said Leslie. “All the librarians then did everything.”

  So this picture hangs in a place of honour in my shop. But the truth is whether that librarian did or didn’t ever help me choose a book is irrelevant to me now. I much prefer the idea that I owe my life’s greatest focus to all librarians.

  I continue to refer to those anonymous women as the “Unknown Librarians,” those people who gave, no doubt not even aware what they were really giving, the incomparable gift of civilization to some timid, shy kid whose imagination they fed with the glory of what being human means.

  Like the unknown soldier, the unknown librarian, in following her vocation, gave humanity some of its greatest gifts.

  It’s probably impossible not to sound trite or pathetically over-sentimental when saying such things, so I won’t try not to.

  Joe was also involved in another group which met every month. This group was made up of George Walker, the talented wood-engraver, and Bill Poole, who owned and ran the Poole Hall Press in Grimsby, another member of those groups of seemingly crazed people who still print beautiful books by hand, usually for no other reason than their passion for fine printing.

  These people are possibly even crazier than book collectors because they often devote their entire lives and most of their incomes to this pursuit in spite of the fact that the rest of the world, if it even knows, doesn’t care.

  These three men met regularly as they printed very small editions of Carroll’s books, with Joe doing the editorial work on the text, George Walker providing the woodcut illustrations and Bill Poole doing the printing. The editions they eventually issued after many years of monthly consultations were done in very small runs and are rarely seen in the marketplace. And while I’m certain profit had nothing to do with the motivations of any of them, when one appears it brings pretty high prices.

  It took many years to finish these books and Joe took enormous pleasure in the collaboration.

  Anyway, I worked on Joe for a couple of years and it was finally decided that the Osborne would be the recipient of his life’s passion.

  But then one day that plan too imploded, this time due to the actions of the head of the Toronto Public Library. This woman had already displayed her lack of credentials as a real custodian of such things by letting it be known that she expected to be considered not a librarian but the “CEO” of the library system.

  If such pathetic snobbery hadn’t been enough, she then announced that the library would place the entire Osborne collection in “storage” while a new building was constructed. Simultaneously the library board, which along with her was made up of various appointed people, discussed selling the Osborne collection.

  This seems to have been initiated by James Lorimer, who had briefly flourished in the sixties and seventies as a publisher of various left wing anti-establishment books which he no doubt considered to be radical but which were really doctrinally socialist in design, and to my mind evinced the sort of totalitarian fascism which is our real enemy.

  Lorimer apparently considered research collections such as the Osborne and the enormously important Arthur Conan Doyle Collection, also held by TPL—one of the prime centres in the world for that delightful, if somewhat eccentric group of Sherlock Holmes aficionados known as the Baker Street Irregulars—as frivolous and e
litist. That two such magnificent collections, both justly world-famous, could be so misunderstood is to me indicative of a type who are the same as those Taliban fanatics who blew up the ancient Buddhist statues in Afghanistan. All civilized people have an obligation to fight such barbarians.

  Apparently Lorimer thought the collection should be sold, with the proceeds being used to provide such things as language tapes (in Estonian or Bulgarian) for branch libraries, so “the people” could be served by practical, useful services. Lorimer, who I’m not surprised to find out came from independent wealth, seems not to understand that the historical collections of major public libraries in cities and countries are exactly the same as museums. Their function is to preserve physical artifacts, in this case printed artifacts, so posterity can have the ability to study its history.

  This all happened twenty years ago and I’ve been hoping ever since to meet Lorimer at some social function so that I can properly insult him for his ignorant barbarity. So far I haven’t, but someday I hope to get a chance.

  Luckily, the Osborne Collection has a very extensive world-wide group, officially known as The Friends of the Osborne Collection, which contains many people who both despise such ignorance and are not shy about fighting it, so this abysmal proposal got nowhere. But it certainly taught me the importance of such groups. People who care about things that most of the world is indifferent to must organize themselves for precisely such ignorant assaults on reason.

  Anyway, this combined display of snobbery and ignorance by people who should have known better proved the final straw for Joe.

  “They’ll pack my collection in a basement somewhere, David. I know it. And it’ll never come out. It’ll rot in some basement. They’re not having my collection.”

  I knew he meant it.

  So I started the process again, and this time the recipient of choice was the University of Toronto. But there was a problem there. Joe didn’t like something about the University of Toronto because of an earlier incident.

  Discussions continued for over a year, and in the end I was forced to pretty much tell him that if the University of Toronto wasn’t going to get his Carroll collection he’d have to return once again to Oxford. In the end Joe had things decided for him. One day he came into the store, sat himself down and said, “David, you can call your friend at the University of Toronto. I’ve just been to my doctor. I’m riddled with cancer. He’s given me six months or less.”

  So the arrangements began. Richard Landon hired Justin Schiller, the children’s dealer who had sold Joe much of the rare and expensive material, and I did the appraisal with Justin.

  I was pretty much out of my depth, never having seen much less handled much of that sort of material. What Justin and I did in two days probably would have taken me two weeks or a month to properly research.

  Justin would pick up a book and say, “What did you pay for this, Joe? I seem to remember $8,000.00, yes?”

  “Yes,” Joe would reply. “That would be around fifteen years ago.”

  “Well,” Justin would say, studying the book or the photograph or the letter, “I think we’d better say $50,000.00 for that now.” And we would write it down.

  Book after book, inscribed to important people or with original illustrations tipped in, would be $40,000.00, $75,000.00, or more. In the end one small section, maybe eight feet tall and four feet wide, added up to $1,000,000.00—I was astounded both at the richness of the material and at Justin’s sense of value.

  Then Justin went home and Debbie and I appraised the rest of the packed apartment after Joe died. That took two or three days and came to another million.

  When we thought we were close to done, we thought we’d better just check the closets in case Joe had put any posters or things in them.

  He had indeed. What he hadn’t put in his closets was clothes. A couple of his business suits, the ratty tweed jacket he almost always wore after he retired, that was all; the rest was stuffed with more Carroll material—including the two huge kiosks he’d bought from the bank after Debbie’s tip.

  It was astonishing—the closets had $100,000.00’s worth of posters, pictures, and bulky paraphernalia in them. It was obvious that, had Joe lived, he would have needed more space very soon. There were no more clothes to get rid of and only three pieces of furniture.

  As the appraisal of a major collection always does, handling every item in Joe’s collection both taught me a lot and demonstrated clearly what a single passionate collector can accomplish on his own. But it still took a lifetime. And I’m sure that he loved every minute of it.

  The University of Toronto issued an exhibition catalogue of Joe’s gift. In the introduction Richard Landon called it the single largest gift they’d ever received to that time.

  Joe, in his time in Toronto, made a large number of friends in the book community at large and his many friends still miss him greatly.

  Since collectors also love to boast of their sleepers—except, of course, to the dealers they bought them from—I have heard quite a few stories of their triumphs as well. But my favourite and the one which I think illustrates not just the principle of the educated eye but the historical principle of rescuing the past in a lowly used bookstore, concerns one of the greatest collectors I have known, Stillman Drake.

  Stillman Drake, when I met him, was a professor of the History of Science at the University of Toronto. Earlier he had been an investment banker in San Francisco and an old friend of Jake Zeitlin’s, with whom he had spent considerable time scouting Europe, mostly Italy, for early science books. Stillman was a born teacher. He certainly taught me many things in every conversation I had with him. Without ever talking down to people he seemed to always be imparting knowledge, usually the arcane anecdotal details which make all history so fascinating.

  He seemed to assume that his listener also knew basic scientific things—which, in my case, I often didn’t—but by the end of the conversation you often had an understanding you hadn’t had when he began.

  Stillman would come in often because I was around the corner from the post office which he visited a couple of times a week. As I have mentioned more than once, he had an important collection on the history of science, centered on Galileo. I was told that he was considered one of the two foremost authorities on Galileo and his times in the world. He had placed his collections on deposit in the University of Toronto and every year we would appraise another lot as needed for his taxes. I believe the university also bought a portion of it outright every year too.

  After it was all absorbed, Richard Landon offered me the residue, the duplicates—which I’m still selling. One of Stillman’s credos which he could and did justify was that an early science book which had defects like a missing plate or page should still be purchased, for he had concluded in his early years that a defective copy was preferable to no copy at all, and he began when the collecting of early science books was in its infancy so it was a largely unexplored area. Hence, that most important of book collecting principles, scarcity, was still largely unknown. Occasionally we get orders for books with his bookplate in them and I often presume it’s other scientists who just want to own a book from Stillman’s library. I have a few of his books myself in what I call my “sentimental collection,” books from the libraries of book friends or famous dealers or collectors. Such a collection, foolish and pointless to anyone but the person who collects it, affords me much pleasure, reminding me of people who went before me. It also reminds us that we don’t really own these books; rather, we are only their temporary guardians, privileged to hold them safely until another generation can absorb their contents and treasure their beauty.

  Some years ago a group of Toronto bookmen formed a club where we met once a month and someone would give a talk. We called ourselves The Amtmann Circle, after Bernard Amtmann, who had attempted several times to organize such groups, his last effort being The Erasmus C
ircle.

  The first talk was given by Stillman, wherein he spoke very amusingly of various rules he had formed in his long life of collecting, illustrated by examples and very shrewd comments. When he gave the talk it was an enormous success. I considered it amusing but ephemeral, perfect for a pleasurable social evening, but not very deep in content. With time I proved myself wrong, very wrong.

  Some years later after I had read the pamphlet several times, the Amtmann Circle imploded and we offered the remaining copies of our publications to members at $5.00 each. This was about the cost of printing them, for we had done them properly, often at the Coach House Press, and they were finely printed and quite attractive. I bought about fifty of them in the same manner I had been buying remainders for years, for eventual resale at what I figured would be a fair profit. But this is how I came to discover how superficial my original opinion of its content had been.

  One thing every serious dealer does is constantly instruct his clients. The smart dealer learns quickly that the sophisticated client is much easier to sell a fine and important book to and it is therefore in his interest to educate his clients. A good book needs no sales pitch to a sophisticated collector—it will sell itself to the man who knows what it is and its importance.

  I found, especially with newish clients, that I was constantly quoting Stillman’s “slight” talk. Time after time the seemingly simple advice he had given would afford a perfect example of what collectors should do in similar situations. Indeed so enthusiastic would I become in quoting his remarks, working myself into a state of excessive enthusiasm, that I found myself impulsively giving them a copy, wanting to both share the knowledge and my pleasure in his wisdom.

  In this talk Stillman recounted, along with his brilliant conclusions about how to collect books, what he considered the discovery which was his most important contribution to scholarship in his long career. For me it remains one of the most remarkable examples of the importance of the book collector to scholarship I have ever heard.